Reposted from the AFL-CIO NOW Blog
How did we end up with all these low-wage, no-benefit temporary jobs in our economy?
Erin Hatton, of State University of New York at Buffalo, had a fascinating read in the New York Times this weekend, The Rise of the Permanent Temp Economy, tracing the rise in America of the temp industry, and how it forged “new cultural consensus about work and workers.” Hatton says:
American employers have generally taken the low road: lowering wages and cutting benefits, converting permanent employees into part-time and contingent workers, busting unions and subcontracting and outsourcing jobs. They have done so, in part, because of the extraordinary evangelizing of the temp industry, which rose from humble origins to become a global behemoth.
U.S. companies fueled the rise of the temp industry by buying the promise of “never-never” employees—who never ask for a raise, take a sick day or stick around when the employer is finished with them.
Hatton concludes:
If we want good jobs rather than just any jobs, we need to figure out how to preserve what is useful and innovative about temporary employment while jettisoning the anti-worker ideology that has come to accompany it.
Read the op-ed piece here.
by Donna Jablonski – Reposted from the AFL-CIO NOW Blog
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who is facing a recall election, quietly repealed a state law making it easier for pay discrimination victims to seek justice. Amanda Terkel reports in The Huffington Post that Walker signed into law a bill passed in party-line votes by Republicans in the state legislature that rolls back the 2009 Equal Pay Enforcement Act. The act had allowed workers to challenge pay discrimination in state rather than just federal courts.
As Greg Sargent reports in The Plum Line at The Washington Post, Walker’s action may add to Republican trouble attracting women’s votes in the presidential election. Republican primary frontrunner Mitt Romney has tied himself to Walker, vowing to support the Wisconsin governor in his recall election.
Sargent reports that President Obama’s campaign spokeswoman Lis Smith released a statement calling on Romney to tell America what he thinks of the repeal:
As he campaigned across Wisconsin, Mitt Romney repeatedly praised Governor Scott Walker’s leadership, calling him a “hero” and “a man of courage.” But with his signing yesterday of a bill making it harder for women to enforce in court their right to equal pay, Walker showed how far Republicans are willing to go to undermine not only women’s health care, but also their economic security. Does Romney think women should have ability to take their bosses to court to get the same pay as their male coworkers? Or does he stand with Governor Walker against this?
Walker’s recall resulted from public outrage after he led the charge to take away public employees’ collective bargaining rights.
Tags: Jobs, Rights At Work, Wisconsin, Wisconsin Recall
by Donna Jablonski – Reposted from the AFL-CIO NOW Blog
Let’s say you’re earning the $7.25-an-hour minimum wage. How many hours would you have to work to equal what a year of college costs? How about a year of family health insurance premiums?
The Center for Economic and Policy Research has crunched the numbers and they’re not pretty.
In 2010, a minimum wage worker would have had to put in 923 hours to cover the $6,695 annual tuition at a public four-year college, the report’s authors John Schmitt and Marie-Eve Augier found. Compare that with a minimum wage worker earning $2.90 an hour in 1979—he or she would have had to work 254 hours to make the $738 annual tuition back then.
Even if a minimum wage worker had an employer-provided family insurance policy (increasingly unlikely, since the share of low-wage workers with employer health coverage has fallen from 42.9 percent in 1979 to 25.9 percent in 2010), the premiums would be unmanageable. Family health insurance premiums that would have taken a minimum wage worker 329 hours to earn in 1979 would have taken 2,079 hours in 2011. After paying for family health coverage, a minimum wage worker would have just one hour’s worth of wages last year left over to spend on anything else after working 40 hours a week for 52 weeks in a year.
As the authors said:
Some economists emphasize the rapid decline over the last century in the relative price of agricultural products and manufactured goods (such as televisions and air conditioners). These analyses, however, inevitably ignore or downplay the large relative increases in the price of crucial services such as education and health care. Minimum wage workers today may be able to buy DVD players that did not exist in 1979, but at the current level of the minimum wage, they are also far less able to cover college tuition or health insurance premiums.
Tags: Health Care, Jobs, minimum wage, wages
