No Wonder People Are In Debt
Louis Uchitelle has a strong and heart-breaking story about the choices auto workers are having to make as tens of thousands of them leave the industry--the largest exodus of workers from one American industry in decades, according to the story.
What caught my eye, within the wrenching stories, was this paragraph:
Across America, more than 30 million people have been forced out of jobs since the early 1980s, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports, and regaining lost incomes has not been easy. Nearly 50 million new jobs have been created over that same period, according to the bureau, so there are always new opportunities but more often than not at lower pay. Among those who have lost work, only a third held new jobs two years later that paid as well as those that were lost, according to the bureau’s surveys of displaced workers. Another third of those displaced were in jobs that paid, on average, 15 to 20 percent less than their previous employment — while the final third had dropped out of the labor force entirely.
If you wonder why the savings rate is so low--actually, negative--and why personal debt is at record highs, there you have it--if only a third of the people out of 30 million people who have been forced from their jobs since the 1980s can find work that pays as well as the jobs they left, it is no wonder that people are struggling under a mountain of debt. This is not some trend that requires "personal responsibility"--the debt comes from a dramatic shift in the world we live in.
Comments
While many rant and rage against so called illegal immigrants entering the US from Mexico these same US Sovereigns then go down to the store and buy products made in Mexico and China.
Corporations can't outsource jobs overseas unless US workers are willing to buy the foreign made products.
Well, we musn't forget that all workers are consumers. And while I don't advocate workers of modest means go shopping at Wal-Mart, the true culprits in the immigration situation are not the consumers who buy the cheap, imported goods, but the transnational corporations and totally lopsided trade and economic policies of the past 20 years that make it impossible for these workers to make a living in their own countries. What's more, once the workers get here, the pay and conditions here are also horrendous, all approved with a "nudge-nudge, wink-wink" of our very own government.
In addition, many so-called "illegals" do not know enough to organize and form unions once they are here. I'm not even sure their unions are legal should they form one, although they SHOULD be. They put up with very poor treatment out of fear of being deported back to their own countries where they may not find any work at all.
BLS jobs stats don't tell the full story
I note that even the best educated, most highly skilled and experienced "white collary" American information technology workers are losing their jobs to offshore outsourcing -- the types of "information age" jobs that New Gingrich and Bill Clinton claimed would be the future of the U.S. workforce in the wake of manufacturing job losses ensuing after passage of NAFTA and GATT by the "free traders" and "sell-outs" in Congress. The BLS does not fully acknowledge this fact but does report far fewer of these jobs being created than are being eliminated.
BLS stats definitely don't take into account the fact that large numbers of skilled trade jobs in the U.S. are NOT filled by American workers. Corporations have done a superb job of convincing politicians in both parties to allow in large numbers of "guest workers" to fill (phantom) "worker shortages".
Every single day that I go to work in a large multinational corporation in American midwest where work is "heavy on information technology", I see hundreds of non-American "guest workers" filling the cubicles nearby, performing work that could and should be done by Americans. It's tremendously discouraging and frustrating. (Note, this isn't a claim that jobs are Americans by right; this is a statement of fact. There are uncounted thousands of highly skilled and well educated American workers who can perform this work but they will never be hired in spite of the claims that business can't find "qualified" workers. "Qualified" means younger, cheaper, submissive labor -- not middle class Americans.)
The reason for the corporate preference for non-American workers and the massive effort to claim non-existent "labor shortages" is quite simple: foreign guest workers are tremendously inexpensive. Foreign workers from nations such as Indian are accustomed to working "sweatshop" hours and willingly accept substantially lower wages than American workers have traditionally been paid. It's a part of the global "labor arbitrage" employment practices completely unnoticed in the official Bureau of Labor Statistics reports on jobs in the U.S.
Look especially hard at what is happening in the IT jobs sector because it is being replicated in other white collar and high skill blue collar job sectors. False claims of "labor shortages" accompanied by slanderous assertions that American workers are either ill-prepared or lazy and slovenly (as Eileen Chou said in a Parade Magazine interview only a few months ago).
When all is done, the U.S. will not only lose millions of factory jobs offshore but millions of white collar jobs beyond the information technology jobs through "BPO" or Business Process Outsourcing.
Of the the jobs that remain in the U.S., the U.S. Labor Department cannot or will not tell us how many of these jobs are actually being filled by Americans. There is a relentless effort underway to substitute foreign low wage "guest workers" under visas such as the "H-1b" or "L-1" for "expensive" middle class American workers. American politicians are not making any effort to change the reporting requirements of the BLS; they are overwhelmingly content to allow this present situation to remain unreported and unexamined.
With every attempt at "immigration reform" measures, it's interesting to note that business lobbyists have been very adept at inserting language into the bills permitting ever larger numbers of mainly "white collar" skilled labor categories into the U.S.
The insatiable desire of corporations to replace middle class American workers across the white collar job spectrum is now on full display -- you just have to know where to look...
Unfortunately, this election is likely to be filled with more nonsensical rhetoric from politicians about the need for "retraining" of former middle class workers, blue and white collar workers, who have lost their jobs to offshore outsourcing. The subject of "non-immigrant, business visa" guest workers will likely be ignored by the press and never mentioned by the politicians. And, adding insult to injury, Democratic politicians will differ from Republican politicians primarily on the subject of whether individuals or the government should pay, for what is essentially a "band-aid" -- vairous "job retraining" for displaced middle class workers.