We need not just jobs, but jobs that pay
(CNN) — Everyone to the left of Michele Bachmann seems to agree that America’s most immediate problem isn’t the budget deficit, but the jobs deficit.
Fourteen million Americans are unemployed, and the number ranges up to almost 16 million if you include those who want full-time jobs but can only find part-time ones. Put all those people to work, and they will cheerfully run out to the malls and spend, thus reigniting the engine of consumer capitalism. Or so the conventional wisdom goes.
But just how many jobs will the economy have to generate to cure the jobs deficit — 14 million? Sixteen million? Or a whole lot more? The answer depends not just on the number of people out of work but on the quality of jobs being offered.
According to a January report from the National Employment Law Project, 76% of the new jobs generated in 2010 were of the low-paying variety, offering between $9 to $15 an hour. Some people can get by quite handily on $9 or so an hour — especially if they’re willing to live outdoors or on a friend’s couch — but, generally speaking, the less jobs pay, the more of them you’re going to need to get.
Suppose you’re a parking lot attendant, a dishwasher or an office cleaner, and you earn only the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. If you have two children to support, your annual earnings will be $3,000 below the official poverty level for a family of three, so you’ll need at least a part-time second job. Not to mention the fact that you’ll need to designate one of your children as a full-time baby sitter for the other.
Having worked in several low-paid jobs myself, I get a little nervous when people start throwing around the word “jobs” unmodified by adjectives such as “decent-paying” or “good.” What kind of jobs are we talking about? Are we talking about jobs with union-style wages and benefits or big-box McJobs that come with the assumption that you’ll qualify for food stamps?
Between 1998 and 2000, while doing research for my book “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America,” I worked as a waitress, a maid with a cleaning service, a nursing home aide and a Walmart associate, with my pay averaging $7 an hour, or the equivalent of about $9 an hour in today’s dollars. Even when I managed to line up my schedule so I could work two jobs at a time, discretionary spending wasn’t on the agenda — not after gas, food and rent for a half-size trailer or a room in a shabby residential motel. Fortunately, jobs were easy to find at the time, and the soaring dot-com economy wasn’t depending on me.
I know the argument: The more jobs there are, even low-paying, the more power workers have to demand higher wages, so wages will automatically rise. But in the late ’90s, while employers were experiencing a “labor shortage,” hourly wages rose only slightly — not because the law of supply and demand had been suspended, but because employers had become fiendishly efficient at preventing workers from organizing to demand higher wages. Today, with the very concept of collective bargaining under political attack from the right, the chance that more jobs will mean better jobs has grown even slimmer.
President Barack Obama promised — just three years ago when he was in general a more promising sort of fellow — that he would raise the federal minimum wage to $9.50 by 2011. Maybe he forgot, just as he forgot his promise to press for the Employee Free Choice Act, which would have made it easier for workers to organize. Or maybe he was intimidated by unemployment rates in excess of 9% and accepted the defeatist notion that any job — no matter how low-paid, backbreaking or abusive — is better than none.
That’s been the sad trajectory of the American middle-class spirit from the late ’70s to the present day: We’ve gone from Johnny Paycheck’s “Take This Job and Shove It” to begging the sleek-suited “job creators” for whatever they can throw our way.
Fortunately there are some courageous exceptions to this idea. Forty-five thousand Verizon employees are walking picket lines to defend their hard-won union wages and benefits. Thousands of Walmart employees have signed up as members of an association (“Our Walmart”) to demand respect from the company.
Even the most isolated and “invisible” workers — nannies and maids — are organizing themselves into a National Domestic Workers Alliance. As anyone in these groups could you tell: We don’t just need more jobs, we need more jobs that treat employees like humans and pay what you could actually live on.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Barbara Ehrenreich.
“After paying the new tleahh premiums, the minimum wage, payroll taxes, and unemployment insurance taxes, hiring a full-time worker will cost employers at least $10.03 per hour. Full-time workers with family tleahh plans will cost $13.75 per hour. “Employers who hire workers with productivity below these rates will lose money.” JS Thank you Heritage for finally putting some hard numbers on the problem of ObamaCare. This is a good example of why big government doesn’t work. It often sounds nice on the surface, but the unintended consequences are devastating. The more we allow “the Invisible Hand of the Free Market” operate, the better our economy is and the more jobs & prosperity there will be for all. The more we try to central plan the economy with big government solutions, the less efficient the economy becomes and the fewer the jobs & the less the prosperity to go around. It took a lot of big government tinkering to ruin this once great American Free Market economy but we have not only reached that point we have gone far beyond it already. Things won’t get better until we DRASTICALLY cut back the size & scope of government, balance the budget & end this big government welfare/warfare state. Ending ObamaCare would be just STEP #1.
I’ve been trying to post this cmemont for a while, but it hasn’t worked up to this point as far as I can see. Sorry if you’ve read this already.SP, you are right that my roommate would have reacted differently if I had opened with I think that your ideas about God are pathetic and shallow, but I wouldn’t have opened with that because I didn’t and don’t think that. Anyone has the right to have any opinions that they want. They start to run into trouble, though, when they start to project opinions on other people, especially Jesus, which is what I am responding to here.Ms. Ehrenreich calls Jesus a socialist. Since she doesn’t support that claim with any evidence, I will discuss here another doozie that I found recently. I added a link below with a video in which Lawrence O’Donnell declares that Jesus supports the progressive tax brackets and would support a 100% tax. What is his evidence for this? The story of the widow’s mite found in Mark 12:43-44. Regardless of personal opinions about the progressive tax brackets, to say that this story obviously supports a clear, Christian, philosophical basis for a progressive income tax is just plain ridiculous. Jesus wasn’t talking about taxes. He was talking about donations to the temple and the money given wasn’t taken by force, but given by the widow’s own free will. It is ridiculous to say that this story is evidence that Jesus supports a progressive income tax because Jesus isn’t talking about taxes here at all. I call these statements doozies for two reasons. First, the word doozie is fun to say, read, and write. Second, it is derogatory and these statements deserve to be derided, not because I disagree with the politics, but because they are adulterating the words of Christ to support a political platform (I also don’t think that Rush Limbaugh has any Biblical evidence that Jesus would support no income tax, even though I think that there should be no income tax).I don’t claim to be perfect and I know that there are many ways that I need to improve, but I will not be silent when people twist Christ’s words to support their politics, especially when it has been done in a public forum. In response, I will use the most public forum I have at my disposal and state what I think as clearly, and as strongly as I can (and I hope that my posts can be lively and fun to read). I will continue to try to be Christ-like in my future posts. I am sorry if that doesn’t satisfy you, but there are many other great writers on this blog and I suggest that you continue to read their posts. I will not be offended if you choose to skip over mine.
So, normally I laelry enjoy this weblog, and I agree with you about Ehrenreich and others who try to force Jesus to conform to constructs nonexistent in His day. I can also understand your frustration about someone you love and worship being described as a wine-guzzling vagrant. But: this post comes across more as a rant about the evils of socialism and the stupidity of certain people than a discussion of either Jesus’ loving, if occasionally divisive, nature or His lack of political affiliation. You can disagree with someone without calling their arguments pathetic or shallow or condescendingly saying You can’t hope to understand Jesus without [subscribing to my beliefs]. (Note that I agree that one can’t fully understand Jesus without accepting Him as the Son of God, but I wouldn’t say it this way, especially in this forum.) What of showing respect for others’ opinions, even if we disagree? A socialist would be talking to the political leaders, to King Herod, to Pilot [sic] Did Christ ever try to gain an audience with the Sanhedrin, the Jewish governing body? King Herod? Pilot [sic]? I do believe you mean Pilate.