Tag: Labor Day

We work hard for the money

What that effectively did was encourage CEOs to keep more money in their businesses — to invest in new technology — to pay their workers more — to hire new workers and expand their companies.

A friend of mine sent me the text of Whatever Happened to the Leisure Society? – by Thom Hartmann.

In a 1966 article, TIME Magazine looked ahead toward the future, and what the rise of automation would mean for average Americans. It concluded:

“By 2000, the machines will be producing so much that everyone in the U.S. will, in effect, be independently wealthy. With Government benefits, even nonworking families will have, by one estimate, an annual income of $30,000-$40,000.”

Now, that was in 1966 dollars, it would be over $120,000 a year now…

So by the year 2000, TIME predicted in 1966, we would enter what was referred to as “The Leisure Society.” The only problems facing America would be, just how the heck everyone would use all that extra leisure time! What kind of things would people get into when a nation has lots of money and lots of free time on their hands? And as we know today, we WISH that was our biggest problem.

Turns out, predictions about the leisure society were dead wrong. Productivity DID increase significantly during the 1960s. This actually starts from 1947 up to 2000, mostly thanks to automation and better technology.

Unfortunately, productivity increased, but wages didn’t. And neither did leisure time.

In 1966, when the TIME article was written, the top income tax rate was 70%.

And what that effectively did was encourage CEOs to keep more money in their businesses — to invest in new technology — to pay their workers more — to hire new workers and expand their companies.

After all, what’s the point of sucking millions and millions of dollars out of your business if it’s going to be taxed at 70%?

Thinking that way — if suddenly businesses became WAY more profitable and efficient thanks to automation — then that money would flow throughout the business, raising everyone’s standard of living, and increasing everyone’s leisure time.

But when Reagan dropped that top tax rate down to 28%, and everything changed…

Now, as businesses became more profitable, there was far more incentive for the CEOs and senior executives to pull those profits out of the company and pocket them, because suddenly they were paying an incredibly low tax rate. And that’s exactly what they did.

All those new profits thanks to automation that were SUPPOSED to go to everyone, giving us all higher paychecks and more time off, went just to the top 1%, to just about 345,000 millionaires.

Everyone else’s wealth has pretty much stagnated since the Reagan tax cuts, except for the top 1%.

HAPPY LABOR DAY.

My first seven jobs

No, I never worked in a coal mine.

coalmineThe meme My First Seven Jobs has been showing up on social media a lot in the last couple of months. I had avoided it until I read an article about what your first seven jobs say about you, and then the exercise intrigued me. And hey, I need a Labor Day weekend post.

I am a little bit fuzzy on what constitutes a job. When your father drags you on some task, for which you are not being paid, I’m not counting that. And having looked at other people’s lists, I’m actually adding a couple that I would not otherwise have considered.

1. Newspaper delivery of the Press newspaper, Binghamton, NY. Six evenings plus Sunday morning for about two years, a job I inherited from my godparents’ grandson Walter. Used the money to join the Capitol Record Club and buy Beatles’ albums.

2. Babysitter. I did this less than a half dozen times, never for more than two kids, two boys who lived near my grandmother. I was pretty good at it, I seem to recall.

3. Singer, with my father and sister Leslie, off and on for four years. We didn’t make a lot of money, as we did a lot of gigs for free.

4. Page at the Binghamton Public Library, for seven months when I was sixteen, a job I inherited from my parents’ godson, Walter. Same Walter. Helped people with the microfilm machine and retrieved back issue magazines. When it wasn’t busy, read Billboard and Psychology Today.

5. Assembly line worker at IBM Endicott. I graduated from high school in January, then worked there from March until early September. I remember the boss wanted me to stay, but I was heading to college.

6. The box factory, which I did for two weeks, longer than either of my two predecessors.

7. Janitor at some department store in New Paltz. Being a janitor was also my eighth job, in Binghamton City Hall.

No, my first seven jobs did not include working in a coal mine. Nor did Lee Dorsey‘s. Or any of the members of Devo.

Americans Don’t Miss Manufacturing — They Miss Unions

Appeals Court Affirms that a Union’s Use of Inflatable Rat Is Protected Free Speech

 

On raising the minimum wage

If other people are getting less screwed over than they had been, it should be a cause for celebration, not disdain.

minimum_wage_1018The junior senator from my state of New York, Kirsten Gillibrand (D) noted that she will co-sponsor a bill to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. That’s something I support, for a lot of reasons; Robert Reich delineates some of them.

More better, as they say, is Jaquandor’s Keeping Ahead of the Smiths: Random Thoughts on the Minimum Wage from late July 2015, which he describes as a “collection of thoughts.”

It’s Labor Day weekend, so I feel no need to work too hard on this post. Yet there are a few points in Jaquandor’s piece I want to emphasize:

“Gee, I’ve never made fifteen bucks an hour.” The latter is often coupled with a description of the jobs one has done, obviously intended to make clear that my work should pay more than theirs. And these sentiments aren’t brand new, either, born of shock that burgerflippers (said with appropriate voice filled with disdain) are going to make that kind of money…

So why, then, so much resentment toward a group of workers who banded together and through various means of legal redress seem to have won a kind of victory for themselves? Why are so many people so eager to see in this another screwing of themselves by the system, instead of an example of what might be done elsewhere? If you’re so convinced that your line of work is deserving of better pay, than why not band together and do your own self-advocation?

In other words, if other people are getting less screwed over than they had been, it should be a cause for celebration, not disdain.

But THIS is the heart of the argument, for me:

After nearly forty years of unending tax-cutting and deregulating… all we have to show for it is wages that are stuck in neutral and money flowing ever, ever, ever upward in a pattern that can only be described as redistributive (albeit in the exact opposite way that that term is usually deployed by libertarian-types). The biggest problem most Americans face, economically, is not what the government is taking out of our paychecks. It is what our employers are not putting into them in the first place.

The recovery after the Great Recession has been tepid, NOT because employers are paying too much, but because they are paying too little. The minimum wage, if tied to inflation, should be over $20 an hour. Instead, US workers’ pay plummeted 4% over the past 5 years.

$15/hour is NOT too much.
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A History of Labor Day.

Labor Day: raise the federal minimum wage in the USA

“The problem is that inequality is at historically high levels and getting worse every day. Our country is rapidly becoming less a capitalist society and more a feudal society.”

minimum_wage_pie_chart_05
Since it’s Labor Day, I shan’t work too hard. I want to recommend that you read:

A Livable Minimum Wage Could Decrease Unemployment by Decreasing Demand for Second Jobs:

Higher wages would more equitably distribute the jobs that are already available…. Forty hours a week (if you can get it) simply isn’t enough to pay the bills

Raising the Minimum Wage Can Reduce Unemployment

Lower-income and middle-class Americans have seen their income and wealth decrease over the last decade. So as you might imagine, many are pinching their pennies and spending less on goods and services. The end result is that businesses don’t have enough money or confidence to hire more workers.

The Effects of a Minimum-Wage Increase on Employment and Family Income, from the CBO

[While] some jobs for low-wage workers would probably be eliminated…As a group, the workers whose income rose because of a minimum-wage increase would consequently pay more in taxes and receive less in benefits.

But if you look at none of these, I urge you to read The Pitchforks Are Coming…For Us Plutocrats by NICK HANAUER. It’s because it’s one thing for the 99% to complain about the inequity that exists, that despite a declining unemployment rate, consumer purchasing power is stagnant. It’s something else to read the views of a guy who made a ton of money through Amazon and other businesses:

Seeing where things are headed is the essence of entrepreneurship. And what do I see in our future now?
I see pitchforks.

At the same time that people like you and me are thriving beyond the dreams of any plutocrats in history, the rest of the country—the 99.99 percent—is lagging far behind. The divide between the haves and have-nots is getting worse really, really fast. In 1980, the top 1 percent controlled about 8 percent of U.S. national income. The bottom 50 percent shared about 18 percent. Today the top 1 percent share about 20 percent; the bottom 50 percent, just 12 percent.

But the problem isn’t that we have inequality. Some inequality is intrinsic to any high-functioning capitalist economy. The problem is that inequality is at historically high levels and getting worse every day. Our country is rapidly becoming less a capitalist society and more a feudal society. Unless our policies change dramatically, the middle class will disappear, and we will be back to late 18th-century France. Before the revolution.
And so I have a message for my fellow filthy rich, for all of us who live in our gated bubble worlds: Wake up, people. It won’t last.

If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when.

Many of us think we’re special because “this is America.” We think we’re immune to the same forces that started the Arab Spring—or the French and Russian revolutions, for that matter. I know you fellow .01%ers tend to dismiss this kind of argument… And yes, I know there are many of you who are convinced that because you saw a poor kid with an iPhone that one time, inequality is a fiction.

Here’s what I say to you: You’re living in a dream world.

He touts Henry Ford, and Washington state’s higher minimum wage while noting the disaster of excessive CEO compensation and “trickle-down” economics.
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One could also tax the rich, but that may be more difficult politically. It’s not class warfare when one side owns most of the ammo.

Labor Day: NOT invented by Hallmark

It’s well documented that there is an income disparity between the rich and the poor.

I’ve become convinced that a lot of people believe that Labor Day in the United States was invented to give those lazy workers a three-day weekend just before the summer ends. From the Census Bureau: “The first observance of Labor Day was likely on Sept. 5, 1882, when some 10,000 workers assembled in New York City for a parade. That celebration inspired similar events across the country, and by 1894 more than half the states were observing a “workingmen’s holiday” on one day or another.

Later that year, with Congress passing legislation and President Grover Cleveland signing the bill on June 29, the first Monday in September was designated “Labor Day.” This national holiday is a creation of the labor movement in the late 19th century — and pays tribute to the social and economic achievements of American workers.”

It’s long been my contention that all of the gains made by the American labor movement in the last century or so most people take for granted such as minimum wage and restrictions on child labor.

It’s well documented that there is an income disparity between the rich and the poor, not just in the United States but in other industrialized nations since the 1980s.

Workers on the “public dole” such as teachers and firefighters were castigated as greedy a few years back by Tea Party favorites such as Governor Scott Walker (R-WI). Now we are seeing in Detroit, and soon in a US city near you, workers who postponed raises in favor of money going into their pensions have discovered that those accounts were not funded properly and that they may have to back to work. Many workers in this class are not eligible for Social Security benefits since they did not pay into that system.

The state of labor, at least in the USA, is shaky at best, with a slow economic recovery – unemployment still well above 7% – and little political will to raise a laughable minimum wage.

Happy Labor Day.

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