economics

The struggles in Madison have understandably focused attention on the wages and working conditions of public sector workers.  Thankfully, it appears that these struggles have helped to promote greater solidarity between public and private sector workers.  Now, we must build on this new solidarity to focus our collective energies on the bigger challenge: transforming a system that demands that workers (in both the public and private sector) accept ever worsening living and working conditions.

As many involved in the Wisconsin struggles have pointed out, there is plenty of wealth being produced—the problem is that those who are doing the producing are being increasingly denied access to it, both collectively and individually.  For example, as the Economic Policy Institute points out:

U.S. productivity grew by 62.5% from 1989 to 2010, far more than real hourly wages for both private-sector and state/local government workers, which grew 12% in the same period. Real hourly compensation grew a bit more (20.5% for state/local workers and 17.9% for private-sector workers) but still lagged far behind productivity growth.

The chart below highlights this development.  As one can see, the real issue isn’t whether public sector workers make more or less than private sector workers (and the chart covers compensation which includes pay and benefits).  Rather it is that workers together have been increasingly productive but receving an increasingly smaller share of the fruits of their labor.    Those who are well place to benefit, those at the very top of the income scale, have of course done quite well.  For example, the richest 1% received 56% of all the income growth between 1989 and 2007 (before the start of the recession).  By contrast the bottom 90% got only 16%.

If we want to change this we are going to have to build a powerful political movement, one that is prepared to take on the powerful interests that are determined to keep spending on the military; privatizing our educational, health, and retirement systems; promoting corporate mobility; weakening labor laws; and confusing us all about the causes of existing trends.

——————————

If you would like to write a post for Sociological Images, please see our Guidelines for Guest Bloggers.

For those keeping track of unemployment in the U.S., The Economist posted this graph showing job gains and losses by state, based on Bureau of Labor Statistics data:

According to the BLS, as of January 2011, the U.S. unemployment rate had dropped to 9.0%. The lowest unemployment rate is in North Dakota, at 3.8%, while the highest is still in Nevada, at 14.2%.

The BLS has detailed state-level employment data here.

The word “proletariat” “proletarian” refers to a member of the working class of a capitalist society, or the “proletariat.”  Combining the word with “precarious,” economist Guy Standing coined the term “precariat” to try to describe the reality of low wage workers in our modern, global economy.

In the ten-minute segment below, sent in by Jordan G., an interview with Standing is complimented by interviews with workers and activists in Britain.  He explains that new international labor markets have weakened the power of labor and strengthened that of employers.  The result is more jobs that are part time, with unpredictable hours, low wages, and few benefits.  This has been good for employers in that the risk inherent in capitalist enterprises has been transferred to the workers.  For example, if the hotel isn’t full, then the managers simply bring in fewer housekeepers.  This is hard on housekeepers, but easy on hotels.  Workers’ lives, then, are increasingly precarious, thus the term “precariat.”

Found at The Guardian via Global Sociology.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Via Shamus Khan, I found the Economic Policy Institute’s interactive graph that lets you see which Americans have earned most of the growth (or, more recently, suffered the losses) in U.S. incomes over time, based on IRS data (and reported in constant 2008 dollars):

You can select beginning and ending points and find out how incomes changed during that period and how the growth was distributed. For instance, the increase in average incomes between 1950 and 1960 were widely distributed:

If we look at the 10-year span between 1995 and 2005, the increase was much more concentrated among the very wealthy:

The data come from a study on historical income in equality in the U.S. by economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. They compare the share of income earned by the richest 0.1% of earners in the U.S., France, and the U.K.:

See our previous posts on Saez’s work here and here.

I recently came across the guideline that was used to calculate how much money was to be paid out to the victims of the attacks on September 11. This was a fund that was set up by the US government partly because of the scale and the unprecedented nature of the September 11th attacks and partly to diminish the amount of lawsuits that the airlines would receive.

According to the New York Times article it goes as follows:

1. Economic loss.
2. Set amounts for pain and suffering: $250,000, plus $100,000 for each surviving spouse and child.
3. Subtract any life insurance paid.

Along with the rubric, The Times also included a chart that showed the amount of payouts that took place as of 2007:

Putting a price on a life is already a difficult concept to parse through. So I am not taken back that the people in charge actually found a price for each of the victims (some compensation had to be made for those individuals who now found themselves without the sole or part-earner in the household).

What I am taken back by is the stratification of how the payouts were dispersed. Who is to say a person makes no income is worth less than a person who makes 4 million and up? Who is to say females are worth less than males? Who is to say that food workers are worth less than individuals who work in finance?

I get the aspect that a person who was a blue collar worker or someone of no income will get less of a payout than a white collar worker or someone who was making $4 million based on the first guideline “economic loss”. But even that argument doesn’t hold much weight as that the food worker might be the next JK Rowling or that person of no income could be the next Bill Gates. Why would it not account for ability not yet realized? We are a meritocratic republic aren’t we?!

Even in a national tragedy like the attacks on September 11 we can’t seem to follow through on the belief that we are a classless society. These payouts are, unfortunately, the reality of the extreme stratification that we hide when we, as a society, claim that we are classless.

AFTER THE JUMP: STEVE GRIMES RESPONDS TO THE COMMENTS THREAD…

more...