Work hard for little reward

In 2007, more than 146 million Americans were employed.  Today, only 141.6 million Americans are employed even though our population has grown steadily since then.  You  can get the numbers to look more “favorable” if you pretend that millions upon millions of American workers simply “don’t want a job” any longer.

A new paper  from Economic Policy Institute found most U.S. workers have been working more for not much more pay. The average worker worked 1,868 hours in 2007, an increase of 181 hours, or 10.7 percent, from the 1979 work year of 1,687 hours. This is the equivalent of every worker working 4.5 more weeks a year (assuming a 40-hour workweek). The lowest-wage workers increased their annual work hours by 22%, but their hourly wages only grew by 7.7%.

Real annual wages for the whole workforce grew during this time period, "for the bottom 60 percent of wage earners, this stemmed roughly as much from increased work hours as increased real hourly wages," the paper finds. Americans started working more hours in part as a coping strategy to ensure some income growth in the face of very slow wage growth

Sadly, most Americans still have faith in the system. Most Americans are still convinced that politicians will somehow find a way to turn things around.