Thursday, July 25, 2013

Some reasons why Americans should be socialists

 US wages for most workers are either stagnating or declining. In fact, real median wages fell by about 2.8% between 2009 and 2012 even though  productivity increased 4.5%. Lower-wage workers – who are already struggling to keep up – saw bigger declines than those in the middle and higher end. Those earning between $10.61 and $14.21 per hour saw real wages drop by 4.1% on average.

 U.S. median income fell to $50,054 in 2011, the most recent full year in which data is available. That's down 8.1% since 2007, just before the great recession started. Overall, median income has fallen 8.9% from its peak in 1999.

Workers' wages as a percentage of the economy just hit another all-time low. In other words, corporations are now paying employees less than they have ever done, as a share of GDP. Less for workers means more for corporations: corporate profits as a percentage of GDP are now at an all-time high. Big companies are also hoarding cash at historically high levels.

There is power in a union. There's also a higher wage. In 2012, the median salary for a unionized worker was about $49,000, as opposed to about $39,000 for their non-union counterparts. But fewer and fewer workers are earning union salaries. Thirty years ago, one in five US workers were union members; now, it's about one in 10.

 The official unemployment rate is 7.6% but the real number is actually about twice that. The U-6 figure, which includes the unemployed, plus those who  want a job but have largely given up looking, plus those working part-time but who want a full-time job for June 2013 was 14.3%, up half a percentage point from May. Youth unemployment has hovered around 16% for the last year and a half.

 More Americans are working part-time – but not because they want to. These involuntary part-timers now number more than 8.2 million – an increase of 322,000 workers from May and almost double the number this time five years ago. It's the highest it's been all year

 During the recovery, job gains have been concentrated in lower-wage occupations, which grew nearly three times as quickly as middle- and higher-wage occupations. State and federal governments, for example, have cut 835,000 jobs over the past four years – many of them middle-income positions. Job growth projections show that this trend will continue. The healthcare, social assistance and retail sectors are among areas expected to add the most jobs by 2020 – all industries notorious for jobs with meager pay and poor working conditions. A lot of these positions will pay the federal minimum wage ($7.25 an hour) – the inflation-adjusted value of which has declined by more than 30% since the 1960s. That's not going to help the approximately 100 million Americans – one in three – either living in poverty or in "the fretful zone just above it", as the New York Times put it.

 The US ranks near the top of most unequal countries in the developed world – and that income inequality here has reached its highest levels since the great depression. The top 1% of earners took 93% of the income gains in the first full year of the recovery. The poorest 50% of Americans now collectively own just 2.5% of the nation's wealth.

Higher education in the US is becoming an unaffordable luxury. The cost of a college education is now 50% higher than it was 30 years ago.

From here

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