The wages struggle

Though nine out of ten Americans perceive blue-collar jobs as "good jobs" and policymakers tout the benefits of expanding the country's manufacturing base, the truth is that factory wages now rank in the bottom half of those for all jobs in the U.S., according to a new study from the National Employment Law Project (NELP).

Their report, Manufacturing Low Pay: Declining Wages in theJobs That Built America’s Middle Class, explains "Manufacturing jobs are... highly sought after by our federal and state policymakers, lauded as 'advanced industries' that generate investments, create a high number of direct and indirect jobs, enhance worker skills, and generate additional economic activity in related industries." But goes on to reveal that while the manufacturing sector has experienced a rebound in recent years, in fact "the quality of too many of the returning jobs is low and fails to live up to workers’ and the overall public’s expectations." The jobs that are returning are not the ones that were lost: wages are lower, the jobs are increasingly temporary, and the promised benefits have yet to be realized.

The study finds that:

(1) More than 600,000 manufacturing workers make just $9.60 per hour or less and more than 1.5 million manufacturing workers—one out of every four—make $11.91 or less;

(2) Real wages for manufacturing workers declined by 4.4 percent from 2003 to 2013—almost three times faster than for workers as a whole.

(3) In the largest segment of the manufacturing base—automotive—wages have declined even faster. Real wages for auto parts workers, who now account for three of every four autoworker jobs, fell by nearly 14 percent from 2003 to 2013—three times faster than for manufacturing as a whole, and nine times faster than the decline for all occupations.

In particular, new jobs in the auto industry pay less than the jobs that were lost. New hires in auto earn less than $10 an hour.

(4) Heavy reliance on temporary workers hides even bigger declines in manufacturing wages. About 14 percent of auto parts workers are employed by staffing agencies today. Wages for these workers are lower than for direct-hire parts workers and are not included in the official industry-specific wage data cited above.

The report concludes "If the wage trends continue, manufacturing jobs will not deliver on the promise of creating livable jobs with positive economic revivals in communities and families."

The Campaign for America's Future blog offers the standard nationalistic commentary, blaming globalization and so-called free-trade pacts for exacerbating—if not directly causing—the issues raised in NELP's report.

"American factory jobs used to provide reasonable pay and benefits—largely because of unions and democracy. So how do you make manufacturing jobs more 'efficient?' You can move the factory to a country that doesn’t allow unions. Our country used to recognize this game and 'protected' the good wages and benefits that democracy provided people with tariffs that raised to price of goods made in places that allowed exploitation of working people. Solution: 'free trade' that pits our democracy against thugocracies with few or no protections for people or the environment.

Free trade' worked—to force unemployment up and wages down. We lost more than 6 million manufacturing jobs and 60,000-plus factories between 2000 (the year before China entered the World Trade Organization) and 2010”

Yet this is the true nature of that thing called COMPETITION in a capitalist system. The primary purpose of that thing called competition is to drive costs lower so as to maximize profits. In order to do this wages must be driven lower. Further to that and more importantly, in order to sustain growth and profits the manufacturing industry MUST find more markets for those goods. They compete with other nation states for those same markets. They strip the world of its natural resources in order to produce those goods. With cheaper resources harder to find input costs climb meaning in order to maintain profitability wages must be driven even lower or more workers replaced by machines. The Environment bears those costs through the havoc wreaked upon it for resources and the worker bears the cost with lower wages. Those “high paying” manufacturing jobs of the past can never return because in the past a country like the USA and or Europe were the only countries that were industrialized and could export their goods the world over. Now that more countries can make these same goods can be made anywhere and can be made by machines, there no longer a premium paid for that worker. Free trade agreements do not CAUSE this. They are in fact a symptom of a failed economic system that is called capitalism.

Taken from here