THE AMERICAN "LABOR DAY" WILL NEVER BE THE SAME

...The US Federal Reserve says that the weak US labor market makes the US economy "highly vulnerable".

We have finally realized that the overall US "jobs market" has been in jeopardy for decades.

President Obama made a fired up and rousing speech at the AFL-CIO Labor Convention in Pittsburgh last week. Unfortunately, the problem with today´s job losses, as compared to the Great Depression era, is that most of those jobs lost to overseas countries over the past 30 years aren´t coming back.......ever.

So far, Obama has been counting on the next generation of clean energy manufacturing to replace those past lost factory jobs. But, can clean-green energy jobs alone replace all those past factory worker´s jobs? It´s a good question and the answer is probably; "no they can´t".

Obama has also said that these green energy jobs are not transferable outside of the US. However, today the US is behind both Europe and China on clean energy innovation and development. And with both China and Europe having strong government programs for financing the building of their new factories for clean green development projects, the US has some major ground to make up just to be playing on an equal playing field.

And who is to say that without a plethora of incentives and major changes in the current US health care programs and trade regulations, the US manufacturers won´t still decide to go off-shore for a cheaper labor force where the workers have universal health care provided by their governments?

Unfortunately, based on the past government mismanagement by the Republicans, Labor Day 2009 was a terrible time to be an American factory worker.

Let´s just look at the facts:

You remember how Republican President Ronald Reagan sold us on the "trickle down" theory that would occur within the "private" job market? Well, between May 1999 and May 2009, employment in the private sector only rose by 1.1%. By far the lowest 10-year increase in the post-depression period.

It´s impossible to overstate how bad this has been for the American worker. Basically speaking, the private sector job machine has almost completely stalled over the past ten years.

Therefore, over the past 10 years, the private sector has generated roughly 1.1 million additional jobs, or about 100K per year. On the other hand, the public / government sector created about 2.4 million jobs.

But even this percentage gives the private sector way too much credit. Remember that the private sector includes health care, social assistance, and education, all areas which receive major injections of government financial support.

Instead of calling it a "private" sector, this sector should be called the "HealthEdGovPrivate" sector.

So for the 10 year job growth rate, it´s the combined "HealthEdGovPrivate" sector that wins hands down.

Today, official US unemployment currently hovers at just under 10%, its highest level since the early 1980s. Now, when you add in the partly employed and those who have given up hunting for jobs because there are so few jobs to be had, and the unemployed and underemployed, they total 16.8% of the labor force, or one out of six American workers.

The following is from a recent article by the Washington Posts´ Harold Meyerson:

"The problems facing workers predate, and are more profound than, the recession, as three important surveys released last week show. Young workers are unemployed in record numbers -- 25 percent of teenagers, or about 1.6 million, are without work, the highest since 1948, when tracking data by age began. But the lot of employed workers under age 35 is dismal, too, as a survey conducted by Peter Hart Research for the AFL-CIO makes clear. Thirty-one percent are uninsured -- up from 24 percent a decade ago. Just 31 percent say that they make enough money to put some aside, down from 52 percent in 1999. With private-sector unionization at a mere 8 percent, and with Chinese competition dragging down wages and benefits across the United States, the living standards of non-professional young Americans are spiraling lower. "

Harold went on to say that it´s no better for older workers. "The Pew Research Center found that nearly two out of five Americans over 62 who are still working say that they've delayed their retirement because of the recession, and a stunning 63 percent of workers ages 50 to 61 say that they might have to push back their retirement dates because of economic conditions. Those conditions reflect not just the recession but also the massive shift away from defined-benefit pensions to the 401(k) plans that employers have imposed over the past few decades. Even before the recession, it was clear that Americans reliant on 401(k)s hadn't saved nearly enough to guarantee a secure retirement, and many of those who thought they'd put aside enough saw their savings plunge dramatically with the stock market in the past two years."

Eventually, the problems of the old become the problems of the young. Because, when fewer older workers retire, fewer younger workers get hired, and so on, and so on…….

Due to the past thirty years of Republican mismanagement, the first nation in human history to create a middle-class majority looks today to be losing the war. The economic security that was common in this country after the institutions created by FDR´s New Deal were strong is now fading. That security, often provided by unionized corporations that provided insurance and pensions to their workers, is now dead.

The "Reaganite Ideology" of the past 30 years that insisted that if Americans were freed from the constraints of government and organized unions and were made responsible for their own economic security, a golden age would emerge. Well, the GOP has allowed American businesses to eluded regulation and they have cast off the unions. However, due to their efforts, they've left the US economy and their worker´s jobs in a major decline.

If America fails to enact some form of universal health care and laws that make it possible for strong workers unions again, the American middle class and American worker´s future Labor Days will be even grimmer than that of 2009.

Copyright G.Ater 2009

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