A Living Wage Job For Every American
Tim Williams
April 02, 2010
Having read the latest adds in the help wanted section of Sundays newspapers just reinforces the latest report of what jobs there are and the corresponding wages have declined by more than 10% compared to one year ago. Wage stagnation is now replaced by wage reduction in almost every employment opportunity there is today. When you see adds for production workers or parts assembly at $7.50 - $9.00 per hour and equate those wages with today's cost of living indicates that this country still has a long way to go in providing living wage jobs for the majority of the population. Today with the price of all consumables increasing at the rate of more than 10% annually along with the employment opportunities that pay substandard wages have resulted in millions of Americans still facing acute financial hardship.
The recent jobs bill signed by the Obama Administration is a very small step in the right direction but there still is a monumental amount of effort that needs to be done to turn the tide of diminishing employment opportunities that are still continuing to occur all across the United States. The stimulas funding to states is only a short term solution to the long term problem of the unemployment crisis that we have today.
Tax credits, the recent passage and signing of the Health Care Reform Bill, and all of the other incentives that the Obama Administration is trying to initiate still won't solve the enormous task of providing and producing living wage employment opportunities that the country needs now so desperately. Let's look at the numbers to date! A total of over 8 and one half million jobs across the United States have been lost within the past two years with no apparent abatement soon. Just in the last month of February alone more than 36,000 people lost their jobs. For African Americans the situation is so dire that in many urban areas the unemployment rate is well over 25%. The national unemployment rate is way over the reported 10%. At the rate the unemployment figures show it would take over 300,000 new jobs to be created within the United States alone per month for almost 3 years just to recover the amount of employment opportunities that have been erased. With these kinds of numbers no amount of tax credits or tax incentives will ever create enough employment opportunities, let alone with real living wages for the United States to fully recover from this economic crisis.
Go back in history to the Great Depression of the 1930's. Then, the Unemployment rate was over 25% with African Americans the rate was so much higher it is hard to imagine how people coped with all the adversity during that time. There was no unemployment insurance or any other safety net that we have today like food stamps, fuel assistance, Medicaid or Medicare to offset the trauma of loosing a job. In 1935 at the height of the Great Depression President Roosevelt realized that the only way to alleviate the acute crisis was for the United States Government to step in. The creation of the WPA was the start of massive governmental intervention programs that paid unemployed persons to work on the many public works projects all across the United States. This program provided the means and opportunities for millions of Americans to rise up from the adverse conditions of being unemployed at that time. Through the implementation of the WPA the United States began the economic expansion that propelled America out of the Depression and in the process built most of the infrastructure that today much of which is in urgent need of repair and modernization.
If President Roosevelt's WPA worked at a time of great uncertainty with today's sobering unemployment figures and our deteriorating infrastructure to go further into debt to get out of debt by creating and implementing a WPA type program the United States can recover. " When more people have more disposable incomes to spend and pay down debt is the greatest economic stimulus any society can have." This is the best and surest way for the United States Government to actually begin and help solve the universal problem of the economic and unemployment crisis today. If other nations used similar approaches in job creation the Global economic future will vastly improve.
The recent jobs bill signed by the Obama Administration is a very small step in the right direction but there still is a monumental amount of effort that needs to be done to turn the tide of diminishing employment opportunities that are still continuing to occur all across the United States. The stimulas funding to states is only a short term solution to the long term problem of the unemployment crisis that we have today.
Tax credits, the recent passage and signing of the Health Care Reform Bill, and all of the other incentives that the Obama Administration is trying to initiate still won't solve the enormous task of providing and producing living wage employment opportunities that the country needs now so desperately. Let's look at the numbers to date! A total of over 8 and one half million jobs across the United States have been lost within the past two years with no apparent abatement soon. Just in the last month of February alone more than 36,000 people lost their jobs. For African Americans the situation is so dire that in many urban areas the unemployment rate is well over 25%. The national unemployment rate is way over the reported 10%. At the rate the unemployment figures show it would take over 300,000 new jobs to be created within the United States alone per month for almost 3 years just to recover the amount of employment opportunities that have been erased. With these kinds of numbers no amount of tax credits or tax incentives will ever create enough employment opportunities, let alone with real living wages for the United States to fully recover from this economic crisis.
Go back in history to the Great Depression of the 1930's. Then, the Unemployment rate was over 25% with African Americans the rate was so much higher it is hard to imagine how people coped with all the adversity during that time. There was no unemployment insurance or any other safety net that we have today like food stamps, fuel assistance, Medicaid or Medicare to offset the trauma of loosing a job. In 1935 at the height of the Great Depression President Roosevelt realized that the only way to alleviate the acute crisis was for the United States Government to step in. The creation of the WPA was the start of massive governmental intervention programs that paid unemployed persons to work on the many public works projects all across the United States. This program provided the means and opportunities for millions of Americans to rise up from the adverse conditions of being unemployed at that time. Through the implementation of the WPA the United States began the economic expansion that propelled America out of the Depression and in the process built most of the infrastructure that today much of which is in urgent need of repair and modernization.
If President Roosevelt's WPA worked at a time of great uncertainty with today's sobering unemployment figures and our deteriorating infrastructure to go further into debt to get out of debt by creating and implementing a WPA type program the United States can recover. " When more people have more disposable incomes to spend and pay down debt is the greatest economic stimulus any society can have." This is the best and surest way for the United States Government to actually begin and help solve the universal problem of the economic and unemployment crisis today. If other nations used similar approaches in job creation the Global economic future will vastly improve.
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