Robert Reich on why rages won’t rise:
Yet there’s reason to believe the link between falling unemployment and rising wages has been severed.
For one thing, it’s easier than ever for American employers to get the workers they need at low cost by outsourcing jobs abroad rather than hiking wages at home. Outsourcing can now be done at the click of a computer keyboard.
Besides, many workers in developing nations now have access to both the education and the advanced technologies to be as productive as American workers. So CEOs ask, why pay more?
Meanwhile here at home, a whole new generation of smart technologies is taking over jobs that used to be done only by people. Rather than pay higher wages, it’s cheaper for employers to install more robots.
Not even professional work is safe. The combination of advanced sensors, voice recognition, artificial intelligence, big data, text-mining, and pattern-recognition algorithms is even generating smart robots capable of quickly learning human actions.
In addition, millions of Americans who dropped out of the labor market in the Great Recession are still jobless. They’re not even counted as unemployment because they’ve stopped looking for work.
But they haven’t disappeared entirely. Employers know they can fill whatever job openings emerge with this “reserve army” of the hidden unemployed – again, without raising wages.
Add to this that today’s workers are less economically secure than workers have been since World War II. Nearly one out of every five is in a part-time job.
Insecure workers don’t demand higher wages when unemployment drops. They’re grateful simply to have a job.
To make things worse, a majority of Americans have no savings to draw upon if they lose their job. Two-thirds of all workers are living paycheck to paycheck. They won’t risk losing a job by asking for higher pay.
Insecurity is now baked into every aspect of the employment relationship. Workers can be fired for any reason, or no reason. And benefits are disappearing. The portion of workers with any pension connected to their job has fallen from over half in 1979 to under 35 percent in today.
Thanks Bob for pointing out the obvious. Bet your income and wealth haven’t suffered over the past 7 or 8 years.
Why do we keep listening to these blowhards who don’t offer any solutions?
Why do we keep believing them when they tell us that only a Capitalist free market can save us?
We all know about the law of supply and demand Bob. That’s the one where huge numbers of the unemployed chase the very few remaining jobs. Jobs that if they get they will work at for very low wages because they feel lucky to have any job at all.
How about telling us the truth Bob. We all know that the time has come to replace the current political and economic systems with ones that will work for the 99%.
But you won’t tell us that Bob, because you and all of your 1% pals are the very people who we will replace.
The portion of workers with any pension connected to their job has fallen from over half in 1979 to under 35 percent in today.
Talk about understating a number! The fifty percent in 1979 were almost all defined benefit pensions. The 35% today are nominal contribution 401K’s. The loss of retirement value is vastly more than a 15% contraction.
He forgot to mention downward pressure on wages from trade agreements like NAFTA, for which Reich advocated back when he was in the Clinton administration.
Reich is one of those who talk a good game, but his actions when he held actual power speak a different story. IOW, one of the reasons why wages won’t rise is people like Robert Reich