GORHAM COLUMN

LABOR DAY ISSUE

MAINE LABOR NEWS

JOBLESS CRISIS CASTS GLOOM ON LABOR DAY

By Edward Gorham

President

Maine AFL-CIO

      Traditionally Labor Day is a time of family fun, picnics, games and celebration – a time for relaxation and pleasure.

      For more than 120 years we have taken notice of working men and women at least once a year. But too often we forget that the Labor Days of decades ago were not only days on which organized labor had picnics, concerts and games but also that these were the days on which labor organized, marched, spoke and pressed for gains for workers and working families – gains such as the eight hour day, the 40-hour week, safe work places, the right to organized and the prohibition of child labor in the mines and mills.

First Labor Day

      On September 5, 1882 more than 10,000 workers assembled in New York City to participate in the nation’s first Labor Day parade.

      But, as the Library of Congress tells us, “For many decades Labor Day was used by workers not only to celebrate their accomplishments, but also to air their grievances and discuss strategies for securing better working conditions and salaries.” (source

      Facing the most anti-labor national administration in a century and facing a crisis in our economy and a crisis in the continued loss of millions of jobs, it is high time to again revive the Labor Day tradition of solidarity, action and protest.

A Crisis of Job Loss

      From here and there we hear mumblings about “economic recovery” slow but sure to come at us eventually out of the darkness – coming like the man in the tunnel who saw a light only to discover it wasn’t the end of the tunnel but a train headed toward him from the other direction.

      We are now involved in a crisis of permanent job loss and continually rising unemployment – disguised in part by the way both states and the federal government keep track of unemployment.

      How many Maine workers have exhausted all unemployment benefits without finding work? We simply don’t know because in the past we have made no effort to find out. No job, plus no benefits, equals a “statistically missing person.”

Thousands Uncounted

      Maine officials estimate that there are “thousands” of such “discouraged workers” without jobs or benefits and by next November there are likely to be 10,000 to 12,000 more.

      The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that, nationally, there are 3.9 million such unemployed “discouraged workers” who have statistically disappeared.

      But the thousands of such workers in Maine and the millions nationally have not really disappeared.

The Disposable Worker

      A study by Rutgers University this summer called “The Disposable Worker: Living in a Job-Loss Economy” shows that these workers and working families are suffering constant daily pain and falling ever deeper into debt as they are unable to pay bills, feed their families, retain health insurance, pay for medical care and make ends meet.

Crisis Getting Worse

      This is a crisis and it’s getting not better but worse. These are the sad totals provided to us in a study in July by the national AFL-CIO:

·         During the course of the Bush Administration to date the private sector has lost 3.1 million jobs – the bulk of the lost jobs are in manufacturing.

·         The NET Bush job loss (losses minus gains) stands at 2.5 million jobs making Bush the only President in recent history to run for a second term with a NET job loss.

·         The Bush era job loss in manufacturing alone stands at 2.4 million jobs. This sector has lost jobs every month for 35 straight months.

·         In June this year, 9.4 million workers were “officially classified” as jobless.

·         In addition, there were 1.4 million jobless workers available for work but not counted because they had not looked for work recently.

·         Added to that are 4.5 million people working part time because they had been cut back or were unable to find a full-time job.

·         And the number of long-term jobless (unemployed for more than six months) stands at a record high of 2 million. More than half of these long term jobless workers have exhausted all unemployment benefits and still cannot find work.

Pain Index Needed

      We read in August about the national unemployment rate being 6.2% but this is a misleading figure that conceals the severity of the unemployment crisis. The most meaningful figure the U.S. Department of Labor calls “labor underutilization” and it stands at 10.6% of the workforce.

      “Labor underutilization” is just a fancy bureaucratic term for economic pressure and pain forced on working families – this “pain index” is now in the double digits.

      The pain index includes more than not having a job:

·         There are some 127 million working people in the country but 7.6 million of them are forced to hold two jobs to just get by.

·         About 38 million of these jobs are only part time.

·         There are some 35 million year-around full-time jobs that don’t pay enough to support a family.

·         Some eight million workers are machine operators and assemblers (production workers) but their average “real” wages (allowing for inflation) were less in 1993 than they were in 1973.

·         In retail trade there are 19 million workers who earn less than $10,000 a year, mostly with no benefits.

·         There are more than a million bank tellers and clerks who earn an average of $8.19 an hour.

Working Families Lose

      We hear a lot of talk about too many workers in big government but, in truth, not counting military defense-related jobs, only two of every hundred workers hold federal jobs and only one in eight of them work in or near Washington, D. C.

      We hear continued talk about the economy rebounding. We have had enormous economic growth since 1979 – but, in this growth period, a third of American households experienced at least one job loss and two-thirds of the fired workers could only find a job a lower pay.

Sending Jobs Abroad

      There is no doubt we have a jobless crisis – a crisis caused in part by the continuing corporate drive to send American jobs out of the country.

      Employers are shifting jobs to China, India and other countries where they can pay less than $1 an hour for labor with no benefits. Even Mexico is now losing jobs because the Mexican wages are too high. And the job exodus is impacting professionals as well as rank and file workers.

      This job shift abroad is one of the issues in the struggle of workers with Verizon. As it moved into contentious labor negotiations, Verizon pushed for far more flexibility to shift union work from the Northeast to lower-wage areas of the United States -- or even overseas -- potentially affecting thousands of jobs.

      Nationally we have lost millions of jobs and in Maine we have lost more than 26,000 jobs – a workforce percentage among the highest in the nation.

No Care – No Plan

      And the root of the problem is we have in place an Administration in Washington whose only sensitivity is to corporate problems not worker pain – the worker pain index isn’t even on the Bush radar screen.
      We have in place no plan, no strategy to reverse this crisis in unemployment and “underutilization” of the workforce. The President lollygags in Texas for a month with absolutely no sense of urgency. He sends top Administration officials off on a bus tour of key election states with the message “better days are coming.” No sense. No plan. Nothing. Zip.
      On the contrary, Bush and the Republican majority in Congress go out of their way to reduce unemployment benefits, to prevent benefit extensions and they persistently ignore the plight of millions upon millions of American workers.

      AFL-CIO President John Sweeney it well when he said, “As we pause to observe Labor Day, America's working families are being battered in a foundering economy. Wages are stagnating again, unemployment is much higher and lasting much longer and workers have lost billions, if not trillions, of dollars in retirement savings.”

      The problem is Sweeney said this on Labor Day a year ago and in the year since then things have not improved. Because of the drive of President Bush to “leave no millionaire behind” and leave no corporate bottom line smaller, workers are suffering more economic pain than ever before.

      If workers and working families expect to be hearing “Happy Days Are Here Again” in the years ahead, 2004 is the year to see that a new song is played by a new conductor and orchestra in Washington D. C.

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