Labor & Employment Law

Labor Day 2010: America?s Workers Losing Ground

By James Parks

The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) this week published three reports showing the extent to which America’s workers are losing ground this Labor Day: People are dropping out of the workforce because there are no jobs and those workers who have jobs are earning less.

First, there are not nearly enough new jobs. Nearly 15 million workers are unemployed, nearly a quarter of whom have been seeking work for more than a year. Even though unemployment rose slightly to 9.6 percent last month, it’s 0.5 percent less than it was last October. But that?s not because the economy has been generating that many jobs. EPI economist Heidi Shierholz found that the percentage of people who were actually employed held steady even as the population increased. Translation: The improvement in the unemployment rate has been almost entirely due to people dropping out of (or not entering) the labor force because of the lack of jobs. Check out Shierholz?s report ?Employment Growth Continues Subpar Performance? here. 

And those who are working are making less. Wages for the typical worker have collapsed. In ?Recession Hits Workers? Paychecks,? Sheirholz and EPI President Lawwrence Mishel show that workers who have managed to keep their jobs or find new ones during the economic downturn have suffered from stagnant or no wage growth.

Wages are growing half as fast as they were immediately prior to the recession. That?s true in almost all occupations. The numbers were worse for men than women. In fact, the median income for an average working household fell between 2000 and 2007 by more than $2,000. This report, which you can find here, is the first in a series of reports leading up to the launch of EPI?s much anticipated ?State of Working America? volume and revamped website in January 2011.

Finally, EPI has released a handy new tool that gives a clear statistical picture of the recession in one place. Labor Day By the Numbers is a chart that lists pertinent facts about the economy in a quick, compact form with links to previous EPI reports.

For example, the section dealing with the unemployment rate shows the number of people who are jobless, the portion who have been unemployed for six months or a year, the number who are underemployed and other key facts. You can check out the chart here.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on September 04, 2010 (boomark / email).