Work full time. Live in poverty.

    "If unskilled and semi-skilled jobs don’t pay a living wage, a significant percentage of the workforce and their families will always live in poverty."

          Herb Rothschild

The stock market is hitting new highs. So are bankruptcies. 

Unemployment is at a fifty year low. People are living in the streets.

America has an income distribution problem. People can ignore it or deny it, but we see one of its effects, the populist unrest coming from both left and right.  Donald Trump's election is a symptom of populist unrest. In 2016 voters chose right-populism. 

Herb Rothchild shares a comment. Rothschild is a retired professor, now living in Southern Oregon. 

Rothschild

Guest Post, by Herb Rothschild:

I am writing in support of your recent blog post that shared Jim Stodder’s criticism of the Democratic Party's decision to justify income inequality based on a "Meritocracy" of educational achievement.

Stephen Klineberg, a sociologist at Houston's Rice University, argued that that well-paying unskilled and semi-skilled jobs in manufacturing were being lost, so if Houston wanted a strong middle class, many more of its future workers would need a higher education. 

Klineberg is saying what this blog has observed, that the Democratic Party's solution for the poverty wages of much of the work of the world is to escape, to go to college or graduate school. One merits a decent income and a place in the middle class through higher education. 

I’m all for people attending college. But there is a problem with this argument.

First of all, manufacturing jobs weren’t inherently high-paying. Only labor union organizing combined with government intervention changed those conditions in the U.S. and Europe. They still prevail in much of the world.

Second, in some cases, higher education doesn't guarantee good wages. Take school teaching. The pay was low because it was one of the few professions open to women before Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act forbid gender bias in employment, and because teachers hadn’t organized themselves. Thanks to their unionizing and becoming a political force in most states, their wages improved dramatically.

And third, let's understand and accept a simple reality. A large number of jobs will always be unskilled or semi-skilled, and they have to be filled. So if those jobs don’t pay a living wage, a significant percentage of the workforce and their families will always live in poverty.

The common ground of these points is that power in the workplace, either directly through unions or indirectly through government mandates such as minimum wage, the standard work week, and paid overtime, determines employees’ well-being at least as much as their level of education. 

We must talk about power in the workplace. It’s no coincidence that the years between 1947 and 1977, when income distribution in the U.S. was the most equal, were also the years when union membership was highest. In 1960, more than one-third of the U.S. workforce was in unions, almost all in the private sector. Today, fewer than 12% of the workforce is in unions, half of us in public employee unions. With loss of membership came loss of political power. Thus today, economic elites control both our workplaces and our legislatures. 

In 2012, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projected that the five occupations that will add the most workers between then and 2022 are personal care aides, registered nurses, retail salespeople, home health aides, and food service workers. Only the second category requires a higher education. The median wage of registered nurses is at least three times larger than that of the other four, so it behooves an individual to become a nurse rather than a home health aide. But from a public policy standpoint, we must ask whether it’s wise to condemn employees in the other and similar occupations to wages below the poverty line. If so, economic inequality will continue to grow, our middle class will continue to shrink, and our social fabric will continue to unravel.