This #LaborDay weekend, remember that the labor movement’s decline has been bad for even non-union workers. https://t.co/882AwvAhGF
— Demos (@Demos_Org) September 2, 2016
… After analyzing nearly four decades of wage data, EPI estimated that male non-union workers in the private sector would be earning, on average, $2,074 [more] per year if the percentage of unionized workers in the private sector had stayed flat since 1979. Overall, EPI found that male non-union workers in the private sector have been losing about $109 billion per year. Women in non-union, private sector jobs took a much smaller hit to their income — about $24 billion annually — because men were significantly likelier to be union members in 1979.
The EPI report was co-authored by Washington University-St. Louis sociologist Jake Rosenfeld, author of the excellent 2014 book What Unions No Longer Do. Rosenfeld told me he had expected to find that union decline had somewhat depressed non-union wages, but that the scale of the effect was “staggering.”
“It has to be seen as a top culprit in the ongoing financial fragility of the average American worker,” said Rosenfeld…
Mr. Pierce, at Esquire:
None of our national holidays have moved as far from its original founding purposes as Labor Day has. This is because most of the people and corporations—which, of course, are indistinguishable from each other; thank you, Justice Kennedy—who have monetized our holidays would rather not have anything to do with the founding purposes of Labor Day… They have no real moral qualms about turning Memorial Day into a celebration of American barbecue, or the Fourth of July into a carnival of gluttonous alcoholism, but they really don’t want Americans remembering that we celebrate the first weekend in September not because of the Americans who died at Gettysburg or Normandy but, rather, that we celebrate the first weekend in September because of the Americans who died at Homestead, and at Ludlow in Colorado, and at Matewan. But that is what this day is for, even now, in a right-to-work, de-unionized global economy…
E.J. Dionne, in the Washington Post, “Help wanted: Phony populism doesn’t feed the family”:
You would have thought that Labor Day 2016 would bring us a serious conversation about lifting the incomes of American workers and expanding their opportunities for advancement.
After all, we have spent the year talking incessantly about alienated blue-collar voters and a new populism rooted in the disaffection of those hammered by economic change…
The truth is that Clinton has offered many more serious policy proposals for raising workers’ incomes than Trump has. Her website is full of ideas on expanding profit-sharing, a “Make it in America” initiative to promote manufacturing, and plans on family leave, child care, cutting student debt and much more…
Labor Day ‘But Seriously… ‘ Open ThreadPost + Comments (136)