Oil or Food?
posted by
Dookie The Webmaster
12:12 PM
Wage erosion cuts deeper in U.S.
Whatever Senator Barack Obama meant by his less than artful remarks about small-town Pennsylvanians being "bitter" over lost jobs, he certainly turned a lot of attention last week to the decline of the American worker, bitter or not.
The talk most often has been of shuttered factories, layoffs, outsourcing and other effects of globalization, especially in a state like Pennsylvania, which has lost tens of thousands of industrial jobs. But there is another way to look at blue-collar workers or their counterparts in the service sector.
The $20 hourly wage, introduced on a huge scale in the middle of the last century, allowed masses of Americans with no more than a high school education to rise to the middle class. It was a marker, of sorts, but it is becoming extinct.
Americans greeted the loss with anger and protest when it first began to happen in big numbers in the late 1970s, particularly in the steel industry in western Pennsylvania. But as layoffs persisted, in Pennsylvania and across the country, through the '80s and '90s and right up to today, the protests subsided and acquiescence set in.
....
"The most important model that rolled off the Detroit assembly lines in the 20th century," said Harley Shaiken, a labor economist at the University of California at Berkeley, "was the middle class for blue-collar workers."
Soup line forms here ---->
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