ON THE ECONOMIC CONDITION OF AMERICAN WORKERS
Brand, H.
The economic and social situation of American workers is deteriorating. The purchasing power of their earnings is declining, and that decline is barely offset by family incomes bolstered by...
...My choice of families headed by full-time, year-round workers is deliberate: it underscores the income inadequacy of large strata of workers whose economic circumstances are usually believed to be favorable...
...In the 1954-57 boom, a 2 percent per year productivity rise was associated with a 5.4 percent a year rise in hourly compensation (wages and fringe benefits...
...Although here jobs are more likely to be full time and year-round, earnings in 1979 ran to only 86 percent of the nonfarm hourly average...
...These, translated by the dollar exchange rate and monetary policy, expose American capitalism to international competition perhaps unprecedented in the magnitude of its challenge...
...Its cost relative to that of capital dropped at an average annual rate of 4.2 percent...
...This Index is 335 based on a worker who is employed at least 40 weeks per year (indicating his firm "attachment" to the labor force) and a family income less than twice that at the official poverty line...
...54 Consumer Price Index...
...they averaged $40,800, a sum nearly two times higher than median family incomes, and more than twice as high as the annual income of the average auto worker (which I estimate at $19,100 in 1978)—assuming that worker worked full time and 52 weeks that year...
...Leaving aside American investment abroad and the trade this has generated, the most striking example of a high rate of capital accumulation may be witnessed in the Southern states...
...27% 32% 19% Goods producing...
...Whether lagging productivity has also been a factor is at best unclear...
...The latest available data are for 1975, but the relationships they indicate undoubtedly continue to obtain...
...a rise in employment presupposes rising amounts of capital, albeit the rise of the former may be more rapid than the rise of the latter...
...The Humphrey-Hawkins Act, potentially a major improvement in the Employment Act of 1946, has been subverted into a license to fight inflation by inducing unemployment...
...63 * Excludes government...
...National Commission on Employment and Unemployment Statistics, Counting the Labor Force: Preliminary Draft Report...
...The greater increase of employment in the service-producing as against goods-producing industries should not obscure the intimate relation between service production and goods production, and both rose at about the same rate over the past two decades...
...The "de-skilling" of jobs, for example, is a general phenomenon, as is the specialization of tasks...
...Such shallowness stems in part from the fragmentation of these industries: there may indeed be growing concentration of firms, by expansion or by merger, but there is little centralization of final outputs and of workplaces...
...But they are also related to the pressures exerted by international trade and investments...
...The median income of a family headed by a full-time, year-round worker was $21,714 in 1978 and 17 percent above the "intermediate" BLS budget for a family of four (figured at $18,622 for 1978...
...56 Finance, insur., real estate...
...This antagonism is not merely rooted in the "invasions" of private property that government planning entails, but also in the fear of corporate business that democratic as opposed to business interests might dominate the planning process...
...10 11 -4 Trade...
...Furthermore, the service industries, like the goods-producing industries, have been marked by an ever more refined division of labor, which has been fostered by such developments as population shifts, the commercialization of household tasks, cost pressures, or technological changes and their administrative precipitates...
...the lowest fourth of service worker families had an income of $11,000 or less...
...or whether, if adequate child-care arrangements were available or jobs were located in their neighborhoods, women would not rather have stable employment outside the home...
...U.S...
...They show that retail workers earned but 62 percent of the annual average for all payroll workers outside government, and service workers 82 percent...
...None of these developments, however, can be said to have promoted nor are likely to promote a "service society...
...51-52...
...Manufacturing here indicates the direction of the pertinent date for many nonmanufacturing industries...
...22 ff...
...Money Income of Families and Persons in the United States: 1978, Series P-60, no...
...Bureau of Labor Statistics...
...This situation will not be resolved in the interest of labor unless international agreements can be reached on all levels of economic activity, by states acting primarily in the interest of labor rather than of capital...
...37 40 26 Transport...
...17-21...
...March 15, 1981 Reference Notes Michael J. Piore, ed., Unemployment and Inflation: Institutionalist and Structuralist Views...
...37 32 20 Retail...
...Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census...
...I will not review the argument about the unemployment-reducing effects of the subminimum but merely say that when unemployment is kept high by public policy, a lower minimum wage for any group stimulates employee substitution instead of the creation of new jobs...
...Here again, the average masks significant detail...
...83 6 58 21 Source: Work Experience of the Population in 1978: Special Labor Force Report 236, U.S...
...The last budget and the last Economic Report of the Carter administration is not an insignificant gauge of how low labor's fortunes have sunk...
...The second reason I cited is the increasing divergence between government policy—as it retreats from promoting full employment and the welfare state—and the interests of labor...
...Clearly, in a large number of cases, such contributions are not sufficient to bring incomes up to the norms implied by the BLS budgets...
...Table 1 Percent of employed persons with full-time, yearround, or part-time jobs, by sex, and industry, 1978 INDUSTRY MEN WOMEN Full-time Part- Full-time, Partyearround time year-round time Total nonfarm...
...But this in itself highlights an element of the deterioration in the economic position of American workers...
...Most vulnerable to reduction is the minimum wage...
...The rate of employment in the South indeed has risen much faster than in the country as a whole...
...In simple English, we create unemployment by depressing demand, then "cure" it by reducing wages...
...Already, widespread violations of minimum-wage laws threaten the modest gains achieved by such unions, as well as the wage levels of low-paid workers generally...
...These jobs are shaped to require a minimum of skills, and so there is no need for the employer to invest in the worker's training...
...Construction, where seasonal work predominates but the incidence of casual labor is also high, as well as the retail trade and services show the lowest incidence of fulltime, year-round jobs and the highest of part-time jobs...
...I will also present a breakdown by major industrial sector (lack of space prevents anything more lengthy and refined...
...This development cannot fail to threaten workers in the primary job sector as well...
...The index of 10 percent, therefore, represents a most conservative statement of the extent of labor market hardship...
...Thus the primacy that recent Administrations have assigned to fighting inflation and their abandonment of all pretense to attain full employment has resulted in lowering the price of labor...
...49 Services...
...regions from federal funds that were funneled into investments of plant and equipment...
...Inasmuch as average weekly hours in 1979 ran considerably below 1973 (and lower still in 1980), the purchasing power of weekly earnings was not maintained but reduced (again except for mining...
...Cost pressures, in part at least, account for the growth of specialized advertising, computer, and janitorial services...
...The first and foremost reason for this deterioration is the relative weakness of the labor movement, its loss of political weight...
...75 11 60 18 Services...
...337 • The third reason is based on the inroads being made on labor's gains, of which the drive for a subminimum wage is symptomatic...
...Bureau of Labor Statistics...
...Source: Employment and Earnings, U.S...
...Productivity Growth," by John W. Kendrick, in The Decline in Productivity Growth: Proceedings of a Conference, June 1980, sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, pp...
...It should be remembered that family income here includes the contribution of any second (or third, etc...
...331 Economic conditions have conspired to enlarge the secondary sector, particularly after the mid'60s...
...In the years 1960-76, the stock of manufacturing plant and equipment in the South grew at an average annual rate of 5.3 percent, compared with 2.7 percent and 3.0 percent annually in the Northeastern and North Central states, and 3.8 percent in the country as a whole...
...Yet it is debatable whether, for instance, teenagers would not often rather work full time than attend school full time...
...International Harvester took a bitter and costly sixmonth strike last year to change its work rules and reduce labor costs...
...48 9 43 30 Manufacturing 75 4 55 10 Transport...
...So I will briefly discuss the "Labor Market Hardship Index" developed by the National Commission on Employment and Unemployment Statistics to complement the official unemployment rate...
...The Commission's definition of labor market attachment and family income adequacy is narrow, considering that a high proportion of men and women even of prime working age experience more than 12 weeks of unemployment in any given year...
...39 34 21 Finance, insur., real est...
...All services are generated from a substratum of equipment and structures, or they are rendered over time by capital goods...
...The experience of being unemployed (which extended to 16 percent of all persons who worked or looked for work in so relatively prosperous a year as 1978) has combined with the scarcity of good and steady jobs to restrain demands for wage increases that might compensate for losses in purchasing power caused by inflation...
...Lynn E. Browne, "Regional Investment Patterns," New England Economic Review, July /August 1980, pp...
...Others have pressed for the abolition of the minimum wage altogether, since the "competitive edge" that would be extended to teen-agers by a subminimum could not long be confined to them...
...no fiscal stimulus was offered, and a restrictive monetary policy was maintained in the face of a weakening economy...
...The abolition of the cost-of-living adjustment under the recently renegotiated Chrysler contract, moreover, sets an ominous precedent for the deliberate reduction in workers' living standards generally...
...The rise in secondary-sector employment is demonstrated in Table 1, showing the extent of full-time, year-round, and part-time employment in the major industrial sectors for 1978 (part-year schedules have been omitted...
...Interest costs were rising moderately, but the relative advantage of capital was little affected...
...Widespread unemployment has been cited as a factor in the trade unions' reluctance to strike for higher real earnings and improved job security...
...On a per-capita basis, the increase in such contracts was 109 percent for the South, as against a decline of 30 percent for the Northeast and 46 percent for the North Central region...
...The Council evinces far greater concern for capital than for labor, advocating policies that "raise the return on capital investment," although the statistics in the same Report show that the ratio of after-tax profits on stockholders' equity in manufacturing rose to a postwar high in 1979, and the ratio of after-tax profits on sales rose to its highest level since 1950...
...Such a prospect, however, is not in the offing...
...Rising energy prices and interest rates also raised the cost of capital relative to the cost of labor...
...The annual rate of percent change over the life of contracts negotiated in 1979 averaged 6.7 percent for all nonfarm industries outside government, compared to 7.4 percent in 1969 or 8.4 percent in 1970—years with rates of inflation less than half to two-thirds as large as those in the late '70s...
...The inadequacy of their earnings often arises from a disturbing trend that, though characteristic of the entire postwar period, has gathered force in recent years: the marginalization of a growing proportion of jobs...
...9 19 9 Mining...
...The commercialization of household tasks, for example, is reflected in the proliferation of fast food chains and readytoeat foods...
...334 barely maintained the level of their purchasing power or saw it reduced...
...Prepared for Public Comment...
...It did not take a Republican administration to compel "a change in the behavior of wages and prices," so they would more promptly respond to official "demand restraint" (compel a reduction in wage claims and hence in price hikes or price levels...
...Washington, D.C., February 1980...
...Lack of space prevents me from calculating the proportion of all workers and their families who according to the data and in terms of the BLS "lower" budget suffer want...
...For example, in 1979, real before-tax weekly earnings of manufacturing workers declined 3 percent from 1978 levels, and ran 2 percent below 1973 levels...
...The first of the three reasons I have cited for the probable further deterioration in the economic condition of American workers is the shallow penetration of unions in the most rapidly expanding industries...
...45 Manufacturing...
...The average earnings of black workers came to but 77 percent of those of white workers...
...This development has helped accelerate the expansion of a low-wage secondary workforce, and the center of gravity of this expansion now is in the South...
...The socalled economic revitalization program would amount to tax relief mostly for those least in need of it...
...These incomes should be viewed in the perspective of the BLS's "lower" family budget of $11,546 for 1978...
...I am altogether ignoring the income relation to the BLS's "higher" budget (figured at $27,420 for 1978), whose level was approached only by the median family incomes of professional and technical workers, and by managers and officials...
...Women workers were the first such groups for whom minimumwage protection was sought, because they often worked for wages far lower than those men were receiving for similar work...
...The concept of a labor-market dualism is very useful—but I regard it as an economic concept, not one that tells anything definitive about either job attributes or the characteristics of jobholders...
...Neither transportation nor health care nor most leisure activities are conceivable without those substrata...
...Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics: Handbook of Labor Statistics, December 1980, Bulletin 2070...
...The outcome of this attack is not predictable...
...Although these documents have now been superceded, they retain great weight as analyses and as programs...
...Hence that worker can be readily replaced...
...This development would be to the detriment of much of the wage structure...
...it depends on whether and to what extent labor and other democratic forces will rally and resist it...
...Let us remember, "median income" means that half of these families had incomes below the indicated figures...
...one-fourth of the families of clerical or secretarial workers on a similar work schedule had incomes of $13,000 or below...
...A subminimum wage would further jeopardize those gains and further undermine low wages...
...For, as mentioned earlier, they remain bound to goods production and, more fundamentally, to the process of capital accumulation...
...In 1980, average hourly earnings before taxes and after adjusting for change in the Consumer Price Index (CPI) fell to a 12-year low for nonfarm workers outside government...
...III Underemployment in the spreading secondarysector labor market, forced obsolescence of great industrial regions, heightened worker insecurity, and high unemployment rates (particularly regionally and locally), even in times of cyclical peak activity—all have contributed, in addition to inflation, to downward pressure on wages and salaries, and hence to the loss in purchasing power...
...and that "twice the poverty level" just barely equals the BLS's lower family budget...
...Changes in the industrial employment structure have vitally influenced the social and economic situation of America's workers, and I will briefly analyze these changes here...
...All these, because of the cost pressures, can no longer be performed within the conventionally organized business firm...
...56% Mining...
...333 of labor has progressively fallen in relation to the cost of capital, capital still remains necessary in order to employ labor...
...in the service industries it averaged $5.36, or 13 percent below the nonfarm average...
...II Industries characterized by secondary-sector labor markets have accounted for most of the growth in employment throughout the post-World War II period, most of all in the decade 1969-79...
...5-23...
...Furthermore, the wage floor established by minimum-wage legislation has provided indispensable bargaining leverage to unions in lowwage industries, such as textiles in the 1930s and hospitals in the '70s...
...William Serrin, "Plan for 2-Tier Minimum Wage to Stimulate Youth Employment Stirs Dispute," New York Times, November 18, 1980, p. B 9. Sar A. Levitan and R. S. Belous, "The Minimum Wage Today: How Well Does It Work...
...Michael Piore and other labor economists have postulated a "dualism" of the labor market, dividing it into a "primary" and a "secondary" sector...
...30 19 37 Manufacturing...
...Average hourly earnings rose substantially in current dollars between 1973 and 1979...
...High rates of manufacturing investments, of course, generate high rates in the expansion of nonmanufacturing "infrastructures," such as utilities, transportation, and finance...
...If it could, adult workers (who constitute roughly 70 percent of the 5.3 million workers earning the federal minimum wage—$3.35 since January'81) would become less competitive...
...Construction workers' real weekly earnings dropped 4 percent from 1978, and were off 11 percent from 1973 levels...
...While part-year or part-time employment is not always marginal work, this is usually what it means...
...332 Hourly earnings in the industries characterized by marginal work fall substantially below the average for all nonfarm employees: in 1979, the hourly wage in retailing averaged $4.53, or 26 percent below the nonfarm average of $6.16...
...The Council of Economic Advisers, again writing in the most recent Economic Report, would "improve flexibility in labor markets through job training or other programs, or which 336 reduce the downward rigidity of wages in the face of high unemployment...
...The legislative gains upon which the labor movement had come to count have long ago ceased to materialize...
...4 21 7 Service producing...
...These wage statistics are, moreover, reinforced by data on median annual earnings, compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics...
...Washington, D.C.: U.S...
...In the decade 1968-78, 40 percent of the rise in all U.S...
...Workers and their unions are increasingly on the defensive—a fact also evidenced by recent attacks in the press on wage differentials favoring unionized workers...
...Clearly, the labor leadership's impact on this budget was nil, and labor's possible contribution to this major document of an Administration and the party it represented was considered irrelevant...
...For although, as Thurow has demonstrated, the cost Table 2 Employment Trends in Three Decades, by Industry PERCENT CHANGE 1969-79 1959-69 1948-59 Total nonfarm...
...The Southern states' share of military prime contracts, for example, increased from 11 percent to 25 percent of the national total between 1951 and 1976...
...On Lester C. Thurow, see the "Discussion" of the "Survey of the Factors Contributing to the Decline in U.S...
...53 58 43 Fed...
...Bureau of Labor Statistics...
...AFL-CIO Department of Research, Union Membership and Employment, 1959-1979...
...According to Lester Thurow, average labor costs in the U.S...
...And it does not account for hardship suffered by those who are outside the labor market...
...utilities...
...Also significant in terms of the present argument has been the rise of employment in the areas of finance, insurance, and real estate...
...12-19...
...In the Economic Report of the President, January 1981, the Council of Economic Advisers of the outgoing Carter administration frankly admitted that in order to force such a response, "in 1980...
...White Plains, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1979...
...Failure to organize the service industries on a much larger scale spells perpetuation of low-wage, low-skill, low-status jobs, the more so as immigrants, unable to find decent jobs at home, succeed in being hired as "cheap labor" here...
...Indeed, existing compensatory programs were to be curtailed (federally financed public service employment, for example, was to be cut by 7 percent in the current fiscal year, and the unemployment benefit program was to be scaled down...
...Although the last federal budget submitted by President Carter forecast an unemployment rate of, again, nearly 8 percent for 1981, no compensatory measures were proposed...
...To all this the living standards of American workers cannot remain immune, the less so as attempted remedies —such as modernization of the industrial plant— will be made at the expense of consumption...
...Such divergence arises from the antagonism between the state and its planning impulses on the one hand, and America's capitalist private enterprise on the other...
...government...
...Government Printing Office (hereafter GPO...
...64 Transport...
...utilities...
...The redistributive and regulatory functions of the state—challenged ever since they were legitimized in the 1930s, and implemented, to be sure, largely by inflationary government finance and collusion with the regulated industries—have been increasingly attacked by interested business groups...
...Washington, D.C.: U.S...
...writes the Commission...
...There is, for example, an article by Charles L. Schultze in the Wall Street Journal (March 20, 1981), in which he points to the rising hourly wage differentials of workers in the coal, auto, steel, and some other industries— differentials that have risen from 19 percent above the all-manufacturing average in 1967 to 40 percent in 1980...
...Let us also note that more than two-fifths of all full-time workers worked less than the full year in 1978, as did most part-time workers (those who work less than 35 hours a week...
...In the 1970s, moreover, the difference in these growth rates became even greater in favor of the South...
...Thomas M. Stanback, Jr., Understanding the Service Economy: Employment, Productivity, Location...
...Employment rose at extraordinarily high rates in the 1970s, but an overwhelming share of this rise occurred in low-wage industries, affording small or no benefits, and frequently offering only parttime or part-year schedules...
...Thurow's cost comparisons are intended to shed light upon the lag in productivity improvement in recent years (which is not an immediate concern here...
...It has, in particular, gravely depressed the economic situation of many blacks and other groups less able to defend their living standards than organized workers...
...338...
...Labor was therefore used more intensively, and the modernization and replacement of equipment was postponed...
...the "secondary" sector of low-skill or unskilled, low-status jobs, usually of a dead-end kind, offering low pay, and little if any tenure...
...A decline in the rate of capital accumulation since the mid-'60s has been widely noted, but considering the comparative strength in the growth of employment over the past decade, and considering the decline also in the light of the relation between service and goods production just discussed, a brief look at that decline is needed...
...57 Retail trade...
...It is, however, disingenuous to point to wage differentials in a setting where income inequality generally is incomparably more blatant than wage inequality...
...The deterioration of workers' economic condition, illustrated by these figures, is further confirmed by comparing the changes in wages and benefits under collective bargaining contracts covering more than 5,000 workers...
...The purchasing power of their earnings is declining, and that decline is barely offset by family incomes bolstered by the earnings of a working wife...
...18 24 20 State & local government 36 61 54 Source: Employment and Earnings, U.S...
...For example, in such service industries as nursing and personal care, the hourly wage was only $3.85 or 27 percent below the nonfarm average...
...See Table 2; the years selected there are cyclical peak years...
...Technological changes in such disparate areas as medicine, communications, and accounting have fostered specialization and given rise to large staffs of technicians and administrators...
...Greater] labor-market flexibility increases the spread with which restrictive demand policies translate into lower rates of inflation" (p...
...patterns in unemployment, in long-term capital investment, and in productivity growth may be attributed to a tendency to tilt economic expansion disproportionately to the secondary sector" (Unemployment and Inflation, p. xxii...
...The marked pattern for working women suggests employers' preference for traditionally low-skilled or unskilled demographic groups who are willing to or under pressure of necessity will accept low wages...
...It also means that unemployment here is more frequent, and that employers will capitalize on the availability of those labor-force groups— women, youths, poor blacks—that are most likely to gravitate toward such jobs...
...This drastic change in comparative costs was caused by the large number of new workers who were entering the labor force, in a political context (not referred to by Thurow) marked by a deliberately passive employment policy that was intended to restrain wage claims...
...While for men the hardship index was 8.7 percent, for women it was 12.1 percent...
...Most of this employment increase took place in service-producing industries and construction...
...Let us also note that the income of families headed by a black worker with a fulltime year-round job invariably averaged lower than the family income of his white counterpart...
...earner...
...The segment of the labor force that fills secondary-sector jobs frequently has a less firm attachment to the labor market—or so it has been said—than the labor force in the primary sector...
...Thus I refrain from saying anything conclusive about the relation between real earnings and productivity over comparatively short periods...
...Low earnings rather than unemployment or discouragement appeared to be the predominant factor contributing to hardship...
...Although the rate of unemployment in the 1930s was much higher, the labor movement's militancy was far greater than it is today...
...These inroads are partly related to the course of economic policy, which has engendered the situation that facilitates them...
...Thurow's cost comparisons also strengthen Piore's argument that the economic expansions of the 1970s "tilted" toward secondary jobs...
...Thus workers generally either Table 3 Percent Changes in Average Hourly Wage Rates, by Industry, and in the Consumer Price Index, 1973-1979 Total nonfarm...
...52 28 27 51 Finance, insurance, real estate...
...41 38 42 Services...
...It is noteworthy that the South benefited far more than other U.S...
...There is no fathomable reason why teen-agers should be in less need of such protection...
...In particular, it has long been proposed that the minimum wage paid to teenagers be cut to some percentage of that paid to adults...
...For blacks, it just exceeded 24 percent, for whites, 8 percent...
...67% 12% 44% 32% Construction...
...Second, economic policy has increasingly turned against workers...
...They also show why, notwithstanding the fears often voiced about technological unemployment from the "automated factory," manufacturing jobs rose at a faster rate during the cyclical upswing of 1975-79 than during any other such upswing since the mid-1950s...
...and, one might add, of an unemployment rate that came close to 8 percent...
...In the'70s, however, the cost advantage turned in favor of labor...
...123, June 1980...
...Philip L. Rones, "Moving to the Sun: Regional Job Growth, 1968-1978," Monthly Labor Review, March 1980, pp...
...eating and drinking places and health services accounted for more than one-fifth of that increase...
...rose 2.7 percent a year between 1948 and the mid-'60s relative to cost of capital, and 2.9 percent when energy costs, which were then falling, are added to the cost of capital...
...Factors more fundamental than uncertainty, however, appear to have caused this development, among them the decline in labor costs relative to the costs of capital (which includes producer durable equipment, private nonresidential structures, and fuel as an operating component of equipment...
...Workers' families thus must work harder if they are to maintain their living standards...
...Piore believes that the Vietnam War and, after 1973, the energy crisis have lessened business confidence and hence long-term investment commitments...
...Bulletin 2031, Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1979...
...Today the enormous layoffs in auto and rubber, the decline in steel jobs, and the shift of hitherto organized plants to "union free" locales have been sapping labor's strength...
...To make my case more conservatively, I will compare average hourly earnings for 1979 and 1973, which were both cyclical peak years...
...That this result is deliberate, not incidental, is evidenced by the recent Economic Reports of the President, which detail the effects of fiscal and monetary policies...
...Secondary-sector jobs do not appear to have unique attributes or to involve unique technologies...
...Jack Barbash, "The Emergence of Low-Wage Unionism," Monthly Labor Review, April 1974, pp...
...This condition has dampened worker militancy and thus has weakened the labor movement...
...The subminimum thus becomes the effective minimum wage...
...It was fed by heavy immigration, and the combination of population increases and population shifts to urban centers represented an additional factor in spurring capital accumulation...
...In 1978, the top 5 percent of American families received 15 percent of all income...
...The New York Times of January 25, 1981 reported that "In recent months, such companies as Armour, Conrail and Firestone, in addition to Chrysler and Uniroyal have won substantive changes in previously negotiated wages or work rules...
...Furthermore, the workforce employed by these industries often lacks coherent, articulated interests arising out of economic pressures commonly shared by its members...
...At the same time, recessions as well as intractable "structural" industrial problems have raised unemployment to twice or three times the (not particularly low) rates that prevailed in the late 1960s...
...The average size of the family of an employed family head was 3.5 persons, so that the difference between his family income and the "intermediate" BLS budget somewhat understates how well off his family actually was in terms of this quite stringent budget...
...public utilities 76 7 63 19 Wholesale trade 76 7 58 20 Retail trade...
...81 Construction...
...As a student of Economic Reports over many years, I have not encountered in any of them a passage so openly advocating wage cuts...
...For example, one-fourth of the families headed by a semiskilled blue-collar worker working full time the year round had incomes of $15,000 or less in 1978...
...The CPI, however, rose as much as or more than hourly earnings for all the industries shown in Table 3, except mining...
...The extent to which primary-sector employment contracts and secondary-sector employment expands, or vice versa, depends on economic conditions, the availability and size of a reserve army of workers, and the success of organized labor in "de-casualizing" employment without jeopardizing it...
...Monthly Labor Review, July 1979, pp...
...jobs occurred in the South (although in 1968 the South had accounted for but 30 percent of all jobs...
...62 18 43 35 Public administration...
...The lowest fourth of all black families headed by such a worker had at most $11,000 in income in 1978, which is 23 percent below the (at most) $17,000 of his white counterpart's family...
...it must be strongly resisted...
...The "primary" sector consists of jobs offering good pay, long tenure, and at least limited opportunities along skill (or career) ladders...
...In the latest decade, the employment increase in retail trade and services represented more than half of the total employment increase...
...IV The economic condition of American workers, particularly of those who are not organized and whose incomes are in the bottom half or fourth of the earnings distribution, most likely will continue to deteriorate...
...Industry and occupation tend to stratify workers by income (and hence status), although no pattern of stratification is permanent, and insecurity pervades the lives of most workers...
...Washington, D.C., January 1979...
...15 -15 -26 Construction...
...196, emphasis added...
...Moreover, while 67 percent of all nonfarm workers held full-time, year-round jobs, this average obscures the fact that only 58 percent of all male black workers held such jobs, and that young men of both races held mostly part-year, part-time jobs...
...U.S...
...Subjective" factors such as this one may change, as unemployment (or disemployment) in the primary sector transforms the secondary-sector workforce and the perception of its interests...
...On this basis, the Commission's Index shows that 10 percent of all workers fell into the hardship group in 1976 (the unemployment rate for that year averaged 7.7 percent...
...for then labor was politically ascendant...
...Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Annual Earnings and Employment Patterns of Private Nonagricultural Employees, 1973-1975...
...It is subject to legislation, and therefore within the reach of key legislators unsympathetic to its objectives...
...The objectives must be, first of all, the protection of those groups of workers who are least able to bargain effectively with employers, and therefore are subject to being underpaid...
...It might be argued that 1980, in contrast to 1968, was a "bad" year and that, more important, the composition of the workforce had shifted toward lower-paid service workers...
...Furthermore, unions remain badly underrepresented in the most rapidly growing employment sectors: only 7 percent of all wholesale and retail workers, only 11 percent of all service workers, and 20 percent of all government workers are organized —compared to 45 percent of manufacturing and 75 percent of construction workers...
...Suffice it to note that labor productivity in manufacturing rose 2 percent per year in 1975-79, while real compensation per hour rose less than 1 percent a year...
...Any subminimum of the broad kind now being proposed subverts the historical objectives, not merely of minimum-wage legislation but of hours legislation as well: more hours would have to be put into work in order to earn the same minimum...
...These averages, while indicative of general patterns, again mask important underlying tendencies...
...Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979...
...63 Wholesale trade...
...Third, and perhaps most immediately important, are the growing pressures to reduce wage levels...
Vol. 28 • July 1981 • No. 3
