Shoring Up the Middle Class

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from The American Prospect:


Shoring Up the Middle Class

Rebuilding mass prosperity in America will require upgrading the jobs in industries like transportation, construction, health care, and sales, and ensuring workers in those jobs regain the power to bargain for decent wages.

Harold Meyerson | September 6, 2007 | web only



LOS ANGELES -- In the spring of 1923, a sick and frustrated Lenin penned an article for Pravda titled "Better Fewer, But Better." The state he had willed into existence was mass-producing communists who knew nothing of communism. Better that the state should take its time, Lenin counseled, and turn out fewer but higher-quality commissars.
In fact, the genius of the Soviet system was precisely its capacity to mass-produce thugs. One system that has taken Lenin's words to heart, however, is American manufacturing. Each year, our factories employ a smaller and smaller share of American workers, but each year the value of their output continues to rise.

The dollar value of American-made goods today is three times what it was in the mid-1950s, The Post's Peter S. Goodman reported on Labor Day. Conversely, the percentage of American workers employed in manufacturing is a little less than a third of the level at mid-century: 10 percent today, 34 percent in 1950. Employers have outsourced such labor-intensive industries as clothing and textiles, retaining the manufacture of high-value products for their domestic factories.

America builds ever-more-innovative products, but ever-fewer Americans share in that bounty. We generate millions of jobs in lower-paying service-sector work even as the number of manufacturing workers continues to shrink (19 million in 1979, 14 million today). Nor do manufacturing jobs, immersed in the cauldron of global competition, offer anything near the security and middle-class living standards that many of them used to. With millions of digitizable service-sector jobs (many requiring college educations) subject to global competition as well, it's no wonder that the income of the typical American household has been flat even as national productivity rates continue to rise.

Rebuilding mass prosperity in America will require two epochal shifts in the way our nation does business. First, non-manufacturing jobs not subject to global competition -- in transportation, construction, health care, sales -- must be upgraded and upskilled the way many of their counterparts in manufacturing have. Second, the workers in those jobs must regain the power to bargain for decent wages, a power that's eroded as the union movement has shrunk from representing close to 40 percent of private-sector workers in mid-century to just 7 percent today. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=shoring_up_the_middle_class