For years I worked in media outreach for the labor movement, and banged my head against a wall talking to reporters about income inequality. They just yawned. During this last recession the Inside the Beltway types started to finally get it - - the growing income divide is now hot. And what's the wonks' solution.... drumroll,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,., Training! We'll train all the people and send them to college! After all, college grads make more money.
Ok, I'm all for college. I teach college. But the problem is that our nation isn't creating more jobs for college grads. We're creating many, many more low-wage jobs. In fact, even the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco recently pointed out that the vast majority of job losses during the recent recession -- 60 % - - were "middle-income" jobs (paying between $14 and $21 an hour.) But then once we started gaining jobs back, only 27% were such middle-income jobs. Most of the new jobs were low-wage jobs. See today's Washington Post article on this here.
Below is a chart that I completely stole from the National Employment Law Project website. You can see that 8 of the 12 jobs with the most openings are low-paying jobs.
So, what's the solution? Training won't cut it. We have to make these low-wage jobs good ones. We can do that through wage policies - - like raising the minimum wage. We can demand that any employers who get tax incentives in our communities meet certain basic standards. And we can support workers' freedom to collective bargaining -- perhaps in creative ways not now supported by law, like giving a minority of union-minded workers at a workplace the power to bargain over some issues.
What do you think we should do to make the new jobs good ones?
