by Ralph Scharnau

A sharp contrast exists between American workers today and those of a generation ago.  In the midst of an ongoing Great Recession, the condition of many working class Americans continues to worsen.

During the New Deal in the 1930s, government passed labor legislation that included the minimum wage and the forty hour work week.  Social Security provided unemployment and old age insurance.  And private sector workers won the right to negotiate wages, hours, and working conditions with their employers.

The postwar years to the mid-1970s were a prosperous era with strong economic growth.  By the mid-1950s, over a third of the workforce belonged to unions.  In the mid-1960s, Congress passed Medicare and Medicaid.  An Occupational Safety and Health Administration came in 1970.  Organized labor’s moral vision, political muscle, and bargaining clout often played a decisive role in securing these gains.

A generation ago, working people had a measure of job security, received decent wages, and job opportunities widened.  The era also witnessed rapid gains in education and a progressive tax policy.   Workers today face much different realities.  Rising rates of unemployment, poverty, housing foreclosures, and personal bankruptcies provide grim reminders of the Great Recession.

The real decline in the status and treatment of American workers dates from the late 1970s.  Perhaps four-fifths of today’s working population find themselves with lower wages and benefits, longer work hours and workloads, higher stress levels and job insecurity.

For too many Americans, the conventional, comfortable forty-hour week has been replaced by the overloaded, overstressed sixty-hour week.  Those living in two-paycheck households put in far more hours than their parents did a generation ago.

The minimum wage is also shrinking; worth about a third less than it was in 1968.  Since 1980, college tuition has risen three times faster than inflation, and Pell Grants cover only a third of tuition.

While unionized workers enjoy wages and other benefits nearly a third higher than those of nonunion workers, today organized workers only account for about 12% of the labor force.  The hard times for workers now reaches all segments of the workforce, white-collar, blue-collar, middle-class, and low-wage.  Joining the unemployment lines with downsized and outsourced manufacturing employees are college-trained and white-collar workers in architecture, law, information technology, art and design, pharmacology, insurance, and banking.

Between 1999 and 2008, U.S. multinationals reduced their domestic workforce by almost 2 million people while increasing foreign employment by about 2.5 million.  Moreover, three fourths of the weak job growth here occurs within industries paying only meager wages.

Today, corporations continue to shred ideas of shared sacrifice and mutual responsibility, pensions disappear, and median incomes flatten. Meanwhile, individuals and families take on debts to finance an education, pay utility bills, cover a cut back in hours or job loss, or just to make it to the end of the month.

In many ways, then, the average household is generally worse off today than it was thirty years ago.  And the public sector that improved life for millions of Americans across three generations is in tatters.

Inequality in America has reached a point where we live in a society composed of two distinct groups, the rich and the rest.  The richest 1% of households possesses as much wealth as the bottom 90%.  During the past generation, many American families that once could count on hard work and fair play for job and financial security now find themselves with neither.

While we receive daily media coverage of markets and corporations, labor reports only seem to appear monthly and around Labor Day.  Yet it is the workers who power the American economy by producing and consuming goods and services.