3/15

So We Have More JobsLow-Paid, Part-Time Ones

recession to 6.7 percent in the figures for December through February.

This all sounds fine, until you look at the reality in back of this cherished statistic.

There may be more jobs, but more and more they're low-paying jobs with short hours, small benefits and bleak futures. We've seen the same thing happen to the American job that happened to the American dollar when it was gutted by inflationthere are more of them around, but they bring home a lot less bacon.

Almost a third of the new jobs since 1980 are part-time. Three-fourths have been filled by people wanting full-time work. Six million American part-timers want full-time work and can't find it. Two-thirds of them make the minimum wage, and 85 percent have no health insurance from their employ

So We Have More Jobs

UNEMPLOYMENT, From Cl
Barry Bluestone of the University of Mass-
achusetts and Bennett Harrison of M.I.T.
compares net new jobs created between
1973 and 1979 to jobs formed between 1979
and 1985. In the first period, 20 percent of
the new jobs paid at or near the minimum
wage now just under $7,000 a year. In the
second period, however, low-wage jobs ap-
peared at more than twice that rate: 44 per-
cent of new jobs in the Reagan years paid
$7,400 a year or less for those working full
time.

Well, goes the rebuttal by conservative
economists, that just reflects the influx of
women and teenagers into the workforce.
They prefer service-type work that lets them
move in and out of the labor market, and low
wages are the reward for inconsistency and
inexperience. But women have actually done
. better than men in the Bluestone-Harrison
study; two-thirds of the net new jobs for men
between 1979 and 1984 paid $7,400 or less,
compared to 31 percent for women.

Granted, there have been complaints about
the validity of the unemployment number in
, the past. Liberals have charged that it ig-
nores people who quit looking for work, while
) conservatives argued that it misses those
who are working "off the books" in cash-only
transactions ranging from house-cleaning to
illegal drugs.

But the real problem with the unemploy-
ment rate is that we've devalued American
employment in order to have more of it.
While corporate stock prices soar to new
highs, the working class is paying for this
situation.

Practically every measure of income and
relative status-except for the unemploy-
ment rate-reflects a sharp decline for the
American working class. Studies compiled by
the Economic Policy Institute indicate that all
the net gain in jobs in the past six years has
come in the service sector, where the aver-
age pay is below $14,000 a year. The aver-
age pay of jobs lost in the manufacturing and
construction industries was over $20,000 a
year.

Median household income and mean family
income are 5 percent below 1980 levels de-
spite the infusion of women and teenagers
into the workforce. Only per-capita income
levels have risen slightly because husbands
and wives who must both work to pay their
bills are having fewer children.

In 185 more American families had in

retirement. White-collar workers didn't worry
about layoffs and could advance to mid-level
and upper-management jobs.

Not any more. Kodak has laid off 10,000
workers in Rochester. One of them, a young
woman laid off from a $9-an-hour assembly-
line job in late 1985, looked for work for nearly
a year before she found a part-time, minimum-
wage job as a cafeteria cashier at Brockport
State college, barely enough to support her
five-year-old daughter.

"I think it stinks," she says. "It's like I'm
sinking, sinking fast. I keep wondering: am I
ever going to be able to make that money
again?"

One computer programmer laid off from
Xerox in 1982 still works there full time as a
temporary employee, paid 20 percent less
than he was making before, with no benefits.

About 15 million workers have lost their
jobs in the past decade due to plant shutdowns,
product-line transfers or other business clos-
ings. Most of those were making more than
$20,000 a year in durable-goods manufactur-
ing. When they got new jobs, often after a year
or two on layoff, they took big pay cuts closer
to the $14,000-a-year service pay average.
The cuts are collar-blind, too. They do not just
affect blue-collar assembly-line workers; they
hit white-collar and pink-collar support staff,
engineers and designers, sales people and mid-
level managers.

Of course there are many opportunities for
specialized programmers and systems ana-
lysts, but chip-makers and semiconductor
manufacturers are moving production oper-
ations overseas. General Electric is moving
electronics production to Asia and Mexico
while it shuts down turbine operations in New
York and Massachusetts. AT&T has shifted
telephone manufacturing to Singapore and
announced the layoff of 30,000 managers and
technicians in other business lines. Westing-
house has announced plans to close a busy,
profitable large circuit-breaker plant in Bridge-
port, Conn., putting hundreds of employees
out of work to shift operations to the 'Domin-
ican Republic.

These are not money-losing, dying compa-
nies. They are Fortune 500 giants where
steady work for production, white-collar and
middle management employees paid $20,000-
$40,000 a year. In its place, those workers
might collect unemployment compensation,
get counseling on how to write a resume and
dress for an interview, perhaps get retraining
allowances for new jobs that don't exist, then
finally find work in the Great American Job
Machine for half what they made before. The
unemployment rate will never reflect this re-
ality.

Nor will it reflect that workers no longer
can have their parents' expectations for a
brighter future. In 1950 and in 1960, a 30-
year-old man who made what would today

equal $18,000 a year would likely double his
pay in 10 years. In contrast, a 40-year-old to-
day is where he was 10 years ago, if he's
lucky. His family's standard of living might
hold up, but only because he's moonlighting,
his wife is working and his teenage children
are working too.

Of course, this scene reflects an intact fam-
ily. The difficulties mount for single-parent
households and mixed families. At this point,
many liberal analysts move on to the plight of
women and minorities. There is a danger here,
though, of seeing workers divided into a white
male aristocracy at odds with minorities and
women. However plausible this view may have
been (it's hard to conceive of aristocrats on
$20,000 a year), the latest Labor Department
figures show white males plummeting toward
the pay and benefit levels of their women and
minority counterparts.

Instead of a secure middle class we have an
American working class whose wages are
dropping, whose good jobs are disappearing
and whose whole families have to work to
make ends meet. Much of the vaunted middle
class is looking at a future closer to the under-
class nightmare than the American dream, but
the unemployment figure on the nightly news.
remains the mark by which we measure the
well-being of the people who actually do the
work in this country, rather than those who
simply devise new ways to profit from their
investments.

It sounds odd, talking of a working class in
the United States. The phrase evokes pic-
tures of French communist factory hands,
not the yeoman farmers of our Jeffersonian
tradition or what was, until recently, our over-
sold image of a middle class autoworker with
two cars, a boat and a summer house. But we
do have a working class, the vast majority of
Americans who make their living on a periodic
wage paid by an employer. President Reagan
telling them to rejoice because 13 million new
jobs have been created on his watch adds insult
to injury for the millions of Americans who
have lost their jobs and had to take the lousy
jobs he's boasting about.

Ridiculing the concern for job quality as
"Economics Propaganda 101," economics col-
umnist Robert J. Samuelson calls the notion
that the U.S. economy is producing too many
dead-end jobs "economic fiction." Acknowledg-
ing "pockets of distress" and "individual suffer-
ing." Samuelson maintains that "in an economy
of 111 million workers, their overall social sig-
nificance is diluted."

The argument pays scant attention to the
fact that today's "good" 6.7 percent unemploy-
ment rate is actually higher than the rates we
deplored so loudly during the 1958, 1961 and
1971 recessions. With each turn of the busi-
ness cycle, the peaks and valleys of the unem-
ployment rate move up. Here's how decade-

long averages have climbed: in the '50s, un-
employment averaged 4.5 percent; in the '60s
4.8 percent; in the '70s 6.2 percent and in the
'80s, so far, nearly 8 percent.

Samuelson writes reassuringly that "the
average jobless spell is now less than four
months." But that is the same length of unem-
ployment that prevailed in the 1975-76 reces-
sion with unemployment near 9 percent and
only a month shorter than the average time off
the job after the 11 percent joblessness of
1982. However, only a third of laid-off workers
collect unemployment-insurance compensation
today, compared to over 70 percent a decade
ago.

Where is it going to end? Perhaps with a
U.S. economy more like that of Brazil, with a
small group of wealthy capitalists, a sizeable-
but minority-sector of professionals and
skilled technicians running high-technology
businesses and services, and a vast mass of
sullen, low-paid production and service em-
ployees. In a report to the AFL-CIO's Indus-
trial Union Department, economist Larry Mi-
chel shows that incomes from dividends and
interest have been increasing at twice the rate
of workers' wages in the past decade.

But perhaps we are headed instead for a
settling of accounts. Not Marx's final conflict,
but the periodic corrective that comes when
Amrican workers decide they have been
pushed too far. Every few decades, common
Americans get fed up with business dominance
and push back, first with political reform, as in
the eras of Populism or the New Deal, then by
buikling trade-union organizations, as with the
consolidation of the American Federation of
Labor in the 1890s and the mass organizing
drives of the CIO in the 1930s.

In 1988 and 1990 and 1992, political aspi-
rants-and union organizers too-can win
elections by stressing forthrightly the interests
of American workers counterposed against the
interest of investment bankers, corporate
takeover artists and golden-parachuting board-
room big shots. Indeed, a Democratic presi-
dential candidate who moves boldly to capture
working people's disaffection and proposes
thoroughgoing reforms could sweep into the
White House next year.

Talk of "workers" and "Wall Street" and
"economic royalists" may sound hoary to jaded
political ears, but these might be the themes
that play in Peoria-which, as it happens, is a
city where thousands of workers have lost
their jobs at Caterpillar and other farm equip
ment plants since 1980.

To win, a reform Democrat has to debunk
claims about the great job-creating machine
and go beyond the old arguments about unem-
ployment to press cures for ill-employment.
Instead of jobs, jobs, jobs, candidates have to
talk about better jobs, for better pay, with
brighter futures.

Chairman GIBBONS. I am going to ask you about that figure, half the market, because that is the first major deviation that we have here, so be prepared for that when I come to that, would you, please?

All right. Let us see. Who is next?

Mr. GREGG. Mr. Chairman, we have Jack Sheinkman, who is secretary and treasurer of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union.

Chairman GIBBONS. Yes, sir.

STATEMENT OF JACK SHEINKMAN, SECRETARY-TREASURER, AMALGAMATED CLOTHING & TEXTILE WORKERS UNION, AFLCIO, AND ON BEHALF OF FIBER, FABRIC & APPAREL COALITION FOR TRADE

Mr. SHEINKMAN. Mr. Chairman, I want to thank you for the opportunity to appear here before this committee. I am sorry that some of our members had to leave who were in here for a legislative session of our own. It gave them an opportunity to see how our system works on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the Constitution of the United States, which serves as a beacon for the rest of the world.

I would also like to underscore what my colleague, Mr. Roboz, says. I get the shakes and the shingles when I think of the $21 billion deficit in trade out of $170 billion. And I heard one Congressman put a question-I do not recall whether it was Mr. Craneindicating that there was a slight increase in exports of textiles and apparel to the United States, and the impact of that $21 billion on our entire system of finances, the dollar, and what is happening with interest rates today. I think we are losing sight of the trees from the forest, and likewise the good commissioner from the State of Washington.

Chairman GIBBONS. Now, sir, right there is where we differ on figures. I do not want to take it up now, but I want to come back to that. Let us put a little asterisk right there and come back to that, because I think there is a difference.

Mr. SHEINKMAN. Let me also say where I have some different fig

ures.

Chairman GIBBONS. All right, sir.

Mr. SHEINKMAN. We were talking about the recent agreements negotiated for Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Korea, and I would like to set straight the facts-not on what the agreements were in terms of the figures, but let me read this to you.

The administration gushed with self-congratulations-and I am sure some Members of Congress did, too-on the impact of the MFA and how well it has been operating. Well, as we have pointed out time and time again, imports over the last 6 years into the United States have impacted us to the extent of 17 percent annually over exports in terms of trade deficit.

What has really happened with those three countries since these agreements were negotiated? Hong Kong is up 6 percent; Taiwan is 7 percent; and Korea is up 10 percent. Put another way, Hong Kong's actual import growth of 6 percent is 1,200 percent greater than the growth rate of 0.15 percent the administration negotiated.

up