Dollars & Sense: Creating Decent Jobs

[marmar]

Comment

Creating Decent Jobs
The Role of Unions

By Jeannette Wicks-Lim


The turmoil of the current recession is deflecting attention from a longer-term challenge facing the U.S. economy: how to create decent jobs. Even before the recession, nearly two-thirds of U.S. jobs failed the “decent job” test—they paid too little to cover a small family’s basic needs. Between now and 2016, the strongest job growth will be largely in low-pay occupations, according to Department of Labor projections. So barring any structural changes, the U.S. economy will be no better at producing jobs that can support a worker and his or her family at a very basic living standard in 2016 than it was in 2006.

Collective bargaining through labor unions could brighten this forecast, raising the quality of future jobs even if the economy continues to produce the same types of jobs. Bringing the unionized share of the U.S. workforce back up to around its level in the 1970s—admittedly no easy task—would lift an estimated 2.5 million additional jobs over the decent-job threshold in 2016.

A reasonable definition of a decent job is one with the minimum pay and benefits necessary to provide a healthy and safe standard of living for a small family. This benchmark is substantially above the U.S. Census Bureau’s official poverty threshold, widely viewed as far too low. Based on very basic family budgets the Economic Policy Institute has developed, a decent job has to pay at least $17 an hour with health and retirement benefits, or $22 an hour without.

A recent Labor Department report examines trends through 2006 to predict the jobs picture in 2016. Here are the ten occupations slated to add the most jobs: orderlies and nursing/home-health aides; registered nurses; retail salespersons; customer service representatives; food preparation and serving workers; general office clerks; personal/home-care aides; postsecondary teachers; janitors; and accounting clerks. In only two—RNs and postsecondary teachers—do the majority of existing jobs meet the decent job standard. The other eight fall short. ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2010/0110wicks-lim.html

[Demeter]

1. All It Requires Is a Sense of Proportion

or a strong union movement and real Progressives in positions of power, tariffs and regulation.

[Tansy_Gold]

2. Yeah, that's all. Piece of cake! We'll get the Obama administration

to take care of that on the double!

:sarcasm: but you knew that already.


None of the job categories listed, of course, involve manufacturing the basic necessities of a modern consumer society. No textile mills, no steel mills, no electronics manufacturers. Without manufacturing, no economy can sustain itself. Like a garden without seeds, all the watering and fertilizing and weeding will not produce a single tomato.



Tansy Gold

[izquierdista]

3. Not a single one?

I sometimes have volunteer tomatoes come up where I bury the dogshit. Maybe factories work the same way. :shrug:

[Tansy_Gold]

4. Volunteer tomatoes (Not for the faint of stomach)

When we built our underground house in Indiana, the excavating contractor screwed up big time. Instead of re-berming the front of the house so the virgin topsoil was on top -- the house was built in the woods and the topsoil was about two feet thick -- they did it upside down, with the marl/clay on top. We needed fertile soil to plant ground cover to hold the berms in place, and nothing would grow in the clay.

The city's wastewater treatment plant routinely spread the decomposed sludge in a field, where it was allowed to decompose further, sanitized by sun and freezing, at which point it was deemed by the state of Indiana to be safe for fertilizer. Understand that this is human waste, processed and decomposed naturally. We were able to obtain several pick-up loads of this material and spread it on the berms in front of the house. Several friends assured us it would smell like shit in the summer, when the heat and humidity were at their worst, but in fact it did not. There was no smell to it at all other than a kind of composty earthy smell like you'd have with any composted manure.

We planted a lot of fast-growing ground cover plants, like creeping phlox, and watched them spread luxuriously. Pansies and portulaca flourished, as did yellow and purple violets, wild peppermint, and other wildflowers transplanted from the woods. We added a few dozen strawberry plants, and they too grew like weeds.

So did the weeds. I pulled out the seedlings as fast as I could, but they seemed to grow even faster. And some of them looked remarkably like tomato plants. I decided to let a few of them grow a bit more and find out if they were indeed tomatoes. Within a few weeks they were a foot high, covered with blossoms. Then came the fruit -- the prettiest little red cherry tomatoes anyone had ever seen. They ripened fast and my husband swore they were the best salad tomatoes he'd ever eaten.

So did my father-in-law, until we told him where they'd come from. Born and raised on a farm, he was no stranger to manure. So at first he was a bit surprised, then he laughed and popped another one into his mouth. "All natural," he said.

For the next three years, until we left Indiana for Arizona, we enjoyed those volunteer "sewage plant" cherry tomatoes every summer, leaving a few to frost and freeze and rot through the winter so there'd be more in spring.

Regardless where they come from, however, you gotta have seeds.


TG

[izquierdista]

5. I think we are on to something

If we just cover all our factories in shit, we'll have a bumper crop of tomatoes to export! :rofl:

[Tansy_Gold]

6. With a big sign out front

"Mierda, S. A."



Oh, wait, that one's already hanging in front of the Capitol, isn't it?



Tansy Gold

[Demeter]

7. Please, Don't Eat the Daisies

and Tansy really doesn't need any encouragement....I enjoyed the banter, though!