A Sin and a Shame
By BOB HERBERT
The treatment of workers by American corporations has been worse — far more treacherous — than most of the population realizes...“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Andrew Sum, an economics professor and director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston...As Professor Sum studied the data coming in from the recession, he realized that the carnage that occurred in the workplace was out of proportion to the economic hit that corporations were taking...
The recession officially started in December 2007. From the fourth quarter of 2007 to the fourth quarter of 2009, real aggregate output in the U.S., as measured by the gross domestic product, fell by about 2.5 percent. But employers cut their payrolls by 6 percent. In many cases, bosses told panicked workers who were still on the job that they had to take pay cuts or cuts in hours, or both...The staggering job losses and stagnant wages are central reasons why any real recovery has been so difficult...
“Here’s what happened: At the end of the fourth quarter in 2008, you see corporate profits begin to really take off, and they grow by the time you get to the first quarter of 2010 by $572 billion. And over that same time period, wage and salary payments go down by $122 billion.”
That kind of disconnect, said Mr. Sum, had never been seen before in all the decades since World War II.
In short, the corporations are making out like bandits. Now they’re sitting on mountains of cash and they still are not interested in hiring to any significant degree, or strengthening workers’ paychecks.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/31/opinion/31herbert.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=general
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