EPI Explores Solutions to Job Hemorrhage

Our friends over at the Economic Policy Institute hosted a live Webcast Tuesday featuring six speakers. The key conclusion? Progressive leaders warn of lasting damage from jobs crisis.

One speaker was Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO.

Here's what he had to say:

If you prefer to read than watch, here's a somewhat different version of the same material.

As I noted Sunday in Jobs Summit Needs Big-Picture Focus:

The key to that transformation is industrial policy, which includes trade policy and a labor-market strategy. The kind of thing countries as far apart culturally and politically as Denmark and China have successfully engineered to make life for their citizens better. America’s fate now rests in the hands of other countries’ industrial policies. Not having our own is, ultimately, an economic suicide pact courtesy of the promoters of the same policies and behavior that got us into this gigantic economic mess.

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After close to four decades of allowing the screwing of American workers to take place amid a chorus of lionized public intellectuals shouting that the screwing is good for us, the current disaster ought to be one of those crises that Rahm Emanuel says we should never waste. Forty years after LBJ added to the New Deal, it’s time to do it again.

For some time, the Institute for America's Future and its sister organization, the Campaign for America's Future has been proposing an industrial policy for the United States. We can surely argue about the details - and we should. But there's no arguing with the facts that the upward transfer of wealth, the siphoning of productivity gains away from workers, the off-shoring of jobs and the failure to provide a progressive social policy to shield Americans from the dislocations of globalization has had a detrimental and still-deteriorating impact on our country. An industrial policy would go part way to stepping away the madness that has plagued us economically for decades.

An industrial policy wouldn't be worth much if it merely focused on getting more jobs. We need good jobs. Just how far we are from that is explained by Algernon Austin at EPI:

Many of the 8.1 million jobs lost during the current recession, have been good jobs. EPI defines a good job as one that pays at least 60% of the median household income and also provides health care and retirement benefits. By that measure, American men are losing ground. The figure shows that the share of male workers employed in good jobs dropped from 46.5% in 1979 to 31.3% in 2008. Of the major racial and ethnic groups, Hispanic men experienced the largest percentage-point decline although in 1979, they already had the lowest rate of employment in good jobs. In 1979, 30.8% of Hispanic men were employed in a good job. By 2008, only 15.3% were in good jobs.

As policymakers consider ways to create more jobs to reverse the longstanding rise in unemployment, which stands at 10.2% nationwide, they should also focus on creating the kinds of jobs that pay more than poverty level wages. The federal minimum wage is currently $7.25 per hour and pays $15,080 annually, based on a 2,080-hour work year. That wage is below the poverty level for a family of four. By contrast, the 2008 "good job" wage was $14.51 per hour, or $30,180 a year – twice as much.  Without a national agenda to create good jobs, more fulltime workers will struggle to pay for basic necessities.

Austin wasn't being sexist in that analysis. Merely pointing to one cohort of the grim employment situation in the United States. Women face their own problems in a workforce that they are reshaping year by year. For instance, if the trends hold women will soon outnumber men as proportion of the unionized population.

While a Clean Energy Conversion Corps and a modern version of the Works Progress Administration are good ideas for dealing with America's immediate unemployment problems, the White House jobs summit coming up in December needs to focus as well on the long-term situation that an industrial policy linked to trade policy and labor-market strategy can transform. What we're seeing in the current crisis, after all, are only the disastrous symptoms of that long-term situation. Band-Aids won't suffice for what only surgery can heal.