At The Atlantic, Eve Tahmincioglu, a labor and career columnist for MSNBC.com and the voice behind the blog CareerDiva.net, writes The Political and Economic Assault on the Middle Class:
Did you hear the happy news? Dollar General stores will hire 6,000 people this year. Yes America, hiring is back!
Actually, curb the enthusiasm. This isn't the stuff that robust middle class recoveries are made of. According to Payscale.com, the Dollar General chain pays its assistant managers $9.22 an hour and store managers $11.51 an hour. Cashiers and sales associates make barely over minimum wage. We're talking about thousands of new jobs between $20,000 and $30,000 a year.
It's a sign of the times. Low-wage jobs, including everything from retail sales associates to home health aides, are the bread and butter of our employment boom, while middle income jobs are on the decline.
Among the top ten occupations projected to have the largest numerical growth in the next decade, seven pay median wages under $30,000 a year, including food preparers and servers earning $16,000, and retail and home care workers who make $20,000. Home aides and retail workers are expected to add about 1.4 million positions this decade while middle-class manufacturing jobs are projected to lose more than a million jobs.
This is not the kind of job swap you want to see in a world-leading economy. Peter Creticos, president and executive director for the Institute for Work and the Economy, calls it the "down waging" of American jobs, and he fears it has and will continue to hurt the economy, blunt innovation and impoverish society at large. |
In a study released in late December that I reported on here, the Working Poor Family Project found:
More than half of the U.S. labor force (55 percent) has “suffered a spell of unemployment, a cut in pay, a reduction in hours or have become involuntary part-time workers” since the recession began in December 2007. Measuring the direct impact of the recession on working families is difficult because there are broader social, economic and demographic factors at work, many of which predate the recent economic decline. ... |
The study showed:
• The share of working families that are low-income increased from 28 to 30 percent from 2007 to 2009.
• Forty-three percent of working families with at least one minority parent were low-income in 2009, nearly twice the proportion of white working families. For both white and minority working families, the proportion below 200 percent of the poverty threshold increased by 2 percentage points from 2007 to 2009.
• Income inequality continued to grow in 2009, with the richest 20 percent of working families taking home 47 percent of all income and earning 10 times that of low-income working families.
And, finally, as reported in the Los Angeles Times Wednesday, a revised method of measurement - explained by the U.S. Census in Who is Poor? A New Look with the Supplemental Poverty Measure - puts the U.S. poverty rate at 15.7 percent of population instead of the 14.3 percent announced last September. That does not reflect in change in incomes, merely a new way to gauge who is actually poor, the first major change in methodology since the 1960s.
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2006:
The National Journal's subscription-only Hotline has a good piece on what Dean has accomplished. The sort of piece you won't see in the WaPo or other publications too busy pushing the "Dean is insane and ineffective" storyline. ...
DNC: Spreading The Word. And The Boots.
"Howard Dean has turned out to be the biggest surprise of the season. He's a good man. And he truly gets it." Those are the words of Charles Soechting, the TX Dem chair who when Dean announced his bid for DNC chair had Soechting grtting his teeth. At the time, the Texan worried that Dean didn't get the problems parties grappled with and certainly didn't possess the regional sympathy to figure out how to win elections in the South.
But now, closing in on Dean's 1st anniversary as DNC chair, Soechting has seen enough to convince him that Dean "knows what it to makes Texas truly competitive."
Veterans of Dem politics who work on state and local campaigns are eager to praise Dean. In part, that's because Dean has devoted the bulk of the DNC's staff, energy and time to fulfilling his chairman's campaign promise: to revitalize the Dem Party at the precinct level. ...
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