You've probably seen this chart or one like it before.
Does it irk you as much now as the first time you saw it?
Robert Reich writes
Why Wages Won’t Rise:
Jobs are coming back, but pay isn’t. The median wage is still below where it was before the Great Recession. Last month, average pay actually fell.
What’s going on? It used to be that as unemployment dropped, employers had to pay more to attract or keep the workers they needed. That’s what happened when I was labor secretary in the late 1990s.
It still could happen – but the unemployment rate would have to sink far lower than it is today, probably below 4 percent.
Yet there’s reason to believe the link between falling unemployment and rising wages has been severed.
For one thing, it’s easier than ever for American employers to get the workers they need at low cost by outsourcing jobs abroad rather than hiking wages at home. Outsourcing can now be done at the click of a computer keyboard. […]
In addition, millions of Americans who dropped out of the labor market in the Great Recession are still jobless. They’re not even counted as unemployment because they’ve stopped looking for work.
But they haven’t disappeared entirely. Employers know they can fill whatever job openings emerge with this “reserve army” of the hidden unemployed – again, without raising wages.
Add to this that today’s workers are less economically secure than workers have been since World War II. Nearly one out of every five is in a part-time job.
Insecure workers don’t demand higher wages when unemployment drops. They’re grateful simply to have a job. […]
Low unemployment won’t lead to higher pay for most Americans because the key strategy of the nation’s large corporations and financial sector has been to prevent wages from rising.
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2010—MA-Sen: Scott Brown's naked ploy:
Scott Brown, the GOP nominee for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts, claims he's never heard of the Tea Party movement:
He also claimed that he was unfamiliar with the "Tea Party movement," when asked by a reporter. When told that different people labeled him a conservative, moderate and a liberal Republican, he responded "I’m a Scott Brown Republican." |
On the face of it, disassociating himself with teabaggers seems like a naked ploy by Scott Brown to avoid turning off moderate voters by exposing them to his long record of hard right positions.
Given the centrality of the tea party movement in Republican politics these days, it's inconceivable that Scott Brown unaware of it, and sure enough, over at Salon, Mike Madden found evidence undercutting Brown's claim: a fundraiser for Brown hosted by Friends of the Tea Party.
So Scott Brown says he wants to be a different kind of politician, but when asked if he's heard of the most active right-wing movement in America just days before an election in Democratic Massachusetts, Brown claims ignorance...even though one of the organizations in that movement of that movement hosted a fundraiser for him just days earlier.
Tweet of the Day
"Wall St bankers, who are supposed to be the smartest ones in the room, cannot comply with a law passed in 2010 by...2017" --@MaxineWaters
— @other98
On
today's Kagro in the Morning show: First order of business today: Denounce the stupidity of lingering over the "issue" of Obama not going to Paris. 2nd: Explain this stance for over an hour. 3rd: Invite
Armando to do the same. Rep. Frank Pallone (D-NJ) calls for an investigation of Christie's gang rifling the E-ZPass files of political enemies. Antonio Weiss withdraws his bid for a top Treasury job. Mitt Romney is totes serious, and it'll be different this time. Columbus brought out the riot cops after Ohio State won the national championship game, but only to control the "revelers." Paul Waldman's "note" on Obama & the Paris march. Parsing the issues and factors in "Fundamentalist wrath."
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