“(Money Magazine) — Writer Barbara Ehrenreich may be best known for chronicling the troubles of low-wage earners in her 2002 bestseller “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.”
But these days she’s putting her consciousness-raising to work for a less obviously needy group: white-collar workers.
Why? As Ehrenreich sees it, outsourcing, downsizing and increasing Wall Street pressure have made them as disposable as blue-collar workers. In September she launched United Professionals (unitedprofessionals.org) to support these “unemployed, under-employed and anxiously employed” Americans. …”
Recent findings shed new light on the increasingly unequal terrain of American society. Starting at the top executive level: You may have thought, as I did, that the guys in the C-suites operated as a team – or, depending on your point of view, a pack or gang – each getting his fair share of the take. But no, the rising tide in executive pay does not lift all yachts equally. The latest pay gap to worry about is the one between the CEO and his – or very rarely her—third in command.
According to a just- reported study by Carola Frydman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Raven E. Saks at the Federal Reserve, 30-40 years ago, the CEO’s of major companies earned 80 percent more, on average, than the third-highest-paid executives. By the early part of the 21st century, however, the gapCEO and the third in command had ballooned up to 260 percent.
Now take a look at what’s happening at the very bottom of the economic spectrum, where you might have pictured low-wage workers trudging between food banks or mendicants dwelling in cardboard boxes. It turns out, though, that the bottom is a lot lower than that. On May 16, a millionaire couple in a woodsy Long Island suburb was charged with keeping two Indonesian domestics as slaves for five years, during which the women were paid $100 a month, fed very little, forced to sleep on mats on the floor, and subjected to beatings, cigarette burns and other torments.
This is hardly an isolated case (see my book, Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy, co-edited with Arlie Hochschild.) If the new “top” involves pay in the tens or hundreds of millions, a private jet and a few acres of
Nantucket, the new bottom is slavery. Some of America’s slaves are captive domestics, like the Indonesian women in
Long Island. Others are factory workers, and at least 10,000 are sex slaves lured from their home country to American brothels by promises of respectable jobs.
CEOs and slaves: these are the extreme ends of American class polarization. But a parallel kind of splitting is going in many of the professions. Top-ranked college professors, for example, enjoy salaries of several hundred thousand a year, often augmented by consulting fees and earnings from their patents or biotech companies. At the other end of the professoriate, you have adjunct teachers toiling away for about $5000 a semester or less, with no benefits or chance of tenure. There was a story a few years ago about an adjunct who commuted to his classes from a homeless shelter in
Manhattan, and adjuncts who moonlight as waitresses or cleaning ladies are legion.
Similarly, the legal profession, which is topped by law firm partners billing hundred of dollars an hour, now has a new proletariat of temp lawyers working for $19-25 an hour in sweatshop conditions. On sites like http://temporaryattorney.blogspot.com/, temp lawyers report working 12 hours a day, six days a week, in crowded basements with inadequate sanitary facilities. According to an article in American Lawyer, a legal tempat a major New York firm reports being“corralled in a windowless basement room littered with dead cockroaches,” where six out of seven exits were blocked.
Contemplating the violent and increasing polarization of American society, one cannot help but think of “dark energy,” the mysterious force that is propelling the galaxies apart from each other one at a speed far greater than can be accounted for by the energy of the original big bang. Cosmic bodies seem to be repelling each other, much as a CEO must look down at his CFO, COO, etc. and think, “They’re getting too close. I’ve got to make more, more, more!”
The difference is that the galaxies don’t need each other, and are free to go their separate ways nonchalantly. But the CEO presumably depends on his fellow executives, just as the star professor relies on adjuncts to do his or her teaching and the law firm partner is enriched by the sweated labor of legal temps. For all we know, some of those CEOs go home to sip their single malts in mahogany walled dens that have been cleaned by domestic slaves.
Why is it so hard for the people at the top to graciously acknowledge their dependency on the labor of others? We need some sort of gravitational force to counter the explosive distancing brought about by greed – before our economy imitates the universe and blows itself to smithereens.
The Wall Street Journal reported on May 25 the results of a Pew Charitable Trusts study that wages for 30-something males today are lower than their fathers’ wages (adjusted for inflation) at the same age. The Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute and the Urban Institute also participated in the study. The study said nothing about women and their mothers’ wages, although that would make an interesting statistic. (Read the WSJ article if you subscribe online.)
Greg Ip wrote, “American men in their 30s today are worse off than their fathers’ generation, a reversal from just a decade ago, when sons generally were better off than their fathers, a new study finds. The study, the first in a series on economic mobility undertaken by several prominent think tanks, also says the typical American family’s income has lagged far behind productivity growth since 2000, a departure from most of the post-World War II period.”
“The report also found that between 1947 and 1974, productivity, or output per hour, and median family income, adjusted for inflation, both roughly doubled,” Ip reported. “Between 1974 and 2000, productivity rose 56% while income rose 29%. Between 2000 and 2005, productivity rose 16% while median income fell 2%, challenging ‘the notion that a rising tide will lift all boats,’ the report says.”
Pew and company got that right! Remember September, 2006, when another study found that American workers’ productivity surge of the previous several years had flattened? I said then in a posting (“U.S. Worker Productivity Down in Spring - That’s Fair”) that there’s only so much blood you can get from a turnip. Now it turns out the turnips have also been malnourished while being overworked, so this report has no surprises.
Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution said she “isn’t sure why men’s wages have stagnated. ‘It seems there’s been some slowdown in economic growth, it’s possible that the movement of women into the labor force has affected male earnings, and it’s possible that men are not working as hard as they used to.’” I have to wonder what wage-affecting forces could make women’s presence in the labor force drive down men’s earnings. Women still make less than men in the same jobs, with all other wage-affecting factors being equal. And I haven’t noticed any men working less hard than they used to. On a purely anecdotal basis, I’d say men and women in white-collar jobs are working more hours for the same or less money than before 2000. The Pew study covers “wages,” so I must assume it analyzed the stats for only hourly-waged jobs, but most of my friends working at those jobs are getting fewer over-time hours as less-skilled workers are brought in to work the base-pay 40 hours.
Not, as the Seinfeld crowd used to say, that there’s anything wrong with that. More people having jobs is a good thing. It’s good business practice to spread the labor out over the number of employees it takes to get the project done in 40-hour weeks. Tired workers make more mistakes. One thing that’s happening, though, is that the lower wages (relative to the increasing cost of living) for those base-pay 40 hours is forcing people to work another 20 or so hours also for base-pay somewhere else. That doesn’t people “not working as hard as they used to.” I think it’s more like “people working longer than they used to just to get by nearly as well as they used to, but having less time to enjoy the fruits of their labors.”
To give Ms. Sawhill her due, she did identify “several factors [that] could explain the divergence: a growing share of income going to the highest-paid workers, or to profits; an increased share of labor compensation going toward benefits such as health care; or a decline in the number of wage earners in the typical family.” In my unscientific experience of reading the many stories contributed to United Professionals, Ms. Sawhill is right on all three counts, and in the most ugly ways.
The 2006 reports on the disproportionate salary-plus-benefits-plus-bonuses packages of corporate officers regardless of their performance bear out Ms. Sawhill’s first factor, as did the reports of corporate profits in the petroleum and insurance industries. On her second point, yes, health care and health insurance are eroding take-home pay, whether those costs become part of the benefits package or out of the employee’s pocket in before-tax (medical flexible spending account) or after-tax payments directly to health care providers. Most sadly, the number of wage earners in families is declining largely against the will of those wage earners. People can’t find the jobs they’re best suited to do, particularly in the white-collar workplace.
I included the white-collar considerations above because this is, after all, United Professionals. But there’s another entirely personal reason in the phenomena I’m seeing in my own high-tech work-life. I see computer programmers being pushed to work longer hours to output more code, and then receive bad performance reviews because of the number of defects in that code. I see other programmers, whose business-software development and support jobs have been outsourced, refocus their programming skills on CAD (computer-assisted design) tools because many of those jobs have to be co-located with the “shop floor” where the designs are executed (for furniture, architectural models, and the like) . For now, “Made in America” still matters in the design and building of some products.
The challenge–for business leaders, for educational institutions and the agencies that fund them–is to produce a workforce, reward that workforce, and market their products to a world where “Made in America” is once again a value proposition.
Going back to college for a teaching certificate takes nearly 2 years and college tuition has skyrocketed, alternative certification programs require a certain grade point average no matter how long ago you graduated from college, transferrable skills are considered irrelevant because you can teach only the subject you majored in. Even teaching experience outside the public school system means nothing.
Alternative certification requirements are confusing, websites are not user friendly, information about certification was written by bureaucrats instead of recruiters, alternative certification programs that are billed as personalized and fast track are neither. Meanwhile, certification tests are very difficult to pass and are no reflection on skills, aptitude, or attitude.
Because of similar nonsense, I couldn’t even break into the teaching profession as a tutor, substitute teacher, teaching assistant, or even curriculum developer.
But organizations like Recruiting New Teachers and Teach for America keep cranking out those slick TV ads and slick brochures. Those ads and those brochures don’t mention the dirty little secrets of the teacher recruitment movement.
Those who make it through the gauntlet of certification and licensing face low pay, regulations, paperwork, and dubious evaluation procedures. They also have to make everybody happy – all 3 branches of federal, state, and local government, unions, parents.
They also have to answer to consultants, researchers, activists, journalists. Beginning in the 90’s, they started answering to CEOs. In my home state, the legislature even dispatched Gestapo-like agents with the authority to fire everyone from the superintendent down – with no stated justification, no due process, and no appeal.
How others deal with all this, I don’t know. I finally fled overseas, where my college degree was enough to get me into the classroom.
I worked for an investment management firm for 15 years before outsourcing made it possible for them to reduce staff yet again. Since then I have been working as a consultant with no real job security or benenfits. The company I work for now has hired me as a consultant to help them get through the tough times so that they can outsource parts of their operations areas to India. And people ask me, why don’t I find a permanent job? I tell them there are no more permanent jobs.
“On the heels of a busy season for H-1B-related activity—a record-breaking depletion of the temporary worker visas, two related pieces of Senate legislation and a published list of the companies that are taking the most advantage of the program—a technology activist on May 23 set out to pan ‘the myth that Americans can’t cut it in technology.’ …”
I was let go from my job in May, 2006, and have been doing contract work while looking for a fullhire position, In the meantime, I have continued my training as a life coach, currently taking coursework in career coaching, and would like to build my own practice.
I’m a 39-year old, fourth-generation native San Franciscan who attended college and worked in the City and County of San Francisco for many years. During the first Dot-Com Boom (I call it Web 1.0), the housing costs and general cost of living in the City and County San Francisco skyrocketed, pushing me and my mother out of the City! My mother and I are both administrative professionals, and during the time we were being pushed out of the City, there were no positions that could ever match the pay needed to stay in the overpriced apartments in S.F.
I’ve also recently noticed how the profession has changed exponentially, though the pay doesn’t reflect the change. Though I’m technology-literate (and have held multiple IT positions), my mother is not. My mother’s job has practically remained the same, while I’ve noticed that the administrative jobs have turned into highly skilled, technologically-focused, underpaid positions. “Admins” now are expected to fulfill the role of both the “old school” adminstrative skills (dictation, cold-calling, scheduling appointments, etc.) to “new school” skills (networking desktops, web-development and design, IT support, etc.), though the pay doesn’t reflect these new skills.
I’m convinced that because these positions have been traditionally help by women, that many workers still expect the positions to serve as a “submissive surrogate wife” …including some women who hold higher level positions! In addition to the change in the position, support jobs are becoming more expendable with workers tearing each other apart for low-pay/high skill positions in it. I’d like to see a workplace that rewards workers for their skill, intelligence (not just educationally) and hard work. If a CEO gets a $100K bonus, what do her/his assistants get?
I have been in the computer field for 17 years now. I see so many ways that companies treat employees unfairly and I want to do something about it. From professional days that last 18 hours to “at will” employment, the people that create so much of the wealth and prosperity for the world are treated like objects instead of highly educated, hard working people.
