Jan. 20—Tammy McDonald and Steven Hengel live different lives in very different parts of the country. But as the holidays approached last year, they shared an all-too-common experience these days: They both lost good jobs.
McDonald, 32, a Hotel Employees & Restaurant Employees Local 99 member and city employee in Duluth, Minn., lost her $13-an-hour supervisory bartender job at the Duluth municipal airport’s restaurant when new private management terminated all the workers—five female HERE members. In Tampa, Fla., 37-year-old Hengel lost a six-figure AT&T management account executive job after nearly eight years.
In his State of the Union speech President George W. Bush didn't mention that many of the jobs now available pay low wages with few or no benefits.
“This administration doesn’t seem to care about working families,” McDonald says. “So far, it has said nothing about people being forced to go from $13 an hour with benefits to $7 an hour with no benefits—it just expects us to swallow what is not acceptable.”
Nearly 15 Million U.S. Workers Unemployed or Underemployed
With the official unemployment rate at 5.7 percent, hundreds of thousands of Americans dropping out of the labor force altogether and only a net 1,000 private-sector jobs created in December, nearly 15 million U.S. workers are unemployed or underemployed. Since Bush took office, the nation has lost some 2.9 million private-sector jobs.
Bush's economic policies, including the 2003 “Jobs and Growth” plan—which gave millionaires an average $93,000 tax break—have fallen 1.6 million jobs short of the 1.8 million his Council of Economic Advisers promised would be created between July and December. At the same time, the jobs that are being created pay less, on average, than those the nation is losing and are less likely to provide affordable benefits.
Like many job-hunters today, McDonald and Hengel face a stark landscape of lower-wage American jobs: They’re finding positions in their fields now pay far less than what they used to make and offer fewer or none of the health and retirement benefits all working families need for financial security.
McDonald worries about her four co-workers, now unable to afford health insurance—including a 62-year-old who is not yet eligible for Medicare. McDonald and her two children are covered under the health insurance of her husband, Scott, a Machinist and Northwest Airlines customer service representative. But family finances still are shaky without her income. “It takes both of our salaries to pay for our mortgage and all the things the kids need for school,” she says. “Luckily, my husband is getting a lot of overtime, or we wouldn’t be making ends meet.”
Scott McDonald, like millions of U.S. workers, depends on overtime to make ends meet. Yet under a proposal by the Bush administration, McDonald and 8 million other workers could lose their overtime protections.
Bush didn't mention his plans to take away workers’ overtime rights in his State of the Union address. And after 15 years in the hospitality industry, Tammy McDonald foresees the possibility of having to take a new, lower-wage hospitality job offering few or no benefits.
“Anywhere I go now, I’m going to get half my former wage, and I’m feeling the loss of my union benefits, especially the pension plan,” she says.
‘Middle-Class Jobs Under Assault’
Surveying his job possibilities, Hengel is worried: “Middle-class jobs, which are America’s backbone, are definitely under assault,” he says.
“I’m seeing some opportunities, but they’re requiring a very, very specific set of skills and have hundreds of people applying for them. Or they’re customer support or sales positions paying between $25,000 and $35,000 and I’m competing with recent high school and college graduates for those jobs. I do look forward to getting married and having a family, and I wonder how I can do it.”
The Big Business trend of sending good tech and customer service jobs to lower-wage nations is intensifying job competition in his field, says Hengel, who recently participated in a workers’ roundtable sponsored by the West Central Florida Federation of Labor. “I believe in the global marketplace, but at the same time I have to ask who the companies’ stakeholders are. We need to know.”
Hengel also wants some straight talk about the administration’s tax policies. The $300 tax refund he got under the president’s “Jobs and Growth” plan “upset” him, he says. “That money isn’t going to make an impact on me financially, but it could be used to fill a pothole, or pay a school teacher a little more money. We need to make sure our government is doing things for the right economic reasons, not just playing to voters.”
“We need a change in the White House, somebody with some vision to drive that road and avoid some potholes. In November, I’m going to be voting for that right person, who is not George Bush.”
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