Aug. 3—Although President George W. Bush boasts about an improving economy, a majority of America’s working families have suffered a steady erosion of their wages and persistent difficulties balancing work and family responsibilities, according to a new report from a top management scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Thomas Kochan, co-director of the MIT Workplace Center and MIT Institute for Work and Employment Research, says significant economic gains over the past two decades were limited to families with two working parents who, at minimum, have graduated from college. Examining statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau, Kochan found that in families where both the husband and wife held bachelor’s degrees or advanced degrees, their family incomes rose by 26 percent between 1980 and 2000—while those with less than a high school education saw their family incomes decline by 18 percent. Although college attendance has been rising, only 29 percent of men and 26 percent of women have bachelor’s degrees or advanced degrees.
Middle-income wage earners saw their hourly pay decline between 1985 and 1995—and then rise for five years until the stock market slumped in 2000. Since then, wages have stagnated, the report says. Over some 20 years, the median wage earner is in about the same position as he or she was a generation ago, concludes Regaining Control of Our Destiny: A Working Families’ Agenda for America, released July 21.
Workers’ most recent paychecks reflect this reality: Adjusted for inflation, workers’ weekly and hourly wages are lower now than they were in November 2001, when the economic “recovery” began, according to a July 16 analysis of the federal Bureau of Labor Statistic figures by the Economic Policy Institute. Earnings have fallen for six of the past seven months.
Working Harder to Keep Incomes from Falling
The average two-parent family spent 15 percent more time working in 2000 than in 1985, Kochan says. U.S. parents are working more hours than in any other country in the world.
“Wives and mothers were America’s safety valve for the past twenty years,” says Kochan. “Without the hours they added to the labor force, family incomes would have fallen precipitously.” Fully 75 percent of the increases in family income in the past 20 years came from the additional hours worked by wives and mothers. “These families are exhausted, literally and figuratively,” he says.
But even as parents are working more, workers—especially those earning lower wages—are getting little help from employers to balance work and family responsibilities. For instance, while 63 percent of workers who earn $45,000 or more are allowed to take time off without pay to take care of a sick child, only 39 percent of workers who earn $29,000 or less have that benefit, according to the Families and Work Institute.
“The less you have, the less you get,” the report says, calling for stronger state and federal legislation guaranteeing paid family leave.
Workers Need Unions to Lift Incomes, Improve Communities
If more workers had a voice on the job with unions, they could influence corporate and government policies to lift wages and benefits, the MIT report says. But Congress must modernize federal labor laws to prevent unscrupulous employers from blocking workers’ freedom to form unions, Kochan says.
“It is largely American managers and their consultants, not American workers or unions, who decide who will be organized,” the report says, calling for improving labor laws by passing the Employee Free Choice Act. The legislation, signed by presidential candidate John Kerry and more than 240 members of the U.S. House and Senate, would allow employees to freely choose whether to form unions by signing cards authorizing union representation, provide mediation and arbitration for first contract disputes and establish stronger penalties for violation of employee rights when workers seek to form a union and during first contract negotiations.
Raising the minimum wage, increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit (a federal tax credit for low-income workers that reduces the amount of taxes they pay), investing in lifelong education and training and making health and retirement benefits more portable and secure also should be part of the working families’ agenda for change, Kochan says.
“These issues will only rise to and stay at the top of the political agenda if working families begin to say, ‘enough is enough,’ ” he says.
More
