wages

This is an off the cuff post that is basically about a book I'm reading now called Big Box Swindle (www.BigBoxSwindle.com) by Stacy Mitchell.

I remember my father telling me three decades ago after returning from a business trip that they were moving textile finishing operations out of the country. He was flabbergasted that they could ship cut cloth off-shore, have it assembled, ship it back and make it cost less than doing all that here. As a Personnel Manager in the textile industry the implications for the people in the mills that he knew personally and cared about worried him. He didn't say that ... but I could see that worry on his face.

Cross posted (stolen) from Progressive Pulse

A new report from the Center for Economic Policy Research indicates that working and middle class families are continuing to hurt by the economy. This is the result of Republican efforts to serve the extreme rich at the expense of ordinary Americans.

The new report, "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Job Quality in the United States over the Three Most Recent Business Cycles" finds that

The US economy has created fewer good jobs in the 2000's than was the case over comparable periods in the 1980's and 1990's. The report analyzed annual data from the March Current Population Survey for the years 1979 through 2006 and shows that while the current business cycle has seen an increase in the share of jobs that pay at least $17 an hour, this gain has been more than offset by a decrease in the share of jobs that offer employer-provided health insurance (down 3.1 percent points) and pension coverage (down 4.9 percentage points).

Republicans will try to tell you that the American economy is not in trouble. And indeed, multinational corporations and the extreme rich aren't hurting a bit. But for the average American it's a different story . . .