Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone?

John Schmitt and Janelle Jones of the Center for Economic and Policy Research reached a conclusion from their research. Their conclusions are incorrect, but the information is still impressive. A synopsis is below.

“The U.S. workforce is substantially older and better-educated than it was at the end of the 1970s. The typical worker in 2010 was seven years older than in 1979. In 2010, over one-third of US workers had a four-year college degree or more, up from just one-fifth in 1979. Given that older and better-educated workers generally receive higher pay and better benefits, we would have expected the share of “good jobs” in the economy to have increased in line with improvements in the quality of workforce. Instead, the share of “good jobs” in the U.S. economy has actually fallen. The estimates in this paper, which control for increases in age and education of the population, suggest that relative to 1979 the economy has lost about one-third (28 to 38 percent) of its capacity to generate good jobs. The data show only minor differences between 2007, before the Great Recession began, and 2010, the low point for the labor market. The deterioration in the economy’s ability to generate good jobs reflects long-run changes in the U.S. economy, not short-run factors related to the recession or recent economic policy.”

The reason why so many good jobs are gone is simple; they’ve been redistributed to the rich. Enact a free trade treaty, ship jobs overseas. The difference between the old higher wages in the US and the new lower wages is pocketed by the affluent via higher corporate profits, rising dividends and surging share prices. This income redistribution scam is achieved by manipulating the political markets, i.e. purchasing the rules of the game. That’s precisely how the 1 percent have stolen nearly 30 of the total national income compared to about 8 percent back in 1980.

When the jobs are shipped away and the income from them is redistributed to the 1 percent, opportunities are lost for the rest of us, and more so than just the loss of the jobs. When those jobs are exported via bribed-enforced legislation, we lose our tax base and government jobs go away, like police, firefighters and teachers. There are less opportunities for accountants, mechanics and attorneys in government.

And illegal free trade treaties are just one way the one percent manipulate the legislative process to achieve income redistribution from the 99 percent. There’s a ton of other ways. Deregulation, for example, allows corporations to jack up the prices they charge at will. The difference between what prices would be under real competitive conditions and the manipulated prices go into the pockets of the rich via the same route as free income redistribution treaties.

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Where Have All The Good Jobs Gone? Center for Economic and Policy Research

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Video of General Motors Workers In Colombia Protesting By Sewing Lips Shut

After spending an entire year protesting peacefully in front of the U.S. Embassy, maintaining an occupation day and night, four members of ASOTRECOL, the association of workers and ex-workers injured at the General Motors assembly plant in Bogota, Colombia sewed their mouths shut Wednesday August 1st, 2012, beginning a hunger strike that they are determined to continue until General Motors resolves their situation or they die.

These workers were fired for occupational injuries that they developed from the General Motors assembly line- from doing repetitive movements, lifting excessive weights, being put into harmful body positions and being pressured to maintain an accelerated work pace. General Motors Colombia operates in a way that exacerbates these injuries and abuses- obligating workers to work extra hours, hiring workers for short contracts, detecting which workers are injured inside the company medical facility, dismissing workers shortly after their injuries are detected, inventing the reason for the dismissal, intimidating workers into signing their dismissal papers, using falsified papers and bribed officials, and controlling the media through its advertising dollars.

General Motors received a bailout in 2008 and a significant percentage of the company is still owned by the U.S. people (around 26%). The tax dollars of workers here have been used to help a company abuse workers.

Wall Street Senator Ron Wyden voted for the Colombia Free Trade Treaty last year fully knowing what’s going on in Colombia, which is not only about the protest in front of the US embassy, but also the continuous murder of labor union leaders. Almost three thousand have been butchered in Colombia since 1986. Nobody has been been charged with a crime in these murders. That means the Colombian government is behind the butchery, and on behalf of US corporations. Wall Street’s president Barack Obama signed the illegal treaty into law late in 2011 knowing all of this. So did Wall Street Ron Wyden.

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