Fathers Getting the Shaft

Happy fathers' day, and you know as well as I do that the ability to take care of your family is going byebye. I have been watching this happen, and it isn't a surprise. The robber barons are in control, and we have to end that. Friday night Bill Moyers' Journal did a great job, showing what is happening to us all.

HOLLY SKLAR: Our wages now adjusting for inflation, average wages are lower than they were in the 1970s. Our minimum wage, adjusting for inflation, is lower than it was in the 1950s, and why is it? One of the things going on is that income and wealth inequality have gone back to the 1920s. We are back at levels that we saw right before the Great Depression.

BILL MOYERS: But, during this time, the economy's been growing. Why aren't workers sharing in the prosperity that they've helped create?

HOLLY SKLAR: Well, that's exactly the problem. It used to be that when productivity went up, wages went up. Worker--

BILL MOYERS: You work harder, you got more of the results.

HOLLY SKLAR: You got the fair day's pay for the fair day's work, you got more results. You shared in the rise and work of productivity. Now, almost all the rise and work of productivity is going not just to the upper class, but to the very top of the upper class. So, we have had a great redistribution of income and wealth in this country in the last three decades. The problem is that redistribution of wealth and income has been going up to the very top. And most people have even been treading water, or going behind. And often working for many, many longer hours to keep up with the living standards.

BILL MOYERS: Is it true that about 80 percent of our workforce in this country make their living from hourly wages?

HOLLY SKLAR: They do. And that's when we refer to average workers, that's usually what we mean. We mean people who are, you know, in production non-supervisory workers and they're, when I say average workers are making less, in real terms-in what they can buy, than they were able to in the 1970s. It's just shocking. And we are told often that we have to do this in order to make our country more competitive in the global economy. You know-

BILL MOYERS: We need to be leaner-

HOLLY SKLAR: Yeah, exactly-

BILL MOYERS: Yeah, leaner and meaner--

HOLLY SKLAR: Leaner and meaner, but we will all be better off in the long-run, we're gonna get more educated and so on. Well, here's the problem. We haven't been making our country more competitive. We've been actually driving it into the ground. Essentially, people at the top have essentially been you know, like they're corporate raiders, essentially raiding the whole country, milking it like a cash cow, is what's been going on and driving the economy into the ground. We have unprecedented debt to other countries.

You know, we have an infrastructure that was built by the tax dollars of prior generations, basically, that is now crumbling. We're not even paying to modernize for the global economy, we don't have a world class infrastructure anymore.

We have research and development that we're spending less on, proportionately. We have an education system that's lagging further and further behind. So the idea that we're getting more competitive for the global economy is ridiculous, that's a myth.
(snip)
HOLLY SKLAR: Well, we need a few things. One is, raise the minimum wage. Raise the floor. Set a green light in a different direction, and the green light is, raise wages, fair wages. The other is universal health care. Get to universal healthcare.

BILL MOYERS: Because?

HOLLY SKLAR: Because one, because something like 18,000 people die from lack of health insurance every year. Two, it's really destroying a lot of small businesses in the sense that they know they want to give health care to their workers but they are in a situation where they just are paying. I mean, it's just become astronomical. It's like a giant shift from, you know, from one person and from one business to another.

BILL MOYERS: It's encouraging that your organization has a lot of small business people, and others working for what is your mission? What are you trying to do?

HOLLY SKLAR: The mission is to say that we can change direction. In other words, that what's really good for business, what's really good for business is also what's good for workers, and good for communities, and good for the country. That instead of this kind of low-road path we've been on, which is low wages for workers, low taxes, lower taxes for the wealthy, reckless deregulation, irresponsible disinvestment in our infrastructure and so on, instead of that we can go to a higher road, where we're shoring up the economy from below, and we're doing long-term sustainable developments, smart development, that we need for long-term success. (Emphasis added.)

It's something I feel like I'm saying too much, but without living wages, our economy is shot. If you want to sell something, you want some one who can afford to buy it.

We are being robbed,and the robbers aren't even smart enough to go to the good neighborhoods to find real riches. We are being robbed of our ability to take care of ourselves.