Productivity, Inequality, Poverty « thecurrentmoment

Obama made waves two days ago when he asked public employees for “shared sacrifice and burden sharing,” on the grounds that they were somehow doing better off than private employees. Daily Kos showed that average compensation for public employees is less than private ones, but that comparison isn’t really the point, or at least the only point. The real howler of Obama’s speech is the implication that there has not been “shared sacrifice and burden sharing” up until now. It’s not just that public workers, even in states with Democratic governors, like New York, have already had to accept yet another round of wage and benefits cuts. The point is that, since the late 1960s, workers in general have been keeping hold of less and less of what they produce. Doug Henwood’s ‘productivity wedge’ shows the growing gap between productivity and compensation:

Henwood’s graph shows the gap in terms of overall compensation (wages plus benefits). As the graph below demonstrates, the gap between productivity and compensation is largely in terms of flatlining real wages:

Asking workers to sacrifice benefits, on top of stagnating wages, is just piling on. And it misses the point that most workers have been “burden and sacrifice sharing” for more than thirty years. Obama’s typically tone deaf appeal used almost exactly the same language as managers and CEOs used during the labor battles of the 70s and 80s. The promise then, of course, was that, if workers worked harder, increased their productivity, and sucked it up then, then they would reap gains sometime in the future.

via thecurrentmoment.wordpress.com