Here’s a stimulating idea - better pay!

January 14, 11:15 PMDC Corporate Ethics ExaminerJim Cunningham

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Zoom of Jonathan Tasini's salary chart.

A while back I discussed at length the strategies employers have learned to employ to systematically hold down salaries.

For example, I know a company that used to give most of their people manager-sounding titles so they could take them off hourly pay and put them on salary. Then, they would lay people off and redistribute the work among the remaining people, who would then have to work “overtime” (unpaid under their new classification) to get it all done.

This was going on while employers, and conservative politicians, bragged that “American productivity” is up. Of course it’s up. They figured out creative new ways of paying fewer people less money to get the same amount of work done. Salaries are down. Way down. And workers are spending more and more time at work to earn the same money that used to come more easily.

Now, with dozens of editorials, daily, about the upcoming Obama economic stimulus, I can’t help wondering about the obvious:

Wouldn’t paying people better stimulate the economy better than anything else?

Conservatives wail about tax cuts, wanting them, mainly, for rich people and corporations. But isn’t that what they got during the Bush Administration? What happened? They apparently didn’t help anyone but the top executives and the already rich. The “wealth” certainly didn’t trickle down. What happened to the jobs that were supposed to be created with those tax cuts?
What happened to our salaries?

Now, most of us are lucky to just keep our nut covered – let alone get a raise.

I’m not alone in possessing this philosophy and the anger that comes with it. Jonathan Tasini, Executive Director of the Labor Research Association, who has been touring the country discussing the reasons for our current situation, wrote this excellent blog entry:

Conspiracy of Silence: Wage Collapse Caused Crisis

Here’s a taste:

…the underlying reason for the collapse has been a persistent war on the wages of American workers… …the basic bargain was roughly this--if you worked hard and became more productive, you would see that sweat of the brow in your wages…. …until the 1970s. Then, the lines diverge--dramatically. You can see it yourself. If the lines had continued to track closely together as they did prior to the 1970s, the MINIMUM WAGE would be more than $19 an hour…. …in short: people had no money coming in in their paychecks so they were forced to pay for their lives through credit… …we will never fix the economic crisis, whether through short-term economic stimulus and certainly not through tax cuts, until paychecks are re-inflated. Dramatically.”

AlterNet launched an appeal for Obama to make stronger wages part of his stimulus plan:

Fair Pay: Decent Wages Must Be Part of Obama's Jobs Package

I concur. After the stimulus passes, the same corporations that conspired to keep salaries down are going to be scrambling for a piece of the stimulus pie. And when it comes, Obama should require that the package also stimulate some of that “trickle down” that conservatives had been promising us for so long, and never came.