Bill Moyers Journal by Moyers Bill

Author:Moyers, Bill [Moyers, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781595586889
Publisher: Perseus Books Group
Published: 2011-04-26T05:00:00+00:00

I read just the other day that a couple with two children has to work approximately three full-time minimum-wage jobs just to make ends meet.

That’s right. And still they don’t make ends meet. They’re constantly trading off. They’re going to food banks to feed their children. Do you know that we have people working in the food industry today who must go to food banks to help feed their children? People taking care of elderly folks can’t save for their own retirement. Although they will be working their whole lives.

People working full-time can’t earn enough money to make ends meet. How does this happen?

We have really shifted expectations in a terrible way. It used to be assumed that if you were working full-time, you would not only make ends meet, but you were heading toward the American dream, when it was possible for one full-time worker to support a family, you could have a home, you could have health care, you could send your kids through college, and you could save for your own retirement. Now we have many two-income households who can’t even achieve what a single-income household could achieve before. We’ve been living the American dream in reverse.

Reverse?

In reverse. We have now gone back to the 1970s in terms of average wages, adjusting for inflation. The buying power of the minimum wage is lower than it was in the 1950s. Inequality of income and wealth is what it was in the 1920s. We are back at levels that we saw right before the Great Depression.

But the economy’s been growing. Why aren’t workers sharing in the prosperity that they’ve helped create?

That’s exactly the problem. It used to be that when productivity went up, wages went up.

You work harder, you got more of the results.

More people got a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work. You shared in the rise of worker productivity. Now almost all the rise in productivity is going to the very top of the upper class. We have had a vast redistribution of income and wealth in this country in the last three decades. As that redistribution of wealth and income has been going up to the very top, most people have been treading water or going under.

Is it true that about 60 percent of our workforce make their living from hourly wages? And about 80 percent of the workforce are production and nonsupervisory workers?

When we refer to average workers, that’s usually what we mean. It’s just shocking what has happened to them. The people who have been driving this phenomenon, in corporations and in the government, have been saying we have to do this in order to make our country more competitive in the global economy.

We need to be leaner—

Exactly.

—and meaner.

Leaner and meaner, and they say we will all be better off in the long run because we will be more educated, more competitive 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.

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