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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Nov 22, 2006 16:40:49 GMT -6
The media continues to overstate wage increases, taking advantage of comparisons with the lowest-wage months of the previous year. According to the U.S. Dept. of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, real hourly wages have increased 1.4% since December of 2005, and only 1.1% since January 2005. Worse still, real wages are at the same level they were in November of 2003. Thus, the current "increase" in real wages has taken us back to the level we were at 3 years ago. To put it differently, there has been 0 average wage growth over the last 3 years. (Meanwhile, Corporate profits have gone through the ceiling.) Furthermore, the wage recovery since November 2003 has been exclusively due to wage increases of the highest earners. Wages continue to decline for the lower 90% of earners. Below is a copy of the latest average real hourly wages. We can thank CEO salary increases for the keeping "average" wages from falling further.
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Post by Brock on Nov 23, 2006 1:08:51 GMT -6
does that stat include unemployed persons?
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Nov 23, 2006 3:32:36 GMT -6
No, it justs includes those employed.
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Post by lc on Nov 23, 2006 15:47:28 GMT -6
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Nov 23, 2006 17:16:25 GMT -6
I've gotten this from Census Bureau Statistics, and even some Democratic Senatorial and Congressional publications. However, I don't have a readily accessible source at my fingertips (unlike BLS statistics)
I am too. In fact, I strongly suspect the BLS is overstating wages.
I certainly do not accept the BEA or BLS stats on inflation. They measure prices very selectively including only certain items, while downplaying and even ignoring others.
I disagree that we have a "declining" domestic workforce. We have an understated number included in the "participating" work force. However, the number of working age Americans continues to increase at 1-1.1% per year, much faster than any other industrialized nation by several fold. Some nations, such as Japan and China, have a nearly 0% annual increase in their labor force. France, Germany, and Britain's labor force sizes are increasing at only a fraction of the U.S. rate.
It's little wonder that Japan and Germany have relocated some of their factories to the United States. They don't have to pay workers as well in the United States as they do in their own countries.
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Post by lc on Nov 23, 2006 20:05:08 GMT -6
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Nov 23, 2006 22:48:38 GMT -6
I disagree that we have a "declining" domestic workforce. We have an understated number included in the "participating" work force. However, the number of working age Americans continues to increase at 1-1.1% per yearMy only reasons for assuming that our workforce is shrinking is that the BLS says so. Maybe not in aggregate numbers but as a % of the working age group that is actually employed. The % of the working age group that is employed has declined about 3% in the last 10 years based on BLS data. Yes, that's exactly what the numbers are saying. But the biggest decline in the percentage working has occurred under Bush. And the NeoCon-Artist story that "less people want to work" is hogwash. As I've mentioned elsewhere, the number of new workforce "dropouts" has increased 7.3 million under Bush, as opposed to only 3 million during Clinton's last 5 years. In other words, 4.3 million more Americans dropped out of the work force under Bush. In other words, the dropout rate under Bush was 240% of what is was during Clinton's last 5 years. Nothing revolutionary happened to cause that many more workers to drop out, other than a severe decline in jobs under Bush. And that should be reflected in the unemployment rate. However, due to this unbelievable recent increase in the number of Americans who apparently don't want to work, the unemployment rate is only 4.4%. (The wonders of statistical manipulation.) In fact, the unemployment rate should be much higher, had the Bush plutocracy not concocted a way to lower the participating labor force. Yes, but the rate of their "retirement" hasn't suddenly increased 2.5 fold, as the Bush administration statistics would suggest. Baby boomers didn't just all of a sudden drop out in the last 5 years. Yes, but it's unlikely that there has been an astronomical increase in the number not accounted for by the BLS, like Cheney claims. In fact, it's likely that the fraction not counted by the BLS is roughly the same as it was during Clinton's last 5 years. It's really a stretch for the Bush administration to claim that not only have 2.5 times as many workers dropped out of the work force as did under Clinton, but that a much higher number are working on jobs not included by the BLS than did under Clinton. In fact, I'd chalk both of these fantasies up to Bush administration fact creation. And the proof is in the pudding. The reason real wage growth has been almost 0 is because the demand for labor has increased very little. Real wages grew rapidly during Clinton's last 5 years, and practically none under Bush. The difference in wage growth strongly suggests that the labor force growth:job growth is much higher under Bush. Given that the population is increasing at about the same rate now as it was during Clinton's last 5 years, its difficult to fathom how labor force growth has declined under Bush. My opinion, based on considerable evidence, is that the true labor force is growing just as fast under Bush as it was under Clinton, and that 4.3 million truly unemployed workers have been deliberately mis-classified as "not-in-labor-force" under Bush, which has kept the unemployment rate artificially low. And that's completely consistent with the almost non-existent growth in real wages under Bush.
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Post by lc on Nov 23, 2006 23:20:03 GMT -6
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Nov 24, 2006 4:38:50 GMT -6
Unlawful, I would agree with all of that but the population growth has not been a steady since the baby boom. It has been quite erratic. I don't have stats, and am only guessing but it seems like we should be expecting a labor force decline sometime in the next ten years that IS pretty significant. And it would be touched off by the baby boomers retiring. And it is possible that 3 or 5 million Baby boomers retired early because they gained so much windfall in real estate appreciations. Just saying. No hard evidence at all. It might at first appear that our population growth and labor force growth should slow down, especially considering our birth rate is declining. But immigration is more than taking up the slack. Again, from the CIA site you showed me previously, the U.S. population is still increasing rapidly, due to immigration. And, as would be expected, this increase is predominantly in the working age range, not the retirement age range. The U.S population is increasing at a rate of almost 3 million per year, according to the latest Census Bureau statistics. I see your point about the possibility of a mass increase in retirement due to the "wealth effect" perceived by a lot of homeowners. But the opposite side of the coin is that more people are working longer due to the shrinkage or disappearance of their pensions, and the realization that they need to work longer to have sufficient money to retire on. My belief is that even less people are really dropping out of the labor force, due to shrinking incomes and decreased buying power caused by inflation. I'm fairly sure that most people are working longer than previously, resulting in a larger labor force and an actual increase in the the labor force growth rate over that prior to 2001. Again, if our labor force was really shrinking, you'd expect real wages to be increasing rapidly, due to a declining labor supply growth. But clearly real wages are increasing little, if any, and are probably even overestimated due to the underestimation of inflation.
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Post by lc on Nov 24, 2006 10:24:03 GMT -6
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Nov 24, 2006 15:29:22 GMT -6
I have been anticipating all of this to occur, and the next sequence is that as the housing values collapse employment will drop below the level of the working age population at which point Americans will be willing to mow lawns and pick strawberries. I agree. In my opinion, the best thing we can do for American workers is to limit the labor supply available to Corporate America. That involves reducing illegal immigration, and reducing their ability to use foreign labor in foreign production facilities (i.e., reduce outsourcing.) In other words, we need to limit the number of workers available to Corporate America, both domestically and internationally. The expansion of the labor force available to Corporate America is one of the biggest factors keeping wages down. This is technically a very easy problem to fix, though politically very difficult to fix. Those benefiting from cheap labor are the same ones running the country, as well as the being the main campaign contributors to those running the country. Once again, we need to withdraw from the WTO, GATT, NAFTA, & CAFTA. All these treaties have ever accomplished was to provide new sources of cheap labor for Multinational American Corporations. These treaties were created for the benefit of America's Corporate elite, and only for the Corporate elite. The stated "goals" of uplifting workers in the rest of the world was only a ruse. In fact, it was a flat-out lie. The Corporate elite new exactly what they were doing when these treaties were passed, and counted on average Americans not to know the real motivation. Many did know the underlying motivation. But not enough knew to prevent it from happening. But there is hope for changing this, because far more people now know what the goal was from the outset-- providing Corporate America with workers they could pay less than Americans. And the tide appears to be turning.
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Nov 24, 2006 16:29:09 GMT -6
It's useful to compare actual population growth figures from the major industrial powers with that of the United States. According to CIA statistics, the U.S. is the highest population growth rate of the major industrial powers by a wide margin. Below are the numbers provided by the CIA. China: www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/ch.htmlPop growth rate 0.59%/yr ----------------------------- France: www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/fr.htmlPopulation growth rate: 0.35% (2006 est.) ---------------------- Germany: www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/gm.htmlPopulation growth rate: -0.02% (2006 est.) ----------------------------- Japan: www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/ja.htmlPopulation growth rate: 0.02% (2006 est.) ---------------------------- Great Britain (UK): www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/uk.htmlPopulation growth rate: 0.28% (2006 est.) ---------------------------- South Korea: www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/ks.htmlPopulation growth rate: 0.42% (2006 est.) ---------------------------- United States: www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/us.htmlPopulation growth rate: 0.91% (2006 est.) It's worth pointing out that Japan & Germany have almost a 0% rate of population growth, which certainly helps limit the labor supply and puts upward pressure on wages. Great Britain's population growth rate is less than 1/3 of that of the U.S. France's is only slightly more than 1/3 of the US's. Even China has a lower population growth rate than the United States. From all of this, it's difficult to accept the premise that the United States is facing a "labor shortage." Our population is increasing at almost 3 million/year. The current working age population is almost 230 million, or about 76% of the total population. Thus with a population increase of 3 million/year, the number of working-age Americans would increase at about 2.3 million/year. Unless job growth is much greater than 2.3 million over the long term, there is no "looming" problem of a labor shortage. We currently have over 77 million working age Americans who are not working, and are classified as " not-in-labor-force." Add this number to the 6.7 million workers the Bush dictatoship begrudingly acknowledges are unemployed, and it gives us 84 million working age Americans who are not working. Does this really look like a looming "labor shortage"? We have more than enough surplus labor at present. And this surplus is growing, not shrinking. To put this in perspective, there have been approximately 6.5 million jobs created since Bush stole his first presidential election. In comparison, the 6 year increase in working-age Americans has been roughly 15 million. This certainly doesn't suggest a looming "labor shortage." In fact, it suggests a gross over supply of labor, and provides ample support for the concept of limiting our population and labor force growth.
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Post by lc on Nov 24, 2006 18:25:34 GMT -6
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