[NJFAC] A New Era of Endless Labor Shortages?

A New Era of Endless Labor Shortages? A Critical Analysis of McKinsey's New Report Article by Thomas Ferguson and Servaas Storm The McKinsey report's highlighting of an extremely high job vacancy ratio in recent years does not reflect the true state of the U.S. labor market. Excerpt: "Every so often a publication comes along that more or less perfectly captures the Zeitgeist of world business elites. So it was on the 26th of June when the McKinsey Global Institute issued a new report: "Help Wanted: Charting the Challenge of Tight Labor Markets in Advanced Economies." The message its few pages of charts and text deliver is dire indeed: "Labor markets in advanced economies today are among the tightest in two decades, not merely a pandemic-induced blip but rather a long-term trend that may continue as workforces age." However, "There is no doubt that the rise in the job vacancy ratio is spurious, i.e., not related to real labor-market tightness, but instead most likely caused by a sharp increase in manipulative job postings." Learn More

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June Zaccone
National Jobs for All Network
http://www.njfac.org

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[NJFAC] Union ‘effects’ on hourly and weekly wages

Union 'effects' on hourly and weekly wages: A half-century perspective David Blanchflower Bruce V. Rauner Professor of Economics Dartmouth College; Professor of Economics University Of Glasgow Alex Bryson Professor of Quantitative Social Science, Social Research Institute University College London  25 Jun 2024

Union membership across the developed world has been falling for decades. This column uses data on wages and hours worked in the US over the last 50 years to examine whether this has led to a fall in the 'union wage premium'. The authors find that while the hourly wage premium for union members has fallen notably since the 1970s, the differential in weekly wages has remained large, driven in part by union members working longer hours. This underexplored role of unions is important for the welfare of workers whose consumption is dependent not only on a decent hourly wage, but the offer of sufficient paid hours of work.

Across the developed world the proportion of workers who are union members has been declining for decades (Garnero et al. 2017).  Today the rate of membership in the US stands at 33% in the public sector.  In the private sector it is 6%, down from 24% 50 years ago. 

This decline is perceived by some to be indicative of a shift in bargaining power between employers and workers which has resulted in a decline in labour's share of income (Summers and Stansbury 2020).  Since the root of a union's ability to bid up wages above the market rate is its ability to call on its members to support its bargaining position and, if necessary, withdraw its labour through strike action, one might expect this decline in union density to have resulted in a secular decline in the union wage premium – the mark up unions achieve over the wage similar workers would get in the absence of the union.  But has it? The short answer is no.

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source: nakedcapitalism.com

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June Zaccone
National Jobs for All Network
http://www.njfac.org

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[NJFAC] expanding union movement in the South

How Workers Are Revolutionizing the South

David McCall, international president of the United Steelworkers Union (USW).

Independent Media Institute

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Local 1025 [USW] members shared firsthand accounts of how the union boosted their wages, gave them a voice, and kept them safe on the job. And in May 2024, the workers at Tarboro filed for an election to join the USW.

They're among a growing number of workers across the South eager to leverage the power of solidarity and build brighter futures, even as CEOs and Republicans in this part of the country still conspire to hold them down.

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About 1,400 workers at the Blue Bird electric bus factory in Fort Valley, Georgia, in 2023 voted overwhelmingly to organize through the USW.

The vote was a breakthrough for workers on the front lines of a vital, growing industry. It also sent a pointed, defiant message to a Republican governor who lies about unions and tries to prevent Georgians from joining them.

On the heels of that monumental victory, autoworkers at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, overcame Republican opposition and voted by a huge majority to unionize.....

Unions lift up entire communities, a U.S. Treasury Department report confirmed in 2023.

They raise members' wages by as much as 15 percent, creating a competitive environment in which non-unionized employers also must increase pay to hold on to workers. Union contracts provide workers with better benefits and retirement security than they'd otherwise earn, and their focus on workplace safety "can pull up whole industries," the report concluded.

Unions fight favoritism and discrimination, creating more equitable workplaces and communities. The collective spirit forged inside the organized shop extends beyond the plant gates, with union members not only voting more often than other workers but also volunteering and donating to charity more often.....

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June Zaccone
National Jobs for All Network
http://www.njfac.org

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[NJFAC] Minn. Fed.: Income Distributions and Dynamics in America: Chart and Map Toolkit

Income Distributions and Dynamics in America: Chart and Map Toolkit | Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis

The charts and maps on this page use statistics from the Income Distributions and Dynamics in America dataset to visualize how income is distributed across dimensions that reflect communities and geographies in the United States.

The tabs organize the data based on four characteristics: race and ethnicity, sex, U.S.- or foreign-born, and age. The menus customize the map and chart to your particular values of interest. First choose the percentile of the earnings distribution you want to see. Next, choose the type of earnings. You then choose the group you want to see values for.

The map displays data for the year you choose, while the line chart displays your selected values over time.

Explore the X percentile of the distribution of [income] among people who are [race or ethnicity, sex, US,foreign-born] in [year]

Compare these values with White incomes?  Yes No

Income Distributions and Dynamics in America: Chart and Map Toolkit | Fe...

cited by an article in Counterpunch

Newsflash: Inequality in Neoliberal America David Schultz If anyone is perplexed or surprised why Americans are so upset about the economy, they should look no further t...

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June Zaccone
National Jobs for All Network
http://www.njfac.org

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[NJFAC] Americans Across the Political Divide Want a Federal Job Guarantee

Americans Across the Political Divide Want a Federal Job Guarantee ByThe Center for Working-Class Politics

A look at all the available survey data on public support for a job guarantee shows consistently strong support for the idea. It's a winning idea for the Left.

Workers prepare to lift a new pedestrian bridge into place at the Stamford Transportation Center on August 26, 2023 in Stamford, Connecticut. (John Moore / Getty Images)

There has been steadily increasing interest in a federal job guarantee since Bernie Sanders reintroduced the concept to the American public in the wake of the 2016 presidential primaries.

The idea of a job guarantee is to provide a public option for struggling workers to find gainful employment — especially contributing to badly needed public infrastructure projects but also a wide range of other service-based work in education, health, recreation, and the arts. The idea has a long history in the United States going back to the large-scale job creation programs of the New Deal in the 1930s to the lesser-known Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) that, by 1978, had put 725,000 people into public sector employment.

Job guarantees, explained Dylan Matthews Imagine if a well-paying job were a human right.

Support for a job guarantee is remarkably consistent across key demographics, including partisanship. A 2023 survey by Data for Progress, for example, found that while Democrats were more likely to support the policy than other voters (88 percent of Democrats responded favorably), independents were also overwhelmingly supportive (74 percent), as were a solid majority of Republicans, particularly those under forty-five.

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Yet the surveys also show that how you present a job guarantee to voters matters. Not surprisingly, given many Americans' concerns about government spending, the two polls that tied a jobs program to potentially costly guarantees of a "good standard of living" (American National Election Studies) or a high guaranteed minimum wage and government-guaranteed health care (Rasmussen) found less backing.....

ps here is the website of CWCP:The Center for Working Class Politics jz

The Center for Working Class Politics

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June Zaccone
National Jobs for All Network
http://www.njfac.org

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[NJFAC] Bloomberg:Corporate America Never Really Quit Forced Labor

Corporate America Never Really Quit Forced Labor

Inmates do billions of dollars of work for companies and governments each year. A landmark lawsuit alleges many are being kept in prison because the business is just too good. By Josh Eidelson May 11, 2024

Lakiera Walker was lying in her bunk bed a year ago, sick with flu and too weak to stand, when a prison supervisor came in to chastise her for missing the afternoon van to work. Walker's job was on an assembly line at Southeastern Meats Inc., a supermarket supplier. The 12-hour shifts on her feet in 30-some-degree cold made her body ache and turned her fingers a deep red. Southeastern Meats paid about $13 an hour for Walker's work packaging its frozen peas and corn, but the state pocketed most of that, including two-fifths for the Alabama Department of Corrections to "assist in defraying the cost" of her incarceration.

That afternoon, a fellow inmate would need to carry Walker to a medical ward. But when the ADOC officer found her in her room, she says, her health wasn't his concern.

"I am so sick," she told him.

"Get up and go make us our 40%," he replied.

"It made me feel," Walker recalls, "like he was a pimp."

Now Walker, a 37-year-old recently paroled after 15 years in prison, has teamed up with nine still-incarcerated fellow plaintiffs, as well as some prominent labor lawyers and unions, to file a class action. They're suing Alabama Governor Kay Ivey, the state's attorney general, the prisons commissioner, parole board leaders, and a slew of cities, along with companies they claim rely on forced labor, including Hyundai supplier Ju-Young, beer distributor Bama Budweiser of Montgomery, and franchisees of KFC, McDonald's, and Wendy's. The workers suing are all Black. Their class action accuses the defendants of human trafficking, racketeering and violating the Ku Klux Klan Act, which targets conspiracies to deprive people of their constitutional rights. They argue that the government officials colluded to keep Black people imprisoned and available as cheap labor and that the companies conspired to profit from the coerced work. The suit, filed right before Christmas, says it seeks "to abolish a modern-day form of slavery." ....

There are 800,000 incarcerated workers in the US, and they do roughly $10 billion worth of work a year, more than $2 billion of it for clients outside the prison system, according to a 2022 study by the American Civil Liberties Union and the University of Chicago.....

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June Zaccone
National Jobs for All Network
http://www.njfac.org

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[NJFAC] US Billionaires Pay Lower Tax Rate Than Working Class for First Time

'Absurd!': US Billionaires Pay Lower Tax Rate Than Working Class for First Time "It's time to tax the billionaires," economist Gabriel Zucman argues in a new analysis. Jake Johnson Common Dreams, May 03, 2024

An analysis published Friday by the renowned economist Gabriel Zucman shows that in 2018, U.S. billionaires paid a lower effective tax rate than working-class Americans for the first time in the nation's history, a data point that sparked a new flurry of calls for bold levies on the ultra-rich.....

To begin reversing the decades-long trend of surging inequality that has weakened democratic institutions and undermined critical programs such as Social Security, Zucman made the case for a minimum tax on billionaires in the U.S. and around the world.

"The idea that billionaires should pay a minimum amount of income tax is not a radical idea," Zucman wrote Friday. "What is radical is continuing to allow the wealthiest people in the world to pay a smaller percentage in income tax than nearly everybody else. In liberal democracies, a wave of political sentiment is building, focused on rooting out the inequality that corrodes societies. A coordinated minimum tax on the super-rich will not fix capitalism. But it is a necessary first step."....

"The idea that billionaires should pay a minimum amount of income tax is not a radical idea," Zucman wrote Friday. "What is radical is continuing to allow the wealthiest people in the world to pay a smaller percentage in income tax than nearly everybody else. In liberal democracies, a wave of political sentiment is building, focused on rooting out the inequality that corrodes societies. A coordinated minimum tax on the super-rich will not fix capitalism. But it is a necessary first step."

Responding to those who claim a minimum tax would be impractical because "wealth is difficult to value," Zucman wrote that "this fear is overblown."...

The last 2 paragraphs seem inconsistent--a tax on wealth is not a min. tax on income.  However, from the Times article: "There is a way to make tax dodging less attractive: a global minimum tax. In 2021, more than 130 countries agreed to apply a minimum tax rate of 15 percent on the profits of large multinational companies. So no matter where a company parks its profits, it still has to pay at least a baseline amount of tax under the agreement.... ....another coordinated minimum tax — this one not on corporations, but on billionaires. The idea is simple. Let's agree that billionaires should pay income taxes equivalent to a small portion — say, 2 percent — of their wealth each year. Someone like Bernard Arnault, who is worth about $210 billion, would have to pay an additional tax equal to roughly $4.2 billion if he pays no income tax. In total, the proposal would allow countries to collect an estimated $250 billion in additional tax revenue per year, which is even more than what the global minimum tax on corporations is expected to add."

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June Zaccone
National Jobs for All Network
http://www.njfac.org

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