Apr. 11, 2004 - 10:00 PST

THE WONDERING JEW

Home Again

In a home on a hill overlooking Eugene, Oregon amid the huge evergreens we are once more in the place I consider our second home. We get spoiled to the max, surrounded by loved ones and seeing deer coming down the hill now and then. Here it doesn't seem crowded like in our town, although it is a very short distance to Willamette which is very busy most of the time. Daughter asked me what I wanted for my birthday. I told her it is already in my possession - to be here with my outland relations, at peace and feeling loved. What more could I ever ask ?

Yet the worry about our youngest son is still there, no way to escape that, but we did sleep well for which we are thankful.

I have a clipping cut from the Rocky Mountain News of April 8th brought along to use to make an entry.

"Corporate profits soar as workers get fleeced."

By Bob Herbert of The New York Times. In part, "American workers have been remarkably productive in recent years. but they are getting fewer and fewer of the benefits of this increassed productivity. While the economy, as measured by the gross domestic product, has been strong for some time now, ordinary workers have gotten little more than the back of the hand from employers who have pocketed an unprecedented share of the cash from this economic growth."

"What is happening is nothing short of historic. The American worker's share of the increase in national income since November 2001, the end of the last recession, is the lowest on record."

"Employers took the money and ran. This is extraordinary, but very few people are talking about it, which tells you something about the hold that corporate interests have on the national conversation."

"The situation is summed up in the long, unwieldy but very revealing title of a new study from the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University" The unprecedented Rising Tide of Corporate Profits and the Simultaneous Ebbing of Labor Compensation -- Gainers and Losers from the National Economic Recovery in 2002 and 2003. Andrew Sum, the center's director and lead author of the study, said: 'This is the first time we've ever had a case where two years into a recovery, corporate profits got a larger share of the growth of national income than labor did. Normally labor gets about 65 percent and corporate profits about 15 percent.' In other words, an awful lot of American workers have been had."

"The recent productivity gains have been widely acknowledged. but workers are not being compensated for this. During the past two years, increases in wages and benefiits have been very weak, or nonexistent. And despite the grrowth of jobs in March that had the Bush crowd dancing in the White House halls last Friday, there has been no net increase in formal payroll employment since the end of the recession. We have lost jobs. There are fewer payroll jobs now than there were when the recession ended in November 2001."

So if employers were not hiring workers, and if they were miserly when it came to increases in wages and benefits for existing employees, what happened to all the money from the strong economic growth ? The study is very clear on this point. The bulk of the gains did not go to workers, but instead were used to boost profits, lower prices, or increase CEO compensation."

The study found that the amount of income growth devoured by corporate profits in the recovery is 'historically unprecedented,' as is the low share . . . . accruing to the nations workers in the form of labor compensation."

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I think I agree with most of that column. As I see it the loss of jobs in our country means, less tax money paid by the average worker, less taxes paid by corporations, unemployment compensation paid to the unemployed which arereally not enough to really live on -- just subsist and the touted retraining and reeducation for the average worker for the most part been a shambles. As far as that goes, in what area can you retrain or reeducate people in order to get non-existent jobs ?

As far as tax cuts go, it is quite obvious just who benefits the most, and it doesn't seem to be building a larger work force.

I would hate to see things in our country be as they were during the Great Depression years, once was more than enough for me, and I wasn't hurting like the families of many of my classmates. But it looks like working folks are certainly on the short end of the stick, and about to fall off.

I don't want to go home back to those days, but here with our family, we're Home Again . . . . . . . . . . . .

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