May. 16, 2005 - 19:37 MDT

FIGURIN'

Dozed off on the couch this afternoon after errands and a meal. Too torpid to do much more I guess. Gradually the perpetual news blasters became a burr under my saddle, each one seems to have their voice pitched in hysteria trying to make their little molehill into a threatening mountain. Even though I am pretty hard of hearing (read deaf) the volume on TV seemed to be rising to an uncanny pitch. I finally stirred and asked Heather, who had the TV muted for the commercial, why she kept turning the volume up. She replied, "I'm not turning it up, that's the way it is nowadays, seems to get louder through the day." So in high dudgeon I clomped off to the keyboard bearing in my teeth an article I read in the Rocky Mountain News the other day, it was in the May 13 paper. By Bob Hebert of The New York Times, (have a hard time remembering that The New York Times has the "t" in The capitalized). Here it is in full, quote:

Economy hammering undeducated and young

"There were high fives at the White House last week when the latest monthly employment report showed that 274,000 jobs had been created in April, substantially more than experts had predicted."

"The employment bar has been set so low for the Bush administration that even a modest gain is cause for celebration."

"But we shouldn't be blinded by the flash of last Saturday's headlines. American workers, especially younger workers, remain stuck in a gloomy employment landscape."

"For example, a recent report from the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston tells us that the employment rate for the nation's teenagers in the first 11 months of 2004 -- just 36.3 percent -- was the lowest it has ever been since the federal government began tracking teenage employment in 1948."

"Those 20 to 24 years old are also faring poorly. In 2000, 72.2 percent were employed during a typical month. By last year that percentage had dropped to 67.9 per cent. Even the recent modest surge in jobs has essentially bypassed young American workers. Gains among recently arrived immigrants seem to have accounted for the entire net increase in jobs from 2000 through 2004."

"Younger workers," said Andrew Sum, the center's director, "have just been crushed." Whatever the politicians and the business-booster types maybe saying, the simple truth is that there are not nearly enough jobs available for the many millions of our-of-work or underworked men and women who need them. The wages of those who are employed are not even keeping up with inflation."

"Workers have been so cowed by an environment in which they are so obviously dispensable that they have been afraid to ask for the raises they deserve, or for their share of the money derived from the remarkable increases in worker productivity over the past few years. And from one coast to the other, workers have swallowed draconian cuts in benefits with scarcely a whimper."

"The squeeze on the younger generation of workers is so tight that in many cases the young men and women of today are faring less well than their parents generation did at a similar age. Sum has been comparing the standard of living of contemporary families with that of comparable families three decades ago."

"Two-thirds of this generation are not living up to their parent's standard of living," he said."

"College graduates today are doing better in real economic terms than college graduates in the 1970s. But everyone else is doing less well. "If you look at families headed by someone without a college degree," said Sum "their income last year in real terms was below that of a comparable family in 1973. For dropouts, it's like 25 percent below where it was. And for high school grads, about 15 to 20 percent below." It shouldn't be surprising that the standard of living of large segments of the populations is sinking when employers have all the clout, including the powerful and unwavering support of the federal government. Workers can't even get a modest increase in the national minimum wage."

"A remark by Louis Brandeis comes to mind: "We can have democracy in this country, or we can have geat wealth concentrated in the hands of a few. But we can't have both."

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It always makes me wary when someone starts throwing facts and figures at me, especially when the data seems to me to be incomplete.

Mixed opinions here. Of course those who are truly educated are making more, I think that is as it should be. Naturally we all can see those who are supposedly highly educated and are hardly capable of taking a paper from the in basket, apparently perusing it and putting in the out basket having more income than we do. Nothing is perfect, never was never will be.

The "recently arrived immigrants" bit sure rings an alarm bell to me.

Some folks have been through tech school and learned a profession that achieves a higher wage because of their expertise. Some started out as unskilled folk and worked their way up by learning what was needed on the job.

I think we are victims of highly touted "bad times," seems like the profits of corporations and their counterpart "big companies" have increased by leaps and bounds, some of that because they "outsourced" the work. Used to be just manufacturing that was outsourced, not any more, highly professional work is gone from the scene here too.

Our overtime recompense is under attack, one way or another. It has long been the practise of companies to say that some of their help is "professional" and of the management team and should be required to work as many hours and as many days as the CEOs want them to.

I wonder if our workforce is losing heart and giving up -- we are losing many of the things that even our ancestors fought bloody battles to achieve. Eight hour days, a forty hour week, time and a half for hours w worked over that, fair treatment, decent working conditions and many other things that only unions could get for people. Unions are on the decline now, therefore people have less say in what they receive for their daily labor, less of a defense against unfair treatment. White collar folks seem to think "union" is a bad word, and work six days a week, a bunch more hours than forty, without overtime and seem to think that is the way it should be.

So the fact that bankruptcies are up, more families are going homeless, standard of living is going down for a great many folks is a good indication that there is trouble in the house of our country. Opposed to that are questions in my mind. For instance, just how many teenagers are actively seeking work ? How many are willing to get their hands dirty at entry level jobs ? Why is the dropout from school rate so drastically high ?

Another thought in my mind that has puzzled me, why are our politicians in Congress guaranteed a lifetime pension and perks while veterans are treated like poor orphans, shouldn't it be turnabout ?

Things like this muddle my thought processes, so called facts and figures without accompanying facts and figures just plain keep me FIGURIN' . . . . . . . . . .

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