Labor Day in the United States means different things to different people. To media folks, one might think that it would offer a great opportunity to talk about, well, Labor. That is, how are workers in the United States doing? Every two years the holiday is the occasion for the release of a comprehensive study called “The State of Working America,” a book-length study done by the Economic Policy Institute that is perhaps the best overall look at how working families are doing at the moment.
Very few media outlets covered the report and, when they did, the stories were mostly seen in the “Business” section. (After all, newspapers don’t have a “Worker” section, do they?) Of the newspapers that did cover it, not all were interested in dealing with the realities that the report found. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, for example, headlined their (Business page) article, “Alternative View of Labor: Things Are Not All That Bad.” The Washington Post ran their story on the front page of the “Style” Section (Really! The Style Section!), with the headline: “It's Labor Day. Must We Talk About Work?”
I guess it isn’t very stylish to talk about, but the welfare of the majority of people who work for wages does seem newsworthy to me. So, in that non-stylish spirit, here are just a couple of facts from the report:
“Real income is lower for the typical family than in 2000, while the incomes of the best-off families have grown rapidly.”
“African-American families went from a 15.6% gain from 1995 to 2000 to a 4.8% loss from 2000 to 2005; Hispanics from a 24.9% gain to a 6.3% loss; and young families (25-34) from a 12.3% gain to a 5.8% loss.”
“Far from being a nation of Horatio Algers who can work their way up even from humble beginnings, we find that many families remain in a similar income class throughout their lives, and children’s incomes correspond significantly to their parents’.”
Oh, there’s so much more! All of which should have been, and should continue to be, on the nation’s front pages. You can see the report for yourself on the web at http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/
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Jeff Nygaard
National Writers Union
Twin Cities Local #13 UAW
Nygaard Notes
http://www.nygaardnotes.org
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