Early in the last century, enlightened industrialists raised workers' salaries so they could buy the goods they were manufacturing. Today, corporations show zero loyalty to their workers. They do not cut productive workers in for a share of the profits. Working Americans, Reich says, are earning on average "only about $280 more a year than 30 years ago, adjusted for inflation. That's less than a 1 percent gain over more than a third of a century."
Worse, corporations whose employees made them great in the first place quit the country to find cheaper labor overseas. And many of the new jobs being created in recent months are bottom-of-the-barrel, minimum wage work.
" Real hourly wages continue to fall," Reich says, because "with unemployment so high, most people have no bargaining power and will take whatever they can get."
At the same time ever more families are sliding into poverty, signing up for food stamps, and lining up at church soup kitchens, "Wall Street profits soared to $426.5 billion last quarter," Reich says.
Since Corporate America is largely responsible for the Great Recession by starving its workers of the purchasing power they need to put punch back into the economy, you might think companies would plow some of their lush profits back into the work force. You might think the oil companies would share some of their fabulous profits with motorists. But no such luck.
Worse, the corporate types and their Republican allies in Congress want to stop federal and state governments from paying their workers fairly and creating needed public service jobs. Instead, they want to lay off loyal employees. They want to bust the unions. They move whole factories overseas. They abandon cities and counties, robbing them of their industrial base. They relocate offshore to evade taxes. They even outsource help-line jobs to low-paid workers in India. And if they can, they will privatize Social Security and gut Medicare.
This is capitalism without a heart, without a conscience.
Yet if the private sector will not live up to its responsibilities, who would deny government the role of employer of last resort and the trainer of last resort?
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