Reply
Fri 8 Oct, 2004 10:32 am
These are. the type of jobs that are replacing those that have gone off shore. The war in Iraq is not the only one that the US is fighting. This one, the war on poverty, which we are losing, is the one that should have been attacked and needs to be won.
Working for a Pittance
By BOB HERBERT
Published: October 8, 2004
Reality keeps rearing its ugly head. The Bush administration's case for the war in Iraq has completely fallen apart, as evidenced by the report this week from the president's handpicked inspector that Iraq had destroyed its illicit weapons stockpiles in the early 1990's.
Coming next week are the results of a new study that shows - here at home - how tough a time American families are having in their never-ending struggle to put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads. The White House, as deep in denial about the economy as it is about Iraq, insists that things are fine - despite the embarrassing fact that President Bush is on track to become the first president since Herbert Hoover to preside over a net loss of jobs during his four years in office.
The study, jointly sponsored by the Annie E. Casey, Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, will show that 9.2 million working families in the United States - one out of every four - earn wages that are so low they are barely able to survive financially.
"Our data is very solid and shows that this is a much bigger problem than most people imagine," said Brandon Roberts, one of the authors of the report, which is to be formally released on Tuesday. The report found that there are 20 million children in these low-income working families.
For the purposes of the study, any family in which at least one person was employed was considered a working family. Very wealthy families were included.
The median income for a family of four in the U.S. is $62,732. According to the study, a family of four earning less than $36,784 is considered low-income. A family of four earning less than $18,392 is considered poor. The 9.2 million struggling families cited by the report fell into one of the latter two categories. And those families have one-third of all the children in American working families.
Not surprisingly, the problem for millions of families is that they have jobs that pay very low wages and provide no benefits. "Consider the motel housekeeper, the retail clerk at the hardware store or the coffee shop cook," the report said. "If they have children, chances are good that their families are living on an income too low to provide for their basic needs."
Neither politicians nor the media put much of a spotlight on families that are struggling economically. According to the study, one in five workers are in occupations where the median wage is less than $8.84 an hour, which is a poverty-level wage for a family of four. A full-time job at the federal minimum wage of $5.15 an hour is not even sufficient to keep a family of three out of poverty.
Families with that kind of income are teetering on the edge of an economic abyss. Any misfortune might push them over the edge - an illness, an automobile breakdown, even something as seemingly minor as a flooded basement.
For the families in these lower-income brackets, life is often a harrowing day-to-day struggle to pay for the bare necessities. According to federal government statistics, the median annual rent for a two-bedroom apartment in major metropolitan markets is more than $8,000. The annual cost of food for a low-income family of four is nearly $4,000. Utility bills are nearly $2,000. Transportation costs are about $1,500. And then there are costs for child care, health care and clothing.
You do the math. How are these millions of poor and low-income families making it?
(A lot of those families are going to get a shock this winter as price increases for crude oil get translated into big jumps in home heating bills.)
The economy relies heavily on the services provided by low-wage workers but, as the report notes, "our society has not taken adequate steps to ensure that these workers can make ends meet and build a future for their families, no matter how determined they are to be self-sufficient."
Mr. Roberts said he hoped the study, titled "Working Hard, Falling Short," would help initiate a national discussion of the plight of families who are doing the right thing but not earning enough to get ahead. "Seventy-one percent of low-income families work," he said. More than half are headed by married couples. But economic self-sufficiency remains maddeningly out of reach.
Even in a presidential election year, these matters have not been explored in any sustained way. We're quick to give lip service to the need to work hard, but very slow to properly reward hard work.
Let's face it...we are on our way to becoming a poor country....
A banana republic. With rich and poor and a very small middle class. That is ripe for fascism.
The republicans take care of their own. Will Bush veto the legislation? Nah.
BUSH MISLEADS ON FISCAL RESPONSIBILITIES
In a speech Monday, President Bush advocated fiscal responsibility in government, saying, "we need to be wise about how we spend your money."[1] He is now poised, however, to sign into law a massive, $137-billion tax giveaway to corporate and special interests.[2]
The tax bill was originally created to fix a $50-billion export subsidy that had triggered retaliatory tariffs by our trading partners. Instead of simply repealing the subsidy, Congress replaced it with a $77-billion giveaway to corporations, many of which never qualified for the original subsidy.[3] It
also provides $43 billion in tax breaks for companies operating overseas,[4] including a giant break to top corporations like Hewlett-Packard and Eli Lilly that allows them "to bring hundreds of billions of dollars in untaxed foreign profits back into the United States at about one-seventh of the
normal tax rate."[5]
Lawmakers larded down the bill with pork for their favored special interests. The bill included million-dollar tax cuts for fishing tackle box manufacturers, Chinese ceiling fan importers, horse and dog track gamblers and Native Alaskan whaling captains.[6]
Sources:
1. "President and General Tommy Franks's Remarks at a Victory 2004 Rally in Morrison, Colorado," The White House, 10/11/04,
http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=3382691&l=62395.
2. "Payback on K Street," Washington Post, 10/12/04,
http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=3382691&l=62396.
3. "Senate Passes Big Tax Breaks," Los Angeles Times, 10/12/04,
http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=3382691&l=62397.
4. "Congress Gives Away the Store," New York Times, 10/12/04,
http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=3382691&l=62398.
5. "Senate passes $137 billion cut in business tax," Baltimore Sun, 10/12/04,
http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=3382691&l=62399.
6. "Congress OKs corporate tax bill, hurricane disaster aid," Daily Herald, 10/12/04,
http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=3382691&l=62400.
Endangered species: US programmers
By David R. Francis
Say goodbye to the American software programmer. Once the symbols of hope as the nation shifted from manufacturing to service jobs, programmers today are an endangered species. They face a challenge similar to that which shrank the ranks of steelworkers and autoworkers a quarter century ago: competition from foreigners.
Some experts think they'll become extinct within the next few years, forced into unemployment or new careers by a combination of offshoring of their work to India and other low-wage countries and the arrival of skilled immigrants taking their jobs.
Related stories:
12/26/02
A short circuit for US engineering careers
06/01/00
Lament of the pocket-protector set
05/15/00
Quiet force behind economic boom: immigrants
E-mail newsletters
Get all of today's headlines, or alerts on specific topics.
Subscribe for free.
E-mail this story
Write a letter to the Editor
Printer-friendly version
Permission to reprint/republish
Not everybody agrees programmers will disappear completely. But even the optimists believe that many basic programming jobs will go to foreign nations, leaving behind jobs for Americans to lead and manage software projects. The evidence is already mounting that many computer jobs are endangered, prompting concern about the future of the nation's high-tech industries.
Since the dotcom bust in 2000-2001, nearly a quarter of California technology workers have taken nontech jobs, according to a study of 1 million workers released last week by Sphere Institute, a San Francisco Bay Area public policy group. The jobs they took often paid less. Software workers were hit especially hard. Another 28 percent have dropped off California's job rolls altogether. They fled the state, became unemployed, or decided on self-employment.
The problem is not limited to California.
Although computer-related jobs in the United States increased by 27,000 between 2001 and 2003, about 180,000 new foreign H-1B workers in the computer area entered the nation, calculates John Miano, an expert with the Programmers Guild, a professional society. "This suggests any gain of jobs have been taken by H-1B workers," he says.
H-1B visas allow skilled foreigners to live and work in the US for up to six years. Many are able to get green cards in a first step to citizenship. Another visa, L-1, allows multinational companies to transfer workers from foreign operations into the US.
The H-1B visa has been highly controversial for years. This fiscal year, Congress set a quota of 65,000 visas, which was snapped up immediately after they became available Oct.1. Now, US business is pleading for Congress to let in more such workers.
The US Chamber of Commerce, for instance, wants Congress to revisit the cap "to ensure American business has access to the talent it needs to help keep our economy strong."
That rationale makes no sense to the Programmers Guild and other groups that have sprung up to resist the tech visas. Since more than 100,000 American programmers are unemployed - and many more are underemployed - the existing 65,000 quota is inexcusably high, they argue. H-1B and L-1 visas are "American worker replacement programs," says the National Hire American Citizens Society.
Further, the H-1B program, set up in 1990, is flawed, critics charge. For example, employers are not required to recruit Americans before resorting to hiring H-1Bs, says Norman Matloff, a computer science professor at the University of California, Davis.
And the requirement that employers pay H-1Bs a "prevailing wage" is useless, he adds, because the law is riddled with loopholes. Nor are even any remaining regulations enforced.
The average wage for an American programmer runs about $60,000, says John Bauman, who set up the Organization for the Rights of American Workers. Employers pay H-1Bs an average $53,000.
A programmer, Mr. Bauman was out of work for 20 months before finally taking a job with a 40 percent pay cut. His experience is common enough that programmers are organizing to fight in Congress against H-1B and L-1 visas.
But they face an uphill battle, says Mr. Miano, as business groups are far better organized and funded than the smattering of programmer groups. "They have the best legislation money can buy," he says.
Miano sees such a dim future for programmers that he decided to enter law school. "I saw the handwriting on the wall," he says.
Stumble It!
Tweet This
Bookmark on Delicious
Share on Facebook
Share on MySpace