Okay, why don’t I have any money? Many people work 60 to 80 hours a week or a full-time job and part-time job, yet there never seems to be enough money or time. What happened? Our politicians, in cahoots with the biggest corporations, have managed to suck all the money out of the middle class. How did they do it? This is how:
The Good Old Days
The good old days seem like the good old days, because we had more money back then. According to the Pew Research Foundation
“In real terms the average wage peaked more than 40 years ago.”
‘For most U.S. workers, real wages — that is, after inflation is taken into account — have been flat or even falling for decades, regardless of whether the economy has been adding or subtracting jobs.”
The 40-hour work week had already become 38 hours for some in the early 1970s. The income from one breadwinner used to support a family with enough left over to provide a savings-account cushion. The woman’s job was CEO of the home with time to provide healthy meals, attend children’s events, and volunteer.
Since Reagan brought in his trickle-down economy, it is no longer a choice which parent will work and which will care for the family. Both the man and the woman need to work to support their family.
Salary Now Equal To 1979
The Pew Research Foundation goes on:
“After adjusting for inflation, today’s average hourly wage has just about the same purchasing power as it did in 1979, following a long slide in the 1980s and early 1990s and bumpy, inconsistent growth since then.
Major organizations started hiring fewer people to do the work, so customer service declined. Most people cannot remember what good, let alone fine service is, given that companies began killing it in the 1970s. Companies cut people or cut the quality of customer service. Now they cut both. We all know how much fun it is to try to communicate with someone from another country whose English sounds more like Swahili. It is almost as much fun as talking to the mechanized voices on the phone that lead you down a blind alley.
Now Versus Then
As Hours Worked Increases, Family Time Decreases (Based Upon Traditional Families Of Four)
Corporations’ Weasel Words
Corporations began using words like: downsize, mergers, and roll-backs. They started buying companies for write-off’s and firing everyone over 30-years-old. Now they are laying people off and then rehiring them as self-employed contractors. Of course, that means there are no benefits, such as insurance, and no taxes withheld from paychecks, so people have to handle all of this for themselves. When our income could not meet the rising costs of the basics, people started working one full-time and one part-time job.
Companies are notorious for importing people at low, low wages. Ten years ago, President Bush made a special concession for corporations to hire undocumented workers to rebuild what Katrina and man destroyed. Microsoft wants to increase the number of visas granted to high-tech people. They say it is because there are not enough qualified workers in the U.S., but that is not true. Corporate-bought politicians are working against us.
Bye Bye Unions
Our salaries are not the only way we are reimbursed. Some of the other ways companies compensate us are: matching 401k funds, retirement packages, education reimbursement, vacation/sick leave, and health insurance. This type of payment used to amount to about 30 percent above the base salary, but that number is less and less as the cost to an employer are more and more. So employers began trimming benefits, too.
Aren’t retirement packages verbal contracts? Yes, and sometimes they are written contracts with the unions. But corporations and politicians began union-busting decades ago. The blood shed to form unions and the benefits they earned for us have been forgotten and lost.
Now many companies are working their people up to 60 and 80 hours a week with an on-call status. Corporations also bought nearly all of the media and at least half of the politicians who are in Congress and/or running for the job of president. That is why Bernie Sanders is so popular with the left and why Donald Trump popular with the right. They take no money from corporations or groups.
What We Lost
As the time spent on jobs increased, parents had to squeeze out the hours from family time. They also decreased vacation time, volunteer hours, and the time purchasing healthy food for homemade meals. Money in savings and investments disappeared.
So I say, let’s take back our lives! When we start saying this, we will find ways to make it happen.
