New Front Opens in the Class War

It's started: employers are using the continued high unemployment rate to destroy middle-class wages. Want a job? Then you better pull your forelock, bite your tongue and count yourself lucky to get shitty, dangerous work at minimum wage with no benefits. It's the Randian wet dream, and it's coming all over our faces.

Kevin Drum:

The Wall Street Journal reports that even with unemployment at 9.5%, employers are having trouble finding workers:

In Bloomington, Ill., machine shop Mechanical Devices can't find the workers it needs to handle a sharp jump in business. Job fairs run by airline Emirates attract fewer applicants in the U.S. than in other countries. Truck-stop operator Pilot Flying J says job postings don't elicit many more applicants than they did when the unemployment rate was below 5%.

Sounds puzzling. Unless you read the rest of the story. The truck stop job, it turns out, pays minimum wage. The airline job requires you to move to Dubai. And the machine shop company pays only $13/hour but requires people with very specific skills. When they set up a ten-week training course of their own, they got plenty of applicants and 16 out of 24 graduated. But apparently we've gotten to the point where blue collar employers are barely willing to invest even ten weeks in training new workers for high-skill entry level positions.

Read the whole thing.

Meanwhile, in Louisville, the desperate are lining up for the chance at 11 days of minimum-wage work.

From the Courier:

Kentucky State Fair jobs paying minimum wage for 11 days used to attract college students looking to pick up some spending money.

On Monday, the crowd of 1,100 who showed up for about 450 jobs paying $7.25 per hour included more laid off factory workers, restaurant managers and carpenters.
Far from financing a social life, they were looking for a little cash to eke out a living amid 10 percent unemployment in the Louisville area.

“I have tried to hit every restaurant job that is out there,” said Jenny Lee, 57, who said she lost her job managing a restaurant four years ago. Without a job, Lee said she recently lost her Highlands home, stored her belongings in a friend’s garage and moved in with her adult daughter.

The numbers seeking jobs taking tickets, leading tours, driving trams and cleaning up at the fair measured about the same as last year, said Vicki Glass, spokeswoman for the Kentucky State Fair Board. Notched up, she said, were feelings of desperation among those waiting to be interviewed outside the South Wing of the Kentucky Exposition Center.

“These are applicants who need to make money to put food on the table, to pay the rent,” said Glass, adding Fair Board officials are also hiring with an eye toward staffing the downtown KFC Yum! Center’s debut this fall.

Yep, those would be the desperate people Rand Paul, Mitch McConnell, Brett Guthrie and every other republican says are too lazy, drug-addicted, dark-skinned, mooslin and terroristic to take all the wonderful underpaid, benefit-less, risky jobs out there going begging for workers.

Susie Madrak gets it:

This appeared in the Wall Street Journal, so the article's very sympathetic to employers who say they can't fill job openings. First, let me wipe the tears from my eyes, and then let me suggest a couple of free-market solutions.

As one company mentioned in the article did, employers should set up their own job-training programs. Hire some good people, and teach them. I know you're used to us paying to train ourselves, but hey, that's the way the cookie crumbles these days.
The other free market solution? You're pissing and moaning that you can't fill jobs, but you're obviously not offering enough money for people to live on. In other words, you don't want to pay what the market will bear. Right?

SNIP

Don't you just love the way they put this? Jobless benefits give the unemployed "less incentive to search out new work." New work that pays so little, it won't even give them enough to cover their rent and food in the same month. (Isn't America great?)

SNIP

As I said, Carolyn: Hire people and train them. That's what they did back in the old days, and this is turning out to be an awful lot like them.

Read the whole thing.

And just in case any still-employed workers out there with salaries they can live on and benefits that protect their families get the idea that a little union solidarity might help their unemployed brother and sisters, the bosses and the rich are starting a worker civil war.

David Dayen at Firedoglake:

Over the weekend, the New York Times published a piece that follows a trend of vilifying public employees, in this case for their pensions. Being involved with California politics as I was, I can tell you that the wingnuts here find no greater joy than in demonizing state workers, all of which in their minds are greedy money-grubbers destroying the state from within. They have used this story about the city of Bell in the Los Angeles area, admittedly a story about thieves who ripped off their own citizens and the state pension fund, and spun it into a story about everyone who carries a government paycheck making $800,000 a year.

SNIP

In a way, people struggling in a down economy are searching for a reason why, and in public employees have found a convenient scapegoat. But Jonathan Cohn had a great piece about the real reason why this rankles the right – public employees have a balanced labor/management structure.

SNIP

Typically, public workers have deferred compensation increases in favor of long-term benefits. Their base salaries are smaller than what you can get in the private sector, while their benefit packages are larger. People want to pay for endless services with low taxes, so this is a way to keep public employees on the job under the current revenue stream, by pushing benefits out to the future. Small wonder that leads to a shaky long-term fiscal picture.

The point being, public workers have the small amount of leverage they have because they can collectively bargain. Other industries that have no such protections are getting screwed on a daily basis – but right-wing ideologues who want to extend that leverage for management across all businesses blame the greedy union bosses because they don’t want to see actual retirement security spread to the masses.

Read the whole thing.

The rich are parasites, sucking the blood of the workers. The bosses are the enemy, constantly seeking new ways to exploit and eliminate workers to increase profits.

None of that is illegal, or even much criticized in policy-making circles. Certainly it is nothing but praised at tea parties and other repug gatherings.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....