Steven Greenhouse: Why We're Working More and Earning Less

By Juan Gonzalez, Democracy Now!. Posted July 30, 2008.

Juan Gonzalez: The federal minimum wage increased last week from $5.85 to $6.55. The increase gave nearly two million American workers a raise. The seventy-cent increase is the second of three enacted under a 2007 law that saw the first minimum wage hike in more than a decade.

But, adjusted for inflation, the minimum wage remains lower in real terms than it was forty years ago, despite record corporate profits.

A new book by the New York Times labor reporter Steven Greenhouse examines how much of the American workforce is working more but earning less. Wages have stagnated, health and pension benefits have grown stingier, and job security has shriveled. The book is titled The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker.

Steven Greenhouse joins Democracy Now! You've traveled all around America, obviously, as a labor reporter for the New York Times, and you take us into all kinds -- not just to factories, but the Silicon Valley jobs, the service jobs, to give us a sense of what is happening to the everyday worker.

Steven Greenhouse: We all love Barbara Ehrenreich's book Nickel and Dimed, and I felt, I'm going to try building on that. And I really try looking across the board what's happening to the nation's workers. I look at, you know, farm workers. I look at Microsoft workers. I look at, you know, factory workers, whose jobs are disappearing to Mexico. And I look at, you know, software engineers at Hewlett-Packard, at some other places, you know, that have lost their jobs to India. I look at janitors in Houston who -- I focus on one janitor in Houston, who, after ten years, is making just $5.25 an hour. I write about a Dominican worker in Brooklyn who works eleven hours a day for just $35 a day. You know, the whole panoply of what's happening, to show that there's this big squeeze on the nation's workers, where, as you were just saying, wages have been flat, health and pension benefits are getting worse, at the same time corporate profits have gone up very, very nicely. Employee productivity has gone up 15, 20 percent, yet wages have been flat, plus companies are pressuring workers, you know, to work harder and harder.

Gonzalez: The health insurance situation, I think you had a starting story about one worker, a security guard, who had caught many shoplifters at his store. He hurts himself in the process of capturing one of them or arresting one of them and then ends up being fired, because now he requires medical treatment that his employers don't want to give him. The impact of the health insurance crisis on America's workers?

Greenhouse: I write about this worker, Mike Michell, who works as security guard for a Wal-Mart in Texas, and he was a great security guard. He caught 180 shoplifters over a two-year period. One day, he runs out into the parking lot to chase after someone who's using stolen checks. The woman's accomplice floors the accelerator, hits Mike, you know, messes up his back, breaks his kneecap. You know, Mike asks for a few weeks off, because he needs surgery on his knee. He applies for workers' comp, and boom, he's fired. And this shows how companies sometimes retaliate against people who file for workers' comp.

And that's part of a broader health crisis in the nation, where, since the year 2000, even though we've had pretty good economic times until the last few months, nine million more Americans are out of work than was the case in 2000. So now, almost 50 million Americans, nearly one-sixth of the workforce, is uninsured. And you think how crazy that is, in ways. You know, we're the world's wealthiest nation, yet one-in-six workers are out of work.

And another, you know, health statistic that surprised me when I was researching the book was, United States spends about $6,500 per person for health coverage, which is more than twice what France and Germany spent, about two-and-a-half times what Japan spent, yet, you know, they have universal health coverage. They have longer life spans than Americans. Yet, you know, we spend twice as much, and one-in-six people are uninsured. So something is badly broken in the health system.

Gonzalez: Now, given the record corporate profits that we've seen and the relative prosperity of so many American companies over recent decades, why do we have this continuing spiral downward, in terms of the living standard of the average worker?

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