As the White House pushes for so-called free trade agreements across both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, the manufacturing jobs that once provided high-paying jobs with good pensions and substantial benefits are dwindling, pay is falling, and benefits are vanishing.
The end result: America's blue collar manufacturing workforce is being forced to turn to government benefit programs simply to survive.
From the University of California, Berkeley:
Just over a third of non-supervisory manufacturing production workers in the United States and half of the nation’s manufacturing workers hired through temporary agencies rely on at least one public assistance program to support themselves or their families, according to research by the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Labor Research and Education.As presidential candidates from both parties debate how to revive American manufacturing, and while lawmakers at the federal and state levels promote subsidies to lure manufacturing jobs, the Labor Center calculates that low wages in manufacturing cost taxpayers approximately $10.2 billion a year in public assistance.
The researchers note that the largest classification of temporary manufacturing production workers—assemblers and fabricators—earn a median wage of $10.88 an hour, compared to $15.03 for those hired directly by the manufacturers.
2 comments:
The power of the media is amazing because most americans dislike unions.
Unions created the middle class and are probably the only entity that would fix things. Companies are self serving and not willing to take on battles they might lose.
flip
Too many Americans don't know labor history, including the facts that vacations, pensions, the 40-hour work week, and unemployment insurance were largely, if not totally, due to the former power of labor unions.
Regressives and the 1% parasite class have successfully used the corporate media to trash unions, while secretly hiding the massive legal bribe$ given to greedy politicians to enact policies redistributing wealth and income from the poor and middle classes to the 1% parasite class.
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