Stuck in the pink collar ghetto
by digby
Monday is Labor Day, a day off for most Americans who spend a good deal of their lives toiling at work. It’s also a stark reminder to those who don’t need reminding: the unemployed and the underemployed. But even those have a job are seeing less and less in returns from that job, says new data from Gallup released Monday. Nearly across the board employees are less satisfied with their health care benefits, their chances for a promotion, job security, and of course, wages.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, average real hourly earnings for all employees actually declined by 1.1 percent from June 2009, when the recovery began, to May 2011, the month for which the most recent earnings numbers are available.
The authors said another factor explaining the weak performance for aggregate wages and salaries was the slow growth in weekly hours during the recovery. At the same time, worker productivity has grown just under 6 percent since the recovery began, helping to keep employment down while lifting corporate profits, the study said.
One of the more interesting things about reporting on the economy is how little anyone ever questions the effect of high unemployment on the employed. Since I’m old I’ve been through a few recessions in my working life. None of them were as bad as this one, but the early 80s Reagan recession was pretty devastating, and I recall what it was like to be employed in the pink collar ghetto as a low level office worker.
On the job it was murder — in a sellers job market, the entry level worker has even less clout that usual. The whole relationship between staff and employer shifts in dozens of small ways as both parties know that any worker can be replaced without much fuss.I subsisted on low paid office jobs, each one abusive and exploitative in its own way, and finally decided to leave the country for a while. It was that bad.
During the 91 recession, which hit quite a bit later (and lasted longer)in California, I was no longer a grunt, but when we laid off a quarter of the workforce, I ended up taking up the slack. My workload became exhausting as I had to absorb several of my former staff’s duties and much of the clerical work I’d left behind long before. (Notably, most of my surviving male colleagues managed to avoid that.) They called it “increased productivity” then too and I didn’t get compensated for the increased duties and responsibilities, of course. Luckily, the boom hit not long after and I was able to go to greener pastures and make up for the several years of stagnant wages. If it hadn’t, that would have been the end of the line for me, careerwise. (It matters where you are in your career arc when these things hit — women have a particularly small window before they become unpromotable.)
I’m sure there are many such lucky duckies in this recession who are stuck in dead end jobs they hate and see no light at the end of the tunnel. Certainly the vast army of female office workers, who keep the corporate and government bureaucracies running, are even more stuck, looking at futures that dead-end in a cubical, watching their already slim chances of advancement slip away, hanging on for the health benefits if nothing else.
There is no quitting, there are no raises, there is no consideration of your personal dignity. You’re in for the duration, hoping against hope that you can hang on, that the company doesn’t fold, keeping your head down, just trying to ride it out. You certainly don’t spend and eventually you stop dreaming. It’s just too painful after a while. It’s better than being unemployed, for sure. But it’s not as if you aren’t affected just the same.
High unemployment is bad for all workers.
Here’s a hearty Happy Labor Day to all the workers in the pink collar ghetto (and every one else too.)You deserve the break.
.