Labor Day - Labor's Love Lost

By: Bryan Zepp Jamieson

It's Labor Day weekend, and once again our corporate media is talking about issues that it ignores the rest of the year - the plight of the American worker. Once a year, over the howls and protests of the right wing, they talk about how many hours an average worker puts in, how much is produced in each hour of work, and how much of it goes back to the worker.

This year was, as has been increasingly the case for the past 20 years, generally discouraging. Average income did manage to beat inflation for the third straight year in 2000 (after 20 straight years of losing ground), and productivity was the highest ever.

Our media likes to report high productivity as being a Good Thing, but unless you happen to be a CEO or a major shareholder, what it means is more hours, harder work.

And, we find, we get considerably less for it. The average American worker in 2000 produced $54,870* in 1990 dollars - about $70,000, more than double what the average salary is.

It's the second-highest rate of productivity per hour in the world behind France, but the American worker is also the hardest worked in the world, putting in an average of 1,979* hours per year. Only workers in the Czech Republic and in Albania, both recent slave states where starvation is a problem, work longer hours.

If you figure 52 weeks a year, and subtract the nine holidays that pepper the American calendar, then a "full" work year with no vacation time at all would be 2,008* hours. The average American gets those nine holidays (if lucky) and an average of another 3½ days off each year.

Twelve and a half days, less than two weeks.

To illustrate this, Japan - regarded as one of the hardest working nations in the world, clocks in with an average of 1,842* hours. That means that the average Japanese worker, working 40 hours a week, gets almost six weeks off per year.

Granted, Japan is having economic problems, far worse than ours. All that hard work doesn't seem to have really done the economy much good, which calls into the question the very notion that high productivity is necessarily good for the overall economy.

In the United Kingdom, they work an average of 1,729* hours a year, which translates to nearly nine weeks a year off. The British economy isn't as productive as ours, of course, but on the other hand, the poverty rate is one fifth what ours is, the average British worker has a higher discretionary income, and of course gets substantially better medical care. Lower pay, higher taxes, and yet they not only get more vacation time, but actually have extra money on hand with which they can enjoy that vacation time.

Imagine that.

Then there's Germany. The average German worker works 1,473* hours a year. That means that the German worker, who enjoys a considerably higher standard of living these days than his American counterpart, gets about fifteen weeks off a year from the "full" work schedule.

That's pretty savage. People are working their tails off, and what do they have to show for it? In stats like disposable income, life expectancy, and medical care, where America was once a uniform first, we now see numbers like 28^th, 42^nd, even 72^nd.

We're the most productive group of workers on earth. Nobody disputes that. We produce about $70,000 a year each in value. And yet we are told that the economy and the business are utterly dependent on our working more hours, working harder, multitasking, taking work home (one of several phenomena far more prevalent in America than elsewhere that didn't get mentioned in the report) and giving up more and more benefits.

Seventy thousand a year in productivity, and we are told that raising the minimum wage would make us unable to compete in the world market.

Where does all that money go? Just try and guess.

In most developed nations, productivity is seen as a percentage of the overall gross wage. It's usually in the range of 115-125%. Here, it's about 200%. The average worker produces for his employer double what he costs. (We're talking profits - overhead, taxes, and so on, are already factored in).

In most countries, they settle for making a fourth again as much. More than that, and they worry about a communist revolution or something.

Here, they snarl that the workers are lucky to have jobs at all, as if they are doing people a favor by hiring them.

So the average American worker is overworked and robbed blind.

It gets worse.

As anyone who works in the service industry can tell you, workers are under enormous pressure to work "off the clock". Go by a fast food place or a quickie-mart at closing time, and the kid you see in there wiping the counters, ringing out the register, stocking and so on almost certainly isn't getting paid for it. His boss told him to clock out at closing and not a minute later, but to make sure everything was done properly before he leaves.

In the medical field and other areas, a lot of employees can find only part time work, and quite a few dental hygienists and receptionists and others will often be working for two different medical offices, four hours a day.

Why? Part time workers don't qualify for benefits, including those ever-more expensive medical benefits. (Medical costs are 150% of anywhere else in the developed world, and insurance companies add another 50-80% on top of that to pay for all those annoying ads you see on TV and keep the stockholders happy).

If you think that sounds like a good reason to take medical care out of the hands of the employers completely...

Yes. It is.

Bigger outfits like Walmart don't hire employees. Instead, they have "associates" who make low income as a percentage of sales, cannot unionize (they aren't employees, you see) and aren't eligible for any benefits, including unemployment. The employer doesn't have to pay one half of FICA, either. It's a colossal rip off, and yet another element of the American work experience that didn't make the ILO report.

Just to add to the general merriment, the percentage of the national budget paid by corporations has dropped to one third of what it was in 1962, even though their income as a percent of the gross domestic product has increased nearly twenty-fold. Then too, there are the issues of on-the-job privacy (employers in America believe they have the right to unlimited voyeurism and drug tests) and control over the employee's outside life (insurance companies are agitating for the right to demand that employers fire employees with dangerous habits and hobbies, such as smoking or hang-gliding).

So where is all that money going?

A depressingly small percentage of that vast sum went into buying up much of the media, and thoroughly corrupting our democracy to ensure the most corrupt and servile government money can buy. Additionally, Americans are bombarded with the biggest marketing campaign in history to convince them that business is good for America and should be running it, employees are lazy and greedy, unions are evil and corrupt, and the government has no business being the nanny of the employee.

For years, Americans have bought that, along with the notion that the amount of time you devote to your ungrateful employer keys directly into your own self-worth.

In return, we've become the most overworked and underpaid work force in the developed world, and some of the money that should be going to us is used in a vast campaign to convince us that we're nothing but a bunch of lazy, greedy, stupid bastards who don't deserve half of what we get.

Incidently, self-employment isn't much of an answer. The hours are long, the pay sucks. But if you are, like me, working in the office this holiday, it's because you CHOSE to be there, and nobody is going to come along and make you piss in a little jar.

But for everybody else, this Labor Day serves as a grim reminder that even with a paycheck, slavery is still slavery.

*ILO Report, as reported in The NY Times, 9/1/01