When Lawrence Mishel, President of the Economic Policy Institute, spoke at the annual Society of American Business Editors and Writers conference this weekend, he said:
''Unless employment starts growing, President Bush will be the first president since Hoover to preside over an actual decline in employment,'' Mishel said in a speech that also criticized the president's economic policy for doing to little to help the economy this year.Unemployment numbers are modest because some people stop searching for jobs or accept ''underemployment'' to earn a paycheck, he said.
The U.S. economy would have to create 140,000 jobs per month between now and the 2004 election to return to the employment levels of 2000. But even that would simply absorb workers entering the labor force; to move the unemployment figure below 5 percent would require 210,000 new jobs per month.
''(That) seems especially unlikely given the preference of this administration for back-loaded tax cuts,'' Mishel said.
Current estimates put GDP growth at 2.4 percent this year. Mishel said that simply isn't enough growth to reduce unemployment and reverse the decline in household income.
Click here to read some more of Mr. Mishel's remarks.
In related news, Bush and Company are looking to replace overtime pay (currently required to be at least time and a half) with comp time for hourly workers whose employers are interested. This means employers could ask you to work 60 hours a week for four weeks then take three weeks off, but pay you the same as if you had worked seven 40 hour weeks. This might not sound like such a bad thing, but remember that the original amount of paid time off is not factored into the equation. Instead of offering any extra paid family time off, employers could instead make it dependent on working overtime. In other words, the difference between time and a half pay versus time and a half off might not mean much to the employer's bottom line, and in fact could help them through more flexible scheduling. However, by accepting this trade off, the worker is accepting the fact that he should not simply get more family time off anyway, without having to work any overtime with no pay at all to earn it.
Say the phone company asked you to pay higher out-of-state rates for cheaper regional calls in order to get an equal number of local calling minutes free. Would you go for it? No way! You want your local calls for free, or next to free, and would not want to pay extra for in-state calls in exchange. So why should workers accept the fact that they get next to no time off for family leave and agree to work overtime at base pay just to get a decent amount of family leave in return? I think that this legislation is a bad idea because it standardizes the practice. It makes time off something you have to work for less money to get. Is that a trend we want to start? Is this really the time to start repealing laws that brought us out of the Great Depression, instead of enforcing them more strictly? Here are some excerpts from the proposed Family Time Flexibility Act, as provided by the Library of Congress:
To amend the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 to provide compensatory time for employees in the private sector....An employee may receive, in accordance with this subsection and in lieu of monetary overtime compensation, compensatory time off at a rate not less than one and one-half hours for each hour of employment for which overtime compensation is required by this section....
An employee may withdraw an agreement described in paragraph (2)(B) at any time . An employee may also request in writing that monetary compensation be provided, at any time , for all compensatory time accrued which has not yet been used. Within 30 days of receiving the written request, the employer shall provide the employee the monetary compensation due in accordance with paragraph (6).
It just seems to me that Bush is doing his best to take America back to the Hoover administration. Excluding Bush's stance on tax cuts, Hoover believed in limited government that did not get involved in providing public services, other than ensuring the national defense. When it came to big business and the economy, Hoover took a hands off approach, similar to Bush's call to let businesses regulate themselves. But don't take it from me, ask Molly Ivins of Creators Syndicate from Sunday's Dallas-Fort Worth Star Telegram:
Consider the Family Time and Workplace Flexibility Act (Senate version) and the Family Time Flexibility Act (House version). The Bush administration is leading the charge with proposed new rules that will erode the 40-hour workweek and affect more than 80 million workers now protected by the Fair Labor Standards Act....As The American Prospect magazine notes, when Republicans talk about "flexibility," it means letting business do whatever it wants without standards, mandates or worker and consumer rights. Ever since FDR's New Deal, working overtime gets you time-and-a-half in money, which has the happy effect of holding the workweek down to 40 hours -- or at least preventing it from ballooning grossly.
The proposed Bush rules, which the two Republican bills codify and expand, would:
• Exclude previously protected workers who were entitled to overtime by reclassifying them as managers. Companies are already using this ploy when they can get away with it. Say you're frying burgers on the night shift, making overtime, and suddenly -- congratulations -- you're the assistant night manager, with no raise and no overtime.
• Eliminate certain middle-income workers from overtime protections by adding an income limit, above which workers no longer qualify for overtime. You like that? You make too much to earn overtime.
• Remove overtime protection from large numbers of workers in aerospace, defense, health care, high tech and other industries.
Pay attention -- this one is coming right out of your paycheck.