Home About ATN

News

Wage Slaves

Jan 29, 2009
“Slow or negative economic growth, combined with highly volatile prices, will erode the real wages of many workers, particularly the low-wage and poorer households. In many countries, the middle classes will also be seriously affected.” So concludes the International Labour Organization, the U.N. body that “is devoted to advancing opportunities for women and men to obtain decent and productive work in conditions of freedom, equity, security and human dignity.”

Their first Global Wage Report 2008/09, Executive Summary (.pdf, 4 pp., 63Kb) paints a bleak world picture for us wage slaves, and one which we would do well to anticipate and struggle against by lobbying our governments to establish living minimum wages and to secure and extend our rights to collective bargaining. Among the report’s conclusions and recommendations:

  • 2009 wages will decline by .5 percent in industrial countries.
  • Levels of minimum wage should be increased wherever possible.
  • Between 2001 and 2007, real wages grew close to 0 percent in the U.S.
  • Wage growth has trailed GDP growth and is continuing to decline (i.e., the profits are going elsewhere).
  • Wage inequality (the difference between the highest and lowest wages) is growing most rapidly in the U.S., Germany, and Poland.
  • In most countries, women’s wages still amount to only 70 to 90 percent of men’s and the gap is closing very slowly, if at all.
Inequity in anything—education, income, health care—can only lead to trouble. And raging, enormous, inhumane inequity, as practiced in the U.S., wastes our most valuable capital, our human capital, and can only lead to social cataclysm.
tags: Poverty | Labor | Economics

Copyright © 2008 All Together Now.

Contact Us

Webmaster |

Services

TwitterEmail AlertsTimeWeather

QuikLinx

The End of LibrariesNew Political PartyNoted with Interest

Archives

20192018201720162015201420132012201120102009Oct-Dec 2008Jul-Sep 2008May-June 2008