Labor Day and the Low-Wage Future The Real News Network go to original September 07, 2009
Jeannette Wicks-Lim: Pre-crisis forecast from Dept. of Labor shows a US economy structurally inclined toward low wages
Unemployment numbers continue to rise in the United States as the potential for a 'jobless recovery' takes hold. In this video, TRNN Producer Jesse Freeston speaks with Jeannette Wicks-Lim of the Political Economy Research Institute about the report she released on Labor Day which shows the problem goes beyond the crisis. The report points to Department of Labor data from 2006, before the US went into recession, which forecast the US economy would not add any 'decent paying' jobs between 2006 and 2016. The forecast can be seen as a continuation of a trend that began in 1975 when workers stopped getting wage increases in concert with increases in their productivity. Wicks-Lim concludes that from an economist perspective, the best proven way for worker's to affect this structure in their favor is through increasing the unionization of the workforce. Wicks-Lim's report was sponsored by the AFL-CIO. Bio: Jeannette Wicks-Lim is an Associate Professor at the Political Economy Research Institute in Amherst, Massachusetts. Wicks-Lim specializes in labor economics with an emphasis on the low-wage labor market and has an overlapping interest in the political economy of race. Previously, Wicks-Lim was a visiting professor at Marlboro College, in Marlboro, Vermont. She has also worked as a research assistant for the Economic Policy Institute and a research associate for Monitoring the Future at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She completed her Ph.D. in economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2005.
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