With the national unemployment rate in the double digits, those who are jobless are happy to get anything that cuts a paycheck. However, we should be demanding more than a paycheck from our employers.
There is a difference between having a job and a “good job.” According to economist Algernon Austin, a good job provides an above-poverty wage, quality health insurance and a retirement plan. Austin recently put out the new Economic Policy Institute report “Getting Good Jobs to America’s People of Color,” stating that wages should be consistent with proposed new U.S. poverty standards and international comparative standards, which are at 60 percent of the median household income – which computes to an hourly wage of about $14.50, or $30,000 a year.
The report shows that only 27.6 percent of Americans had good jobs in 2008. But in 1979, that number was higher — about 35 percent of the population had “good jobs”. When this is broken down by race, the loss in good jobs over the last 30 years have been mostly felt by Latino men, followed by white men. Only white women have seen a gain in good jobs.
And yet when it comes to present-day totals, it is blacks and Latinos who lack good jobs. According to the 2008 survey, 31.5 percent of whites have good jobs, compared with 21.8 percent of blacks and 14.4 percent of Latinos. Even with a college education background, whites still have a slight advantage.
I’m not shocked by this all. It never ceases to amaze me that with all the strides that people of color have made since the civil rights movement, including getting a black man in the White House, we are still having this conversation about decent wages with health insurance and retirement security. One can only wonder if America would have been different had Dr. King lived to carry out his Poor People’s Campaign, when he expanded his advocacy for racial equality to also include economic justice.
Unfortunately, the current economic downturn has only made the quest for employment equality worse. I have many friends and associates struggling to keep their low-wage jobs with no benefits, staying in their near-poverty cycle. As the folks on Capitol Hill discuss bringing jobs back to save the economy, we need to force a discussion on what exactly these jobs should look like.
Providing more good jobs is not just the right thing to do from a benevolent perspective, but good jobs are good for a healthy economy. The report not only indicates that employees with proper wages are more likely to get out of poverty, but also that employees with proper health care are better workers, and a good retirement plan allows older employees to retire with dignity. In particular, those with quality health insurance are less likely to have an illness that impairs their ability to work. In addition, a proper retirement plan along with Social Security enables individuals to have a comfortable standard of living without having to continue working well beyond retirement age.
If we can’t strive to provide all Americans with good jobs, then what does it say about us as a society?