By Marty Logan
Montreal, Mar. 5 (IPS) -- Jobs are everywhere in US discourse
these days, but not where they are most needed — attached to workers.
Talk of jobs is dominating economic news and — depending on the
day and the debate — the US political scene, as the governing Republicans
and their Democratic challengers each make the case that their party
is the savior of “America’s workers”.
As early as Monday financial markets were blipping — some up, some
down — on rumors that Friday’s employment report for the month
of February would reveal more jobs being created than in recent disappointing
months. December, for instance, yielded 1,000 new positions, 100 times
less than some forecasts.
Three million jobs have been lost in US manufacturing alone in the past
three years, but earlier this month officials in the administration
of President George W. Bush predicted the “jobless recovery”
would turn the corner, offsetting the controversial “outsourcing”
of posts overseas, particularly computer-related jobs to India.
But while the markets, politicians and headlines were poised to cheer,
or jeer, in reaction to Friday’s job numbers — which in fact
left unchanged the US unemployment rate — few people were asking
what lies behind those figures.
For future workers at the biggest grocery stores in California, the
largest state economy in the nation, jobs will be slimmed-down versions
of the posts held by their senior colleagues.
Last weekend, 70,000 workers at Vons, Albertsons, and Ralph’s voted
overwhelming to end their four-and-a-half-month strike, called in response
to the grocery companies’ plans to start making employees pay some
of the costs of their health care insurance.
The owners backed down from that demand for existing employees, but
in exchange, the stores will cut health and other benefits and wages
of workers hired after Oct. 5, 2003.
Before the strike, workers at the stores earned an average of 12 to
14 dollars an hour in a 30-hour work week. About 65 percent of the employees
are women.
Analysts agree that the California grocery stores took a hard line against
their employees because of the imminent arrival to the state’s
grocery business of Wal-Mart, the world’s retail giant.
The Arkansas-based firm has not permitted labor unions at any of its
5,000-plus stores in 11 countries to date, so its labor costs are lower
than those of its future opponents in the California grocery business,
giving it a sizeable competitive edge.
According to an official for a labor union that represents Wal-Mart
workers attempting to organize in Canada’s Quebec province, the
store has a much higher turnover rate of employees than other retailers
because of its poor working conditions.
Wal-Mart workers say that, “If you’re a good loyal employee,
if you have to work a little extra longer than you’re scheduled,
you won’t charge overtime. They frown on it. Of course if you put
your time-sheet in and charge it, they’ll pay it — [but] you
might just see your hours disappear the next week”, says Michael
Forman of the United Food and Commercial Workers.
“So there seems to be systemic abuse of unpaid overtime,”
he told IPS.
Forman says the retail industry, where most of the union’s US and
Canadian members work, has seen a large shift from full-time to part-time
jobs in recent decades — tied to extended store-opening hours —
which has increased workers’ insecurity.
“Think of what’s missing now: first of all, what’s missing
is a full-time job. The culture of a workplace is missing too, because
even if people sort of hate where they work, often it fills in their
day — they have friends they’ve been working with for years.”
Also, says Forman, “The feeling of security about the workplace
no longer exists, and there’s a certain tension there, because
as the employer has moved in a part-time direction ... while in a unionized
workplace there are parameters about how people can be scheduled; the
fact is that for most employees there is no guarantee over the medium
term of what their income is going to be.”
“They may get a certain number of hours this year; who knows what
they’re going to get next year?”
The growth of alternative forms of work to the full-time, full-year
job became apparent in Canada in the mid-1980s, says Leah Vosko an associate
professor specializing in gender, labor, and social policy at York University
in Toronto.
“We saw a growth in certain forms of part-time work, temporary
wage work, and what I often call ‘solo self-employment,’ or
working on your own account... so the dynamics of insecurity in the
labor market in Canada have been very much tied to these new work arrangements,”
she told IPS.
While many workers chose those non-standard forms of work, one must
look at how that choice is defined, she adds.
About one-quarter of people working at part-time jobs or who were solo
self-employed did so because they could not find a full-time permanent
position, say Vosko and co-authors of an October 2003 report for the
government’s Statistics Canada.
Since 1989 about one-third of Canadian workers have been employed in
other than full-time jobs, yet labor market policies continue to reflect
needs of full-time workers, Vosko points out.
That means, for example, “if you are in a temporary, part-time
job then you might be able to pay into unemployment insurance in Canada,
but it doesn’t really mean you can gain access to your entitlements
because the system is based on hours [and] assumes the norm of a full-time,
full-year worker,” she adds.
While some of the trends are the same, the process takes a different
shape in the United States, where “many more full-time jobs are
quite low wage, and may exhibit dimensions of precariousness [which
includes low income, limited control over working conditions and lack
of regulatory protection],” according to Vosko.
According to a recent report of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the
services sector — which includes both some of the most highly-skilled
and low-skilled jobs in the economy — will account for most of
the country’s new jobs, at least until 2012.
“We know that a substantial amount of the employment growth has
been in lower-wage industries [in the services sector], which are probably
lower-quality jobs — less job security; less access to health care
insurance,” according to Lori Kletzer, chair of the department
of economics at the University of California, in Santa Cruz.
“If that’s where the job growth is and we bemoan the loss
of secure, well-paid jobs in manufacturing, then we have to turn to
services and we have to think about it at a societal level — whether
it’s by legislation or other kinds of institutional change —
what might happen for those jobs,” Kletzer adds in an interview.
A three-year study into the impact of economic globalization found,
“In many parts of the world, especially in industrialized and middle-income
countries, problems of high or rising unemployment have been compounded
by additional pressures on the quality of employment.”
“Real wages and conditions of work have been under pressure, partly
as a result of increasing competition for export markets and foreign
investment.”
“There has also been growing insecurity among those at work, due
to interrelated factors such as the erosion of the welfare state, labor
market deregulation and the declining power of trade unions,” adds
the report of the World Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalization,
released in February.
It calls for a new focus on “decent work” — “employment
must be freely chosen and provide an income sufficient to satisfy basic
economic and family needs. Rights and representation must be respected,
basic security attained through one form or another of social protection,
and adequate conditions of work assured,” adds the commission,
created two years ago by the International Labor Organization.
