Op-ed from Congressman George Miller
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Sunday, June 13, 2004

Reports increasingly cheer the economic recovery. Gross domestic product is growing at a healthy rate; corporate profits are up; the Dow Jones is consistently hovering near 10,000; and payrolls, finally, are increasing. Talk to the Bush administration and most CEOs and you'll get a rosy picture of the U.S. economy.

Talk to typical workers, though, and the view changes significantly. Sure, the jobs are starting to come back -- but they're not as good as the jobs that were lost, and there are still fewer Americans working today than there were four years ago. And no matter how fast and how smart they work, workers' paychecks keep shrinking.

It is time for the president and the Congress to see things the way these workers see them.

The Economic Policy Institute has shown that the fastest-growing industries are low-wage ones, like hotel and food services, while shrinking industries are high-wage ones, like information services and manufacturing. And over the last few months, across-the-board, real wages have actually declined. In fact, wages have proved more sluggish in the last six consecutive months than in any other comparable period on record.

The explanation for all of this is that we're living in an economy where the forces that should benefit average workers are overwhelmed by policies and practices that benefit corporations and the wealthy, like trillion-dollar tax cuts.

In this difficult era of globalization, the Bush administration sees no need to stand up for average employees. Now, both the departments of commerce and labor do the bidding of big business.

The administration has either ignored or offered inadequate solutions to the growing crises in access to health care and retirement security; promulgated new regulations that threaten workers' hard-earned right to overtime pay; failed to extend unemployment benefits to workers that have lost their jobs through no fault of their own; and refused to raise the minimum wage. In other ways both large and small, the Bush administration has put a tight squeeze on the American middle class.

It's easy to see the effect of an economy where workers have trouble meeting their families' needs. Since the beginning of the 2001 recession, corporate profits have expanded by an astonishing 57.5 percent. Meanwhile, total wages and salaries have actually shrunk by 1.7 percent.

This exorbitant disparity is a new development. The Economic Policy Institute looked at the average trends over each of the last eight economic recoveries and found that profits grew by 13.8 percent, while wages and salaries grew by 6.3 percent.

Corporate leaders are doing well, too. The CEOs of large corporations bring home an average of $8.1 million per year -- more than most Americans will see in their lifetimes. In 2003, the average CEO of a large corporation pulled down 300 times as much pay as did the typical worker.

More and more, full-time workers are wondering how they're going to get by on their paycheck alone. Health-care costs are through the roof. For workers that dream of sending their kids to college, tuition and fees at four-year public universities are soaring, increasing by 14 percent last year alone. If all this weren't enough, average gas prices hit $2 this month, for the first time ever.

From one point of view, the good times are starting to roll again: profits are up, it's a bull market, GDP is growing. But for most Americans, caught in the Bush administration's middle-class squeeze, it feels a lot more like they're getting rolled.