The plight of the U.S. working class

Monthly Review

Volumn 65, Issue 8, 2014, Pages 1-22

  Magdoff, Fred ^a   Foster, John Bellamy ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF VERMONT   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF OREGON   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84893513279     PISSN: 00270520     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.14452/MR-065-08-2014-01_1     Document Type: Review

References (63)

1. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Charles Scribners, 1958), 21
2. and Economy and Society (Berkeley University of California Press, 1978), 85-86, 138, 1156.
3. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), 781-802.
4. Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, 796.
5. Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, 798
6. Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998), 264-77.
7. For a detailed empirical discussion of the modern reserve army of labor see Fred Magdoff and Harry Magdoff, "Disposable Workers: Today's Reserve Army of Labor," Monthly Review 55, no. 11 (April 2004).
8. On the global aspects of the reserve army see John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney, The Endless Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012), 125-54.
9. For a recent dissertation on Marx's reserve army and its significance for the sociology of unemployment see R. Jamil Jonna, Toward a Political-Economic Sociology of Unemployment: Renewing the Classical Reserve Army Perspective, PhD dissertation, University of Oregon, June 2013.
10. Calculated from SL Louis Federal Reserve FRED database, series PAYEMS, all nonfarm employees.
11. See David Milton, The Politics of U.S. Labor (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1982), 154-67.
12. Lewis Powell, "Memo to U.S. Chamber of Commerce," August 23, 1971, http://reclaimdemocracy.org
13. Bill Moyers, "How Wall Street Occupied America," Nation, November 21, 2011, http.//thenation.com
14. Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010), 117-20.
15. William E. Simon, A Time for Truth (New York: McGraw Hill, 1978), 195-201, 219-21, 230-38
16. Moyers, "How Wall Street Occupied America,"; Hacker and Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics, 123-24
17. W. Carl Biven, Jimmy Carter's Economic Policy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 237-52.
18. Kris Maher, "House Bill Would Boost Federal Authority Over Workplace Safety," Wall Street Joumal, April 18, 2013, http://online.wsj.com.
19. Gordon Lafer, The Legislative Attack on American Wages and Labor Standards, 2011-2012, Economic Policy Institute Briefing Paper 1364, October 31, 2013, http://epi.org.
20. Ben Stein, "In Class Warfare, Guess Which Class Is Winning," New York Times, November 26, 2006, http://nytimes.com.
21. See Doug Henwood and Liza Featherstone, "Marketizing Schools," Monthly Review 65, no. 2 (June 2013): 58-70.
22. Paul Krugman, "A War on the Poor," New York Times, October 31, 2013.
23. On the global labor arbitrage see Foster and McChesney, The Endless Crisis, 137-43.
24. Harry Magdoff, "A letter to a Contributor: The Same Old State," Monthly Review 49, no. 8(January 1998); 1-10.
25. See Floyd Norris, 'Many More Are Jobless Than Are Unemployed, New York Times, April 12, 2008, http://nytimes.com. Related to the real jobless or non-employment rate is the employment-population ratio.
26. See Paul Krugman, "The Employment Situation," New York Times Opinion Pages, September 7, 2012, http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com.
27. Philip Elliott,'Study: 15 percent of US Youth Out of School, Work, Associated Press, October 21, 2013, http://bigstory.ap.org.
28. Annie Lowrey, "Caught in a Revolving Door of Unemployment," New York times, November 16, 2013, http://nytimes.com.
29. Bruce Western, Jeffrey Kling, and David F. Weiman, The Labor Market Consequences of Incarceration, Crime & Delinquency 47, no. 3(2001): 410-27
30. Bureau of Justice Statistics, "Prisoners in 2012," http://bis.gov
31. Hannah Holleman, Robert W. McChesney, John Bellamy Foster, and R. Jamil Jonna, "The Penal State in an Age of Crisis," Monthly Review 61, no. 2 (June 2009): 1-17.
32. Heidi Shierholz, "A Projected 13.1 Percent of Workers Will Be Unemployed at Some Point in 2013," Economic Policy Institute, December 19, 2012, http://epi.org.
33. On this topic see Heidi Shierholz, "The Missing Workers: How Many Are There and Who Are They?," Economic Policy Institute, April 30, 2013, http://epi.org.
34. Heidi Shierholz, "Roughly One in Five Hispanic and Black Workers are 'Underemployed," Economic Policy Institute, August 22, 2013, http://epi.org.
35. Carol Hazard, "Hiring Explodes in Part-time and Contract Work," Richmond Times-Dispatch, September 2, 2013, http://timesdispatch.com.
36. Michael Grabelt, "The 4 A.M. Army," Time, June 27, 2013, http://nation.time.com.
37. David J. Roelfs, Eran Shor, Karina W. Davidson, and Joseph E. Schwartz, 'Losing Life and livelihood: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Unemployment and All-Cause Mortality, Social Science and Medicine 72, no. 6 (March 2011): 840-54, http://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.
38. Kate W. Strully, "Job Loss and Health in the U.S. Labor Market," Demography 46, no. 2 (May 2009): 221-46.
39. A lundin, I. Lundberg, L. Hallsten, J. Ottosson, and T. Hemmingsson, "Unemployment and mortality - a longitudinal prospective study on selection and causation in 49321 Swedish middle-aged men," Journal ol Epidemiology and Community Health 64 (2010): 22-28.
40. Marina Karanikolos, Philipa Mladovsky, Jonathan Cylus, Sarah Thomson, Sanjay Basu, David Stuckler, Johan P Mackenbach, and Martin McKee, 'Financial Crisis, Austerity, and Health in Europe, Lancet 381 (2013): 1323-31.
41. "Federal Minimum Wage Rates, 1955-2013," http://infoplease.com.
42. Calculated from St. Louis Federal Reserve FRED database, Real Median Household Income in the United States (MEHOINUSA672N).
43. Sylvia Allegretto, Marc Doussard, Dave Graham-Squire, Ken Jacobs, Dan Thompson, and Jeremy Thompson, Fast Food, Poverty Wages: The Public Cost of Low-wage Jobs in the Fast-food Industry, University of California, Berkeley, Center for Labor Research and Education and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Department of Urban & Regional Planning, October 15, 2013, http://labor-center.berkeleyedu.
44. Carl Bialik, "Public Cost of Fast-Food Industry's Low Pay Remains Unclear," Wall Street Journal, November 1, 2013, http://online.wsj.com.
45. David Ferguson, 'Bernie Sanders: Walmart Family's 'Obscene' Wealth Subsidized by Taxpayers," Raw Story, August 3, 2013, http://rawst.ory com.
46. "Poverty," U.S. Census, http://census. gov.
47. A Profile of the Working Poor, 2011, U.S. Bureau of labor Statistics Report 1041, April 2013, http://bls.gov.
48. A Profile of the Working Poor, 2011.
49. Edward P. lazear, Kathryn L. Shaw, and Christopher Stanton, 'Making Do With Less: Working Harder During Recession, NBER Working Paper No. 19328, National Bureau of Economic Research, August 2013, http://nber.org
50. "Why Productivity Increased During the Downturn," CNN Money, October 3, 2013, http://manage-mentfortune.cnn.com/.
51. "Workers' Awesome Output," Washington Post, March 31, 2010, http://washingtonpost.com.
52. Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster, 'Class War and Labor's Declining Share, Monthly Review 64 no. 10(March 2013): 1-11. It should be noted that our article contained a small error. In the comparison of private sector employees and all employees in Charts 1 and 2 the difference between the two was incorrectly said to be government workers instead of government and non-profit workers. However, this did not materially affect the argument in any significant way, because the argument clearly was that the small decline in the wage share in the 1970s did not occur within the private/profit sector and was instead attributable to the growth of non-private/nonprofit sector employment.
53. Margaret Jacobson and Filippo Occhino, 'Labor's Declining Share ol Income and Rising Inequality, Commentary, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, 2012, http://develandfed.org
54. Michael W.L. Elsby, Bart Hobijn, and Aysegul Sahin, The Decline of the U.S. Labor Share, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Working Paper 2013-27, 2013, http://frbsf.org
55. Congressional Budget Office, What Accounts for the Slow Growth of the Economy After the Recession?, 2012, http://cbo.gov, 14
56. Economic Report of the President, 2013, http://gpo.gov, 60-61.
57. Justin Lahart, "Worry Over Inequality Occupies Wall Street," Wall Street Journal, November 10, 2013, http://onlinewsj.com.
58. The Decline of the U.S. Labor Share, 31.
59. Eduardo Porter, 'Rethinking the Rise of Inequality," Ateiv York Times, November 12, 2013, http://nytimes.com
60. "How the 1 Percent Won the Recovery, in One Table," Washington Post, September 11, 2013, http://washingtonpost.com/
61. "Worry Over Inequality Occupies Wall Street," Calculated from NIPA Tables 1.1.5. Gross Domestic Product and 6.19D. Corporate Profits After Tax by Industry, U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau Economic Analysis, http://bea.gov.
62. "Worry Over Inequality Occupies Wall Street," Hacker and Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics, 3.
63. Karl Marx, Value, Price and Profit (New York: International Publishers, 1935), 59.