Educating For A Minimum Wage Job ?

When the Bush recession hit this country, and millions of jobs disappeared, a lot of Americans opted to get more education instead of trying to find work in an economy that was shedding, rather than adding jobs. The idea was that the further education would prepare them for an even better job once the economy turned around and businesses were hiring.

Well, the economy is once again producing new jobs, and there have been more new jobs created than jobs lost since President Obama took office. Unfortunately, that is not necessarily good news for those newly college-educated workers. Too many of them have only been able to find low-wage low-benefit jobs since getting their education, because there are still far too few decent paying medium to high wage jobs available.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that 8% of college-educated workers are currently employed in minimum wage jobs. But the bad news doesn't stop there. The number of college-educated workers in hourly jobs (paying just slightly above minimum wage) has climbed to about 17.8% -- a jump of 19% since 2007 (the start of the recession). That's about 1 out of 6 college-educated workers who have accepted low-wage jobs because nothing better was available.

How can this be? Isn't the economy recovering? Well, that depends on you point of view. If you are rich, a corporation, or a successful business-person, then you probably do view the economy as recovering -- because of higher profits and the ability to hire workers at a lower wage than was possible in the past. But if you are a working person, the picture is not so bright.

The reason for this is revealed when we look at the jobs that were lost and the new jobs being created. When the recession hit, about 20% of the jobs lost were low-wage jobs while about 80% were medium or high-paying jobs. But out of the millions of new jobs that have been created, about 58% have been low-wage jobs while only 42% have been medium or high-wage jobs. In other words, our economy is replacing good-paying jobs with low-wage jobs that have few benefits.

That is not the prescription for creating a healthy economy. A healthy economy has growing wages that creates growing demand (which in turn creates new jobs). Replacing medium and high-wage jobs with low-wage jobs just means the general public has less money to spend, contributing to shrinking demand and an economy struggling to grow. And if this trend continues, it will soon start to affect businesses and corporations (as overall spending decreases).

The Republicans say the answer to getting the economy moving again is to refuse to raise wages (especially the minimum wage, which they would like to abolish), weaken or do away with unions, cut government spending (which would shrink the economy), and give the rich and corporations even lower taxes (in spite of the fact their taxes are currently lower percentage-wise than many in the shrinking middle class). That is crazy -- just more of the same failed economic policies that created this economic mess in the first place.

What should be done is just the opposite of what the GOP wants. We need to increase the minimum wage to a decent wage (and tie it to the inflation rate), strengthen unions (making it easier for workers to form unions and bargain for decent wages), increase government spend for job creation (good jobs, not low-wage jobs), and fix our tax system so the rich and the corporations pay a higher rate than the middle class does (since their income and profits are so much higher).

Current economic policy is turning this nation into a huge third-world country (where a college education for most is a useless endeavor). Is that what we want?