Enforce the Wagner Act

[Canadian]

As for those other jobs that Americans ``won't do," we should invest in better pay.

The truth is that plenty of Americans would do landscaping work, clean hotel rooms, wash dishes, pick vegetables, and perform the other kinds of labor increasingly done by immigrants, just as earlier generations of Americans were willing to work in hot, dirty factories and dig ditches. It's just that they want to be paid decently for the work.

Every so often, even in this era of outsourcing and automation, somebody opens a factory in the American heartland. Maybe they pay $15 to $18 an hour, plus health benefits. And, funny thing: though the work is far from glamorous, people start lining up and camping out to apply for the jobs.

Raise wages, improve working conditions, and Americans will materialize. But won't that be inflationary? Here are some statistics that suggest it needn't.

Last September, Robert Gordon and Ian Dew-Becker, economists from Northwestern University, observed that productivity and per-capita GDP had roughly doubled in three decades, while median wages had hardly budged. So they conducted a study titled

``Where Did All the Productivity Go?"

They found that nearly all of it had gone to the richest 10 percent of the population, and the most extreme gains to the richest 1 percent, who now have a share of national income equal to the bottom 50 percent. The people who really made out were the top one- 10th of 1 percent -- one American in 1,000.

So if we had a distribution of income more like the one that prevailed in 1966, when chief executives made ``only" 60 times what a normal worker made instead of 600 times, we could raise the wages of ordinary people without adding to the nation's overall wage bill.

How to raise wages? By the usual methods that obtained before a plutocracy of CEOs and Wall Streeters specializing in conflicts of interest grabbed the economy by the throat: higher minimum wage laws, enforcement of the Wagner Act recognizing the right to form unions, and the use of federal reimbursements to set decent wage levels in human service work.

How to pay for that? Restore progressive taxation on the wealthiest.

Read it all here -

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/edi...p1=MEWell_Pos3