How the Economy Got Restructured to Screw Workers
But don’t let’s kid ourselves. Capital still holds the whip hand. As The New York Times’s Noam Schreiber reported Feb. 1, “There is little evidence that service workers are winning any meaningful, long-term gains.” Wages are up, but they aren’t keeping pace with inflation. Union membership is declining. Even as the omicron virus raged in January, the workforce grew by nearly half a million people. And economic growth during the last quarter of 2021 was nothing short of astonishing.
In this booming economy, the problem of involuntary part-time work remains every bit as bad as it was before Covid, and at restaurants and hotels, it’s slightly worse. Last-minute scheduling of hours, which plays havoc with family responsibilities, is no less prevalent. Neither is outsourcing. Gig work, despite its long-term decline, saw an uptick during the pandemic, preliminary data suggest. That’s what you’d expect after the…
