This morning Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger reduced the wages of over 200,000 state employees to $7.25/hr until such time as the state legislature sees fit to pass a budget.

In California, $7.25 is the minimum wage, and most of those 200,000 workers are NOT employed by the legislative branch.

We have the same problem in Michigan, where the legislature gets locked up every year at budget time, because the state has less and less money every year to cover expensies. Many states are on the verge of bankruptcy, and Michigan is one of them.

Every year, the Democrats here don’t want to cut services, and the Republicans don’t want to raise taxes, so this collection of elected losers takes up sides and yells at each other. Then the government shuts down for weeks until someone figures out how to kick the can down the road for next year.

This has led to loud demands by aspiring Michigan politicians for a part-time legislature with no benefits and severe benefit cuts for all state employees (excluding themselves). Maybe we could make our representatives and state employees wear funny hats and hairnets and pay for their own uniforms too.

Yes, that will fix it all, I’m sure. At the very least it will be entertaining.

In Portage, the burbish city in Michigan where I personally live, early retirement was recently offered to hundreds of public school teachers in an effort to trim payrolls and save money. It was expected that this offer would go over pretty well, but sadly, almost no one jumped at the chance to retire at 45 or 50. (There are no other jobs around here. Period. Trust me, I’ve looked.)

So… the city kicked the can down the road, tabled the issue, and kept all the teachers on until next year, or until the city or state or both go bankrupt—which may well BE next year. Hard to say. 

Harry Reid’s opponent in Nevada, a Tea Partier named Sharron Angle, recently made headlines when she remarked that Americans have become “spoiled” and won’t take the jobs that are out there because they can get unemployment instead, and that entitlement programs are the real problem.

Angle must have made that wish when she blew out the candles on her last birthday cake, because no sooner did she slam the lazy spoiled American unemployed than Republicans in D.C. filibustered an extension on unemployment benefits three times in a row. By the time the Fourth of july weekend is over, over 2 million American families will no longer receive unemployment checks. Take that, you slackers!

Most experts believe that the U.S. needs to add at least 280,000 jobs per month for five years running in order to just get back to the level of employment before the October 2008 crash. June’s numbers saw the first real decline in jobs this year: Private payrolls added 83,000 new jobs, but 125,000 were lost—most of them temporary Census jobs. So even leaving out the Census complication, the U.S is nowhere near any kind of imminent economic recovery.

If we keeping adding about 83,000 jobs per year, we might have pretty decent employment in this country by 2025.

All of this is worrisome, but I think it’s actually much grimmer than what we’ll be hearing all day today as these numbers are spun and spun and spun again until they begin to resemble gold instead of straw. It’s going to take a lot of spinning to make that happen, and I doubt anyone will really believe it.

70 is the New 40

No, not the age, the workweek.

(Although, age-wise, 70 will probably also be the new 40 soon, as Baby Boomers start retiring en masse, either voluntarily or through forced corporate buy outs.)

Areas of ‘job growth’ in the U.S. in recent months have been mostly in temporary work or subcontract labor—that is, 1099 projects. By contrast, many of the people still left in traditional jobs are working ALL THE TIME.

Instead of hiring new people, corporations are just working the employees they already have to death. Most of the people in my immediate family who are still working are working 70+ hours per week or almost no hours per week. My significant other leaves the house at 5:30 in the morning and is lucky to be done working by 8:30 at night. Meanwhile, I grub subcontract work and take care of EVERYTHING else. I know many, many people whose lives are just like ours. And we are lucky: One of us has a real job.

The 40 hour work week is becoming a historical relic. If you do get a job, you better have a strong back.

The favored explanation for this grueling new reality is that businesses are slow to hire because they don’t fully trust the recovery. So, as orders tick upward and business improves, employers are just working their skeleton crews harder until they see the recovery is real.

But what if the recovery is not real?

Personally, I see no reason why employers, especially corporate employers, should EVER re-employ people at decent wages with real benefit packages when they can get desperate unemployed persons to do the work as subcontract labor at a fraction of the original cost. Many, many, many people are doing the exact same work they did before the crash only now they are ‘freelancers’, have no benefits, and make a third of what they once made, if they can collect it—which is an essay in itself.

What is even more troubling is this growing expression of contempt for labor. Out of work? Screw you! Start your own business you loser! Put your hand out and we’ll slap that hand so fast it’ll make your head spin. What we value here is movers and shakers, entrepreneurs!

In reality, in this economy, ‘entrepreneur’ is usually a euphemism for a laid off 50-year-old who can’t make money any other way than spotty self-employment.

I don’t know when or why we started hating working people. Working people literally built this nation, but now we talk about the unemployed like they are lepers or whores. Fend for yerselves ye scurvies!

Wow.

Well, here’s the thing:

If we are waiting for the ‘consumer economy’ to come roaring back on $7.25 per hour, we’re going to be waiting quite awhile.

I’m not saying we’ll never recover.

I’m just saying.

The good news is, there ARE countries where people get up every day without jobs and try to figure out, through their own initiative and their own energy, how to find food and heat for just that day. Most of them are in Africa and South America and most of them have better health care than we do, but these people do show that such a life is not impossible. (Did you know you can make burnable fuel but making patties out of dung and drying them? Also makes a great building material!)

I’ve also heard that there is work in Mexico at U.S. auto factories, but be careful sneaking across the border—their immigration policies are killer.

Beans and rice anyone?

Seriously, we need to start banding together. Change is possible but people have to cooperate, not be at each other’s throats. In Monopoly, when one person has all the money, the game is over. We seem to be near that point in real life in the U.S. right now. Less that 1% of the population now holds over 80% of the wealth. And they don’t care if the rest of us dry up and blow away.

So we’d better stop pointing fingers and start caring about each other.