Goals and Articles
Immediate Coalition Goals
1. Recruiting every American worker that has to struggle to make ends meet. Every worker out there who has to work 50-60 hours every week just to get ahead of the game. Those workers that have had to put themselves into debt because of their puny pay. Anyone who makes less than $200,000 a year, and especially anyone who makes less than $50.000 a year. Any family has to make a dual income to get by. Any worker that finds it hard to keep a job because of the lack of jobs. Any family that wonders where the money will come from to send their children to college. College students that have to work poor paying jobs, and have to put themselves into debt to get their education.
2. Opening the first CAW Coalition office, and staffing it with members to not only meet your needs, but to find funds for the Foundation, contact our government officials on a constant basis through emails, letters, phone calls, and meetings, and to contact our members and keep them updated on current affairs.
3. To distribute funds to coalition members through the Foundation, in hopes that you can have a little domestic tranquility.
4. Eventually to have a SAW Coalition office in every state so that the coalition can work with Government officials at every level of Government.
5. In four years from now to have enough members to make a difference in an election. They always have their special interest groups, but if this one has enough members their going to have to make changes or else loose an election.
Extended Goals
1. To get fraud laws passed that would prosecute any person campaigning for public office that makes promises, and is elected, and does not do everything in their power to keep said promises a term in prison.
2. New tax laws that protect American workers who make below $200.000 a year exempt from income tax. What you make is what you get paid.
3. Reinstatement of Social Security back to 65 and new laws protecting workers from ever loosing those rights. We have paid into the system, and we earned the right to collect.
4. New laws passed that protect consumers from over pricing and driving up the cost of living, and driving down the cost of living so that it lowers to a 30 year ago comparison. Corporations should not be making billions of dollars at our expense. example, oil companies making 3 or 4 billion dollars in a quarter while we pay nearly $4.00 or more a gallon in fuel costs.
5. Programs developed to help small businesses to compete with larger corporations. Also protection against being ran out of town.
6. Laws against hording large sums of money, driving our country into recession. Why does anyone need more money than generations could ever spend. This excessive amount of money needs to be in the economy to stimulate the economy. Also laws against our Government printing excessive amounts of money to solve the money hording problem.
7. Laws against our Government spending tax payer money to aid other countries. This is what Non Profit Organizations are for. How about spending this money to help the out of work homeless in this country that want to work.
8. This Coalition will spend time tracking Government spending and confront any wasted spending. At the top of the list is this obsession with finding some bacteria or foreign organism from outer space. Why is our Government wasting tax dollars on this when so many people in this country are suffering. It is time to really balance the budget.
9. Push to get our Freeways and Highways caught up with the times. More fuel in this country is wasted while we sit in gridlock during rush hour. Update our old bridges and overpasses. This ought to create a few jobs.
10. Tax those businesses that outsource jobs to make more profit.
11. No more tax breaks for million and billion dollar companies, but use those tax dollars to help small businesses when they are struggling.
12. Politicians should not be allowed to have any interests in big business, because this is a conflict of interest. Any Government official who uses their position in government for financial gain should be prosecuted.
13. Any bill passed by the senate that benefits Americans, always seems to have attachments That hurt Americans. This needs to stop, Bills and Amendments need to stand on their own without these hidden agendas.
14. This Coalition will fight every day of its existence to see that these geniuses that caused this financial problem in our country, watches the problem get solved while they are behind bars. Also if any of our Government officials pay them a nickel of taxpayer money to pay them bonuses, this Coalition will fight to see them prosecuted.
Monthly News Letters
Wages in America: The Rich Get Richer and the Rest Get Less
by JACK RASMUS (Copyright 2004)
Do you feel like you’re working harder, longer hours, and still can’t keep up with rising taxes, gasoline prices, utility bills, ballooning medical expenses, or the accelerating cost of paying for your kids’ education?
Well, you’re not alone! You’re in good company. The company of tens of millions of American workers today on the same economic treadmill, having to walk faster and faster just to stay in the same place, or, unable even to keep up with the pace due to unemployment, loss of benefits, or wage cuts by their employers.
How would you like to be making $200,000 a year today after 25 years on the job? Well, if you started with the pay of an average worker 25 years ago that’s what you’d be making today—if you got the same kind of raises that CEOs of American companies got for the past 25 years! The average compensation of a CEO in 1980 was about 40 times that of the average worker in his company. Today it is more than 500 times! If your pay had kept up with his, you would be making more than $200,000 this year. Of course, that didn’t happen, did it? So let’s see what actually did happen to the average American worker’s pay over the past 25 years of the Reagan-Bush economic regime.
Stagnating Workers’ Wages
In 1979 the American worker’s average hourly wage was equal to $15.91 (adjusted for inflation in 2001 dollars). By 1989 it had reached only $16.63/hour. That’s a gain of only 7 cents a year for the entire Reagan decade.
But wait. Things get worse! By 1995 it had risen to only $16.71, or virtually no gain whatsoever over the 6 years between 1989 and 1995. During the great ‘boom years’ between 1995 and 2000 it rose briefly to $18.33 per hour. In other words, from 1979 to 2000, even before the most recent Bush recession, after more than two decades the American worker’s average wages increased on average only 11.5 cents per hour per year! With nearly all of that coming in the five so-called ‘boom’ years of 1995-2000, and most of that lost once again in the last three years. And that includes for all workers, even those with college degrees.
The picture is worse for workers who had no college degree. That’s more than 100 million workers, or 72.1% of the workforce. For them there was no ‘boom of 1995-2000′ whatsoever. Their average real hourly wages were less at the end of 2000 than they were in 1979! And since 2000 their wages have continued to slide further.
The Great Productivity Swindle
Management is always quick to say in contract negotiations, ‘give us more productivity and we can afford to give you a bigger raise’. But this has been a false promise from 1979 to 2000, and an even bigger lie under George Bush II.
With 1992 as base year, productivity was at 82.2 in 1979. It grew to 94.2 by 1989 and 116.6 by the year 2000. In the past year, moreover, it has exploded, putting it over 120. That’s a nearly 40% increase since Ronald Reagan took office nearly 25 years ago!
The 100 million American workers without college degrees, whose real take home pay today is less than it was 25 years ago, certainly can’t be said to have shared in that 40% productivity gain. And the other 20 million or so with college degrees whose pay rose modestly at best certainly shared in very little of that nearly 40% productivity gain.
So who got all the money?
CEOs & Executive Compensation
Considering just the period from 1989 to the present yields an obscene result. The median executive salary (cash pay and bonuses) of American CEOs rose by 79% from 1989 to 2000 and has continued to accelerate right through the current Bush II recession! And that’s only the median. The average CEO cash and direct compensation growth is even higher than 79%.
But wait! That’s only CEO wage or ‘cash’ compensation. How about management incentives, stock options exercised, the value of new stock grants, special supplemental pensions, etc. etc. The growth of this ‘direct compensation’ of CEOs from 1989 to 2000 was no less than 342%!. 212% of that growth occurred in the ‘boom years’ of the late 1990s.
Put in real money terms, the median pay for an American CEO was $2,436,000 in 1989 and $10,775,000 by 2000.
The growth in CEO compensation has been unstoppable, and is accelerating faster every year. In 1965, CEO pay was 26 times that of their average worker. In 1980, as noted, 40 times. In 1989, it was 72 times. In 1999 it had risen to 310 times, and today, as per the above data from the accounting firm, Towers Perrin, survey it has reached 500 times.
The international comparisons are also interesting to note. Whereas the American worker today earns only about a third more than the average wage of the worker in 13 other industrialized countries, for those same countries the American CEO earns 300%, or three times, as much as his CEO counterpart. No average CEO compensation in any of the other 13 countries is equal to even half that of the typical American CEO’s. For example, the ratio of CEO to average worker’s pay ranges from a low of around 10 to 1 for Japan and Switzerland to a high of around 25 to 1 in the UK and Canada.
As one source has put it, “in 2000 a CEO earned more in one workday (there are 260 in a year) than what the average worker earned in 52 weeks. In 1965, by contrast, it took a CEO two weeks to earn a worker’s annual pay”.
The Falling Minimum Wage
One of the more shameful legacies of the past decades has been what has been allowed to happen to American workers at the lower end of the earnings spectrum. While workers at the top end have become fewer and fewer with the outsourcing and off shoring of high pay-good benefits union jobs, those at the lower end have been suffering their own severe hardship.
We are talking here about more than 10 million American workers who earn the minimum wage. (Contrary to corporate propaganda, only 28% of those getting paid minimum wage are teenagers. Most are single women or men as head of households). The minimum wage in America reached its high point in the late 1960s in terms of real buying power, and thereafter went into a deep and steady free fall of more than 29% decline in buying power under Reagan during the 1980s. In the early and mid 1990s the decline was slowed somewhat with modest increases in the minimum wage legislated by Congress, but has fallen sharply was again since the last increase in the federal minimum wage in 1996, now approaching almost a decade ago.
In terms of 2001 dollars, the minimum wage in 1979 was worth $6.55. It fell to $4.62 in 1989, rose modestly in the early and mid-1990s, but today in 2003 is equivalent to only $4.94 an hour. The minimum wage is 21.4% less today than it was in 1979.
The Legacy of Declining Hourly Wages in American: Working Longer And Harder
The overall picture is abundantly clear: real average hourly ages of more than 100 million of American workers’ are less today than 25 years ago; real wages of college educated workers have risen only modestly in the late 1990s and fallen since under Bush II; and real wages of the 10 million lowest paid workers have declined more than 21%.
Given this irrefutable array of facts, one might ask ‘how has the American worker and his or her family survived the last quarter century under Reagan and Bush’? The answer is by working longer hours individually and as a family unit and by taking on more and more household debt both in lieu of hourly wage gains.
Let’s look at hours worked: The American worker not only works more hours in a year than his counterpart in other industrialized nations, but is the only worker in the 13 major industrialized countries whose hours worked per year actually increased since 1979.
Workers in all the other industrialized countries have enjoyed an actual decrease in their total hours worked per year in a comparable period.
For example, there are approximately 2080 hours of work in a year. In 1979 the American worker individually worked 1905 hours out of the possible 2080. But by 1998 he or she was now working 1966 hours a year. That’s an increase of 61 hours. In contrast, a worker in Germany saw his working hours decline from 1764 to 1562. A worker in France from 1813 to 1634. And in the United Kingdom from 1821 to 1737. The picture is similar in all 13 industrialized countries recently surveyed.
As a family unit, while real wages of male workers as heads of households in the US have fallen, the American family has worked longer hours by adding more family members to the workforce. Since 1973 this increase in family average hours worked is the equivalent of adding 5 months of work in a year to the 2080 hours. Wives in working families have assumed the major share of this increase in total family hours worked, contributing more than 500 additional hours of work per year. But the male worker in the family has also worked more overtime hours, and both husbands and wives have taken on second part time jobs as well. All three developments add up to the 5 additional months of work American workers’ families now work in order to offset declining hourly wages and just to make ends meet.
If it were not for working these longer hours worked, or adding record amounts of family debt (installment, mortgage, student loan, etc), the standard of living of the American worker and his family would have certainly collapsed.
Conclusion
While the American worker and family are working harder, with longer hours, and still falling further and further behind. The American CEO is 500 times better off since Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II. Think about that $200,000 equivalent pay you might have gotten if you were treated as equally or fairly as the CEO of the company you work for.
—Jack Rasmus, National Writers Union, UAW 1981, AFL-CIO.
This article is an excerpt from Jack Rasmus’s forthcoming book, THE WAR AT HOME: The Corporate Offensive in America From Reagan to Bush, which is available for pre-ordering along with offerings of other plays, music and videos.
Take Action!
This is a list of government contact information
1. These are areas of Government that you can contact to help our cause. When you have time send them email or write them a letter. We want them to know we are here.
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2. Copy this section and paste it into the subject section.
How about some real help
3. Copy and paste this into the body section.
Hello I am a member of Struggling American Workers Coalition.
1. For the past 30+ years the cost of living in this country has had a steady incline, while wages have remained nearly stagnant. This is an issue that in my view is at the top of the list. Everyone keeps saying less Government, but I believe that we need more government, but only where we need them. They need to be on the front line transforming Corporate America back to America. Let’s get the money being horded by the wealthy, back into the hands of the American worker. Stop giving billions of tax dollars to those that already have billions of dollars, and give those dollars to the small businesses that find it hard to get by. Drive down the cost of living by any means necessary, while keeping our incomes the same.
2. Give the baby boomers back their Social Security, just like those that came before us. You have taken our money, and we have the right to get what we paid for, and not when we are 80 years old.
3. Pressure insurance companies to also give us what we pay for, health insurance rates keep going up and the coverage goes down. Deductibles are a huge scam that provides us with almost no coverage at all. This is supposed to be health insurance not incidental insurance.
4. Corporate America has forced the American worker to work longer hours to survive our puny pay, we need to make them pay for it by increasing the amount that that they have to pay for overtime. Over time should be a luxury not a necessity.
5. Salary is Corporate Americas version of slavery. After a division of hours worked by the amount of pay, most times results in an hourly wage less than most of the workers below them. Salary or not if you work over 40 hours per week you should get paid extra for it.
6. How much money is enough? The number one problem I believe in our economy today is money hording. All these billionaires that are in some kind of race to be the top ten richest people in the country or even the world. This money needs to be in the economy to stimulate the economy. Right now the trillions of dollars made by the wealthy stays amongst the wealthy. Money hording should be against the law. These profits are made by screwing over the American workers by charging extreme prices driving up the cost of living, and paying unfair wages that I believe violates our Constitution.
This is the kind of help that Americans need right now, not some measly stimulus check to put a Band-Aid on the real problem.