It says a lot about the current state of the US labor market
that Obama chose an Amazon warehouse to tout his economic policies, job
creation, and support for the “middle class”.
Apparently we have resigned ourselves to a labor market that, as most economic studies have shown, produces primarily low paying, insecure, and precarious
forms of employment for low skilled workers.
Our growth sectors are no longer goods-producing, but rather
goods-moving (more politely described as “logistics”).
Two reports on working conditions
in an Amazon warehouse, with the following titles, are hardly reassuring: “Inside Amazon's Warehouse: Lehigh Valley workers tell of brutal heat, dizzying pace at online retailer” and “I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: My brief, backbreaking, rage-inducing, low-paying, dildo-packing time inside the online-shipping machine”.
Based on what I
could discover from various sources, the average
warehouse worker at Amazon takes home about $24,500 a year — barely above the
federal poverty line for a family of four. This assumes the worker is not a
temp, an increasingly common employment status in this sector.
These
jobs will not contribute to an economic recovery, or a growing "middle
class", but they will sustain the Third World levels of income inequality
that now characterize the US economy.
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