Headline News
Low Work Participation Rate Shaped By Sorry Salaries
The U.S. unemployment rate over the last several years has declined significantly. But behind those numbers is another statistic that has created concern – the labor participation rate is falling, standing at 62.8 percent in May. That’s a 35-year low!
As a result, nearly 92 million adult Americans are not working, an all-time high. While some have argued this is because would-be workers cannot find jobs, the truth is somewhat different. They cannot find quality employment that would cover their childcare costs and let them contribute to their families’ needs.
A report by the Pew Research Center notes a sizeable increase in the amount of stay-at-home mothers. It found that 29 percent of mothers did not work outside the home as of 2012, up from the modern-era low of 23 percent in 1999. This is not because more are choosing to opt-out of the workforce. Rather, they are being forced out of it.
“With incomes stagnant in recent years for all but the college-educated, less educated workers in particular may weigh the cost of child care against wages and decide it makes more economic sense to stay home,” Pew states.
Such a choice becomes even clearer when one delves deeper into the how much daycare prices have soared. The U.S. Census Bureau notes costs have nearly doubled over the last quarter century, and families with an employed mother and children younger than 15 paid an average of $143 a week in 2011 for childcare.
Families who decide that one parent should forgo finding a job and instead care for the kids give up something quite valuable – economic security. “One of the most striking demographic differences between stay-at-home mothers and working mothers relates to their economic well-being,” Pew finds. “Fully a third (34 percent) of stay-at-home mothers are living in poverty, compared with 12 percent of working mothers.”
The sorry state of pay for non-college educated working women in particular is yet another reason why they should support unions. Those who do join unions make 15 percent more than their non-union colleagues, according to a new Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) study.
“Since unions disproportionately raise wages at the middle and the bottom of the wage distribution, and since unions reduce gender wage disparities both across and within occupations, unionization works to reduce the gender pay gap,” CEPR states.
Hard-working Americans, female and male, deserve to make a wage that will allow them to support their families. But increasingly that is not happening for too many workers. The Teamsters continue to lead the charge for equality and respect in the workforce. It begins when corporate America decides to lift up its employees so they can live a middle-class lifestyle.