Public Employee Press


Editorial
Manufacturing workers in crisis

As unionized jobs decline and employers increase the use of temporary employment agencies, one in three frontline manufacturing workers now rely on public assistance.

Once providers of unionized jobs with decent pay and benefits, these days U.S. manufacturers are beginning to resemble low-wage fast-food businesses like McDonald's and retailers like Wal-Mart, according to a recent study by the Center for Labor Research and Education at the University of California, Berkeley.

This comes with a public cost as local governments must make up for lost benefits. According to the study, low-wages in manufacturing cost an estimated $10.2 billion a year in public assistance.

Temporary jobs account for 9 percent of the jobs in manufacturing, up from 1 percent 25 years ago. At the time, employers were well on their way to implementing their anti-labor agenda of aggressively shifting jobs overseas, gutting benefits and weakening unions.

The median wage of temporary production workers is $10.88 an hour, compared with $15.03 for workers hired directly by manufacturers.

"While employment in manufacturing has started to grow again following the Great Recession, the new jobs created are less likely to be union and more likely to pay low wages," said Ken Jacobs, chair of the Labor Center and co-author of the report, "Producing Poverty: The Public Cost of Low-Wage Production Jobs in Manufacturing."

Half of the manufacturing workers hired through temp agencies receive at least one type of public assistance. That's similar to the rate of fast-food workers, which is at 52 percent. The benefits examined by the study were Medicaid, the children's health insurance program, the federal earned income tax credit, food stamps and basic household income assistance.

For the first time in decades, wages in the manufacturing sector rank in the bottom half nationwide, according to a study by the National Employment Law Project. In 2013, the typical manufacturing worker made 7.7 percent less than the median wage of all workers.

The state of our manufacturing workers cries out for a revitalization of the labor movement.