This Labor Day is unlike any other we can remember in our lifetime. There is more labor to be done than there are willing workers. It seems there is a “help wanted” sign hanging on almost every other door or store window we pass. The biggest concern for local grape growers as the 2017 harvest begins is finding enough workers to pick their crops. With the official unemployment rate at 3.9 percent, this Labor Day in Sonoma County will be marked in stark contrast to recent Labor Days that were marred by a recession when the local unemployment rate hit a high of just over 11 percent.
The local jobs picture and state of our economy is never in perfect harmony. The help wanted signs in many local businesses’ windows have become almost permanent fixtures. Service and retail positions are going unanswered. Turnover of workers in hospitality has become a new fact of daily business. Even at this newspaper, we have had job openings go unfilled for more than two years.
Low unemployment is good news, but not everyone has the job they might prefer. Wages in many job sectors have not kept up with the rising cost of living — especially the cost of rents and housing. It’s been great to see the local construction industry regain so many trades jobs since the 2008 recession, but in other places many full-time jobs have been replaced with lower paying part-time jobs.
Between 2000 and 2017, the estimated accumulated worth of American households has more than doubled from $44 trillion to $90 trillion, according to studies conducted for the Congressional Budget Office. Equally spread, that would mean an average household of four should have a very handsome nest egg. But we all know that these trillions of new wealth are not being shared equally. Far from it.
In fact, average wage levels for American workers, age 24-54, have declined four percent in those same years. Corporate profits and shareholder dividends are higher than ever — and farther from reach to the average laborer than anytime in all the years that America has been celebrating Labor Day on the first Monday of every September.
Beyond the official unemployment statistics and the recovery numbers since 2008, perhaps the more real measurement is not how many jobs there are, but how many living wage jobs that number includes. The current California minimum wage is $10.50 per hour but an MIT Deparment of Urban Studies report calculates a true living wage for Sonoma County to be $13 per hour for an individual and $27.16 for a parent with one child. (In 2015, the county board of supervisors passed a $15 per hour living wage ordinance for county workers or contracted workers.)
It’s not news that Sonoma County is an expensive place in which to live. We have some of the nation’s highest-priced housing and transportation costs. Sonoma County also has a high federal poverty rate where 55,000 residents — mostly young children — live with unmet minimum food, shelter and health needs.
How can we have both a surplus of jobs and a lack of adequate household incomes?
The original spirit of Labor Day honored an organized labor movement that won bargaining rights, job safety, expanded employment for women and dignity for factory, farm and immigrant workers. That spirit today seems splintered by bitterness and resentment among, and between, different worker groups and citizens.
We have jobs nobody wants. We have paychecks that never go as far as we’d like. We suffer in disbelief that a very few (1 percent) are making trillions while the rest of us are just trying to make do. Added all together, it makes a farce out of this Labor Day.
