Occupy our occupations: why "we are the 99%" resonates with working people and what we can do to fix the American workplace.

• Author: Leberstein, Sarah

Introduction I. Workers Are Falling Behind A. Running Faster to Stay in Place B. Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone? C. Wage Theft and the Decline of the Organizations that Fight It II. The Decline of Standard Work A. You Don't Work Here Anymore, Now Get to Work B. Losing Your Job is "Just a New Way of Doing International Business." III. A Disintegrating Safety Net IV. Rebuilding Work as a Pathway to Opportunity A. Raise the Minimum Wage and End Outdated Exclusions B. End Tax Incentives for Outsourcing American Jobs and Create Incentives for U.S. Job Creation C. Support Strong Enforcement of Labor Standards and Hold Employers Accountable D. Stop Independent Contractor Misclassification and Hold Subcontracting Employers Responsible E. Get America back to Work Conclusion INTRODUCTION

The experts have named "Occupy" 2011's word of the year, (1) even as the path for the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement itself is unclear. Protest sites throughout the country are threatened with closure, and recent polling shows that a slim majority of respondents see their physical presence as a public nuisance. (2) The same polls however, show that between forty and forty-eight percent of respondents continue to see OWS as representing the frustrations of most Americans. (3) By coining the phrase "We Are the 99%," OWS has distilled a general sense of lost equilibrium such that even four months after its start, OWS remains able to "occupy" the popular imagination of a significant portion of the public. As The New York Times observed, OWS took a sentiment "in the air" and converted it into "simple math." (4)

Although most onlookers are not pitching tents at an Occupy camp, they are nevertheless experiencing the division between the 1% and the 99% every day in their occupations. (5) Workers at all levels are feeling precarious and exposed, and their ability to defend their labor rights and bargain collectively to set workplace standards is under attack. (6) OWS's early assertion that the movement represents "all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world" (7) resonated with the suspicion among millions of U.S. workers that employment no longer provides certainty today or promise for tomorrow. (8) Indeed, workers in the United States have less relative economic mobility--the ability to move outside the economic class of one's parents--than in most other industrial nations. (9) At the same time, legislative changes to safety net programs and increasingly hostile rhetoric against those who depend upon them have signaled to workers that they are on their own.

Even before the Great Recession, workers struggling with stagnant wages and stalled mobility were confronted by an idealized "meritocracy" that suggested their failure to rise was due to flaws in their character rather than a system where the rules were stacked against them. (10) Even now, several years into the recovery, an unprecedented number of workers are feeling the stigma. The Great Recession came on the heels of another slow "jobless" recovery; from 2000 to 2007, average annual job growth was only 0.6%, (11) leaving millions un- or under-employed and providing no pressure to increase the wages of those still at work. (12) The jobs that are being added to the economy are concentrated in higher-wage skilled professions or lower-wage jobs, while mid-wage jobs like machinists, kindergarten teachers, and sales representatives accounted for only 6.2% of net employment growth between 2001 and 2008. (13) This new hourglass economic model squeezes out any promise of economic mobility for most workers. (14)

Even with the start of this most recent "recovery," wage growth and job growth stagnated. Between the second quarter of 2009, when the recovery began, and the fourth quarter of 2010, national income rose by $528 billion, with the vast majority of that increase--$464 billion--going to pretax corporate profits and just $7 billion going to aggregate wages and salaries (after accounting for inflation). (15) In contrast, in the recovery that began in 1991, 50% of the growth in national income went to wages and salaries during the first six quarters after the recession ended, while corporate profits actually fell by 1% during that period. (16) That this "recovery" has disproportionately favored corporations over workers may help to explain why such a large swath of the workforce feels left behind. The social compact whereby Americans believed that both the opportunity for prosperity and the burdens of economic change would be widely shared is in shreds, making working people especially responsive to OWS's rallying cry of "the 99%."

In this Article, we review some of the methods by which corporations and their allies have diminished workers' leverage in the workplace, providing decades worth of lived experiences that ratify the OWS critique. We also suggest concrete policy solutions to rebuild the workplace as a point of opportunity, to "re-occupy" our occupations. Worker and community organizations have taken the lead in challenging workplace insecurity and injustice, though the path to broad coalition work remains unmapped. As we move into the third year of the purported economic recovery and the election season opens the dialogue on what kind of economy we want as a nation, these case studies in policy design suggest ideas to take "occupy" from the word of the year to a solid economic plan.

1. WORKERS ARE FALLING BEHIND

   1. Running Faster to Stay in Place

      Long before the first tents were set up, even before the Great Recession, working people were working harder just to keep their heads above water. Between 1973 and 2007, productivity (the output per hour) went up by 83%, while pay for the median worker increased by only 10%. (17) Had typical wages been in line with productivity increases, by 2005, workers would have seen a 6 to 70% rise in their paychecks. (18) These lost dollars have added up; researchers estimate that in the first decade of the twenty-first century alone, the failure of wages to keep up with productivity increases has cost workers more than $200 billion in lost labor compensation. (19)

      Wages have stagnated as a result. For two decades, high-school educated workers in particular saw miniscule wage increases; in the private sector their paychecks rose just 4.8%, and those in state government struggled with a barely perceptible 2.6% growth. (20) The federal minimum wage, theoretically the floor that upholds workers' wages and provides them some level of leverage in negotiating their pay, has increased only five times since the late 1960s. (21) Because federal legislation fails to index minimum wage to rising costs of living, the minimum wage now stands at roughly two-thirds the value it had it 1968 and is less than 40% of the average wage. (22) To compensate for stagnant wages, families depend ever more heavily on multiple wage earners, entering into the "two-income trap" in which adults--especially women--cannot afford to quit their jobs, but find that increased costs for child care and transportation mean they cannot really afford to keep them either. (23)

      Some pin the blame for stagnant wages on American workers' lack of skills and education, arguing that these alleged deficiencies make them unable to compete in the modern economy. (24) And indeed, the income gap between skilled and unskilled labor has grown exponentially as earnings for those with college degrees dramatically outpace those of workers without post-secondary education, adding pressure for working-class families to send children to university. By 2009, this college wage premium had risen to 84%. (25) These premiums in earnings come with a steep price; since the 1990s, tuition and fees at public universities have grown by almost 130%, (26) with the result that graduates can see repayments that consume more than 15% of their income. In an international context, the United States is "clearly the worst place to be" for low-income high-education debt graduates. (27) Many OWS activists have called for student debt forgiveness, noting that because it is non-dischargeable, loan debt can follow a borrower for years. (28)

      Sadly, taking on these debt burdens doesn't guarantee a job. Unemployment for recent graduates with a bachelor's degree is just under 9%, with holders of degrees in architecture, information systems, and the fine arts averaging over 10% unemployment. (29) Furthermore, the benefits of higher educations are not spread equally across occupations, with the greatest rewards concentrated amongst managerial and health professionals. Nor do the benefits accrue equally across race and gender lines. In fact, women need to have a doctoral degree to earn as much as men with a bachelor's degree. (30) On average African Americans' lifetime earnings are 13 to 16% less than their Caucasian counterparts, a discrepancy that increases to 23% less for those with professional degrees. (31)

   2. Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone?

      Even now, in the third year of the "recovery," job growth remains sluggish. According to the Department of Labor (U.S. DOL), in December 2011, the total unemployed, including those out of work, discouraged workers who have stopped looking for jobs, and those employed only part-time for economic reasons, remained at 15.2%. (32) Early data indicates that while many mid-wage jobs were lost during the recent recession, lower-wage industries are returning more quickly. (33) The federal government predicts that some mid-wage professions that suffered significantly in the recession, for example architecture and engineering, may only barely recover their 2006 employment levels by 2020, while occupations generally classified as lower-wage, such as personal care aides and home health aides, are predicted to have the largest percentage growth over the next decade. (34) By 2018, the U.S. DOL expects the fastest growing occupational groups to include home health aides (with...