Rutgers Report Card: Labor Day Finds American Workers Without Much To Celebrate

Washington, D.C. (AHN) - Many American workers don't have much to celebrate on this Labor Day, according to a report released by Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations.

Rutgers University researchers found that the number of Americans who are unemployed, discouraged from seeking work or underemployed has increased nearly 25 percent from a year earlier.

"The economy is the number one issue going into the presidential race, and the scorecard provides a way to look at this area from the perspective of the American worker," Professor Douglas Kruse, a labor economist who helped create the scorecard, said in a statement Monday.

In its first report card on the condition of the nation's labor force, Rutgers researchers found a cause for concern because the sharp drop in the number of Americans who are able to find full-time employment was accompanied by escalating health care costs and growing consumer debt.

That situation is only likely to grow worse, as most Americans obtain health insurance through their jobs and usually only full-time jobs offer health insurance, rising health care costs will hit uninsured Americans who are unemployed, or only working part-time, especially hard.

Professors David Finegold, dean of the School of Management and Labor Relations, and Kruse, used both government and non-government data to pull together a "wide range of national indicators to provide a comprehensive picture of the condition of the U.S. workforce," they wrote in a statement.

What they found, and revealed, in their first national labor force report card were some sobering facts.

Among the problems that American workers face are:

• Although the federal minimum wage is now $6.55, when it is adjusted for inflation, the current minimum wage is now worth 40 cents an hour less than a decade ago.
• Wage stagflation because median weekly earnings for American workers have not grown over the last eight years.
• Employer-assisted childcare and employee wellness programs only cover less than one quarter of American workers.
• Roughly 4 percent of the workforce wants to work full-time, but is working part time because they can't find full-time work.
• An additional 530,000 people were subject to mass layoffs in the last year, a growth of nearly 5 percent.