3-14-05, 8:21 am
Who took one of every two new jobs created in the U.S. in the past 12 months? Give up?
'Over the last year, workers over age 55 accounted for 918,000 of the 1,810,000 rise in employment shown in the (Labor Department’s) household survey,' says economist Dean Baker. 'This is a very striking and relatively new development.' Also, employers are increasingly choosing not to provide retirees with health insurance coverage, Baker adds. This move cuts costs for companies in fierce competition with other firms for profits and market share. Such a trend forces retirees to spend more income from pensions or savings on health care. For them, earnings from entering the labor market can help with rising health-care spending.
Frequently, President Bush speaks about an 'ownership society.' In this society, taxpayers, braced by examples of personal responsibility from the Republican Party and some Democrats, can keep more of their money due to the three income-tax cuts that the president proposed and Congress passed. What could be better than that? This unity of fiscal policy and personal responsibility sounds wonderful.
The for-profit health care industry has a related notion of self-reliance. It is called 'consumer self-help.' In this scenario, people exercise responsible use of the health-care system. When they act with too little responsibility, they are the problem. When health-care consumers turn that around, they become the solution. The less of the health-care system that consumers use, the more they can help to contain rising costs. Investor-owned hospitals back this private-public partnership with patients for the good of all. This is a win-win approach.
People work, from child-rearing to much else in US society. Nothing could be more natural than for us to be in motion, producing for ourselves and others. However, there is nothing natural about economic insecurity. It is not a force of nature like the temperature at which water boils and freezes.
Yet economic insecurity is driving older Americans back into the labor market. At the same time, employment opportunities for other workers are souring, the regular pattern of a market economy.
'In February 1999, there 16,953,000 people over age 55 who were working,' Baker says. 'Last month there were 22,772,000, an increase of more than 35 percent. This is especially striking since job growth had collapsed for everyone else after March 2001.'
Where is the popular discussion about this new workplace trend being lived by older Americans? They are, after all, a force to be reckoned with. Their strong opposition to Bush’s Social Security privatization plan is proof of that, and provides a platform upon which to push the domestic policy debate in a progressive direction.
--Seth Sandronsky, a member of Sacramento Area Peace Action and a co-editor of Because People Matter, Sacramento’s progressive paper. He can be reached at: ssandron@hotmail.com.
