We have a lot of employment, but the quality of the jobs has collapsed over the last 10 years. The people who work now used to be people who had a jo… - Richard D. Wolff
" "We have a lot of employment, but the quality of the jobs has collapsed over the last 10 years. The people who work now used to be people who had a job with good income, good benefits and good security. The jobs, overwhelmingly, created have none of those things: low wages—that’s why our wages have gone nowhere; bad benefits—those are shrinking, pensions and so on; and the security is virtually gone. One of our biggest problems in America is people don’t know one week to the next what hours they’re working, what income they’ll get. You can’t have a life like this. So, what we’ve done is we’ve ratcheted down the quality of jobs. We’ve made people use up their savings since the great crash of 2008, so they’re in a bind. They have really no choice but to offer themselves at lower wages or at less benefit or at less security than before, which is why there’s the anger, which is why there was the vote for Mr. Trump in the first place, because this talk of recovery really is about that stock market with the funny money that the Fed Reserve pumped in, but is not about the real lives of people, which are in serious trouble, hence the numbers, like a average American family can’t get a $400 emergency cost because it doesn’t have that kind of money in the background. So, you’ve undone the underlying economy, you have this frothy stock market for the 1 percent, and this is an impossible tension tearing the country apart.
English
Collect this quote
About Richard D. Wolff
Richard David Wolff (born April 1, 1942) is an American , known for his work on and . He is Professor Emeritus of Economics at the , and currently a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the in New York. Wolff has also taught economics at Yale University, , , University of Paris I (Sorbonne), and The Brecht Forum in New York City. Not be confused with Richard Wolffe
Also Known As
Alternative Names:
Richard David Wolff
•
Richard Wolff
•
Economic Update
•
democracyatwork.info
•
Democracy at Work
•
rdwolff.com
Related quotes. More quotes will automatically load as you scroll down, or you can use the load more buttons.
Additional quotes by Richard D. Wolff
The second reason I focus on capitalism is that the responses to today's economic collapse by Trump, the GOP and most Democrats carefully avoid any criticism of capitalism. They all debate the virus, China, foreigners, other politicians, but never the system they all serve. When Trump and others press people to return to churches and jobs—despite risking their and others' lives—they place reviving a collapsed capitalism ahead of public health.
Well, you know, easiest way to summarize it: We have been following—and, unfortunately, Democrats, too—something called trickle-down economics. We do economic policy where we help the folks at the top—we bail out the big banks, we give a tariff benefit—and we hope it trickles down, which it rarely does. First thing they can do, reverse it. Let’s do trickle-up economics. You help the people at the bottom, in all the different ways that we know how to do because the FDR regime back in the ’30s did a lot of that. So we know how to do it. [...] Do it—well, put people to work. Put people to work doing socially useful things at a decent income, not working in a fast-food restaurant under unbearable personal situations. Here’s another one: this greening of America. There’s a project that could help millions of people in a direct way. Let’s kind of do that.
We did them before. The minimum wage should be raised, and dramatically. We should be helping all the kinds of people who have been denied help. We should be making sure that jobs are secure, that jobs have proper benefits, that we’re enhancing the benefits—all the things that could help the folks at the bottom have the money to spend, that will trickle up into the profits and revenues of business. That’s a more humane system. And, you know, even if it doesn’t work as much as we want it to, at least we will have helped the majority of people. What we have now is trickle-down, that helps those of the top, and then, when it doesn’t trickle down, what have we got? We’ve helped those at the top—again. The focus on trickle-up would be an alternation in our policy that’s long overdue.
Loading...