The economic insecurity

It may be tempting to reduce President-elect Donald Trump’s victory solely to a triumph of bigotry, especially when the headline numbers on the United States economy seemed to work in Hillary Clinton’s favour. Under President Barack Obama, the US witnessed the longest streak of job creation on record. Unemployment is below 5 percent and Americans are finally getting a raise.

But dig into the data and you’ll find a cauldron of economic insecurity that helps explain why voters sided with the self-styled, anti-establishment candidate.

Nearly six million Americans are     working part-time     who’d rather be working full-time. Non-college educated men of prime working age are    dropping out   of the labour force in alarming numbers.

A Federal Reserve survey found that 46 percent of Americans would struggle to        cover an emergency          $400 expense. Average incomes adjusted for inflation are         less than what they were     in 2007 and 1999 - despite the biggest jump on record last year.

Then, there are the trends the data doesn’t capture, such as wage theft, from which poorly paid, low-skilled workers are far more likely to suffer. The data is also partially blinded to the effect of ‘permatemps’ on the economy. We know there are battalions of permatemps and that many of them languish in this employment purgatory for years. Scholars believe permatemps drive down wages for permanent employees by making them aware of how interchangeable they are, thus reducing their bargaining power.

We have no clear picture of how many permatemps work in any specific industry because the US Department of Labor categorises them as employees of temp agencies and not the firms where they actually put in a day’s work.

These trends were the soil in which Trump sowed his promises to deport undocumented workers and tear up the trade deals he blamed for harming American manufacturing. However, these policies could backfire by creating more economic pain.

Still, the promise to revive manufacturing is a powerful one. For many, it conjures images of the golden era of the US’s middle class, when factories provided blue-collar workers with steady jobs that paid well above average.

But even if Trump manages to make good on that promise, there’s no guarantee it will wind back the clock for the middle-class Americans. Today, the average, non-supervisory factory worker       makes about  $5 less than    the     median          for all workers.

Globalisation has certainly been a factor in driving down wages, but there are other forces, such as automation and the erosion of collective bargaining power thanks to the collapse of unions.

Trump isn’t promising to reboot collective bargaining, but his anti-establishment rhetoric struck a chord with voters who long for job and financial security.

Americans who live with the sword of economic ruin dangling over their heads; Americans who have not recovered fully from the Great Recession, these are Americans who voted for the political outsider because the status quo has become unbearable.

 

This article has been excerpted from: ‘The economic insecurity behind Donald Trump’s triumph’.

Courtesy: Aljazeera.com