US Labor Market Improved But Not Back To Pre-Crisis Levels
Marc Chandler | Sep 01, 2014 09:50AM ET
The United States and Canada celebrate Labor Day today. Its origins are a few years earlier than the May 1 international labor holiday, which is also of American origin.
May Day arose out of the ashes of the 1886 Haymarket Square affair in Chicago. The roots of the September Labor Day can be traced back to a large organized labor parade in New York City in 1882.
The September Labor Day did not become a national holiday until 1896. It appears to have been seized upon by the political elite as moderate alternative to the May Day holiday, which was identified with more radical elements of the labor movement. May Day has historically been associated with effort to reduce the work week and increase pay. September's Labor Day traditionally focused on the dignity of work. It may not be an exaggeration to say that September Labor Day is to the May Day holiday what a company union is the the union movement.
These Pew Research , which drew on Bureau of Labor Statistics. They illustrate both the improvement in the US labor market and how it still has not returned to the conditions that existed before the crisis.
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The increase in productivity means that we can produce more goods, while spending less time making them. Productivity is considerably more difficult to measure in parts of the service sector, but technological advances also permeate that space. Consider the ATM and sku-readers at retail stores, as easy examples (but don't fiddle with my string quartet).
The key challenge is lies with distribution not production. The distribution is not only of consumption, and the necessary separation of consumption from work, but also the distribution of work and leisure time itself. On this Labor Day, I will think about how the cumulative increase in productivity provides the economic basis for a re-organization of society.
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