Ordinary Americans

One of the reasons the economy is so deeply in the tank is that ordinary Americans have not received a fair share of the economic advances of the past several years. You don’t hear much about this. Americans have been working harder and harder, and more and more efficiently (we are now the hardest working people on the planet, having passed the Japanese in this category), but ordinary workers have not been paid for this enhanced productivity.

As my colleague at The Times, Steven Greenhouse, pointed out in his book “The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker,” published earlier this year:

“Even though corporate profits have doubled since recession gave way to economic expansion in November 2001, and even though employee productivity has risen more than 15 percent since then, the average wage for the typical American worker has inched up just 1 percent (after inflation).”

That was part of a pattern of gross unfairness that has been unfolding for some three decades. No wonder people have depleted their savings and maxed out their credit cards.

The crisis now, of course, is not that wages are stagnant but that the jobs themselves are disappearing. It’s not just change that the nation needs, but big change.

President-elect Obama has talked of a “new dawn of American leadership.” Three-quarters of a century ago, Franklin Roosevelt promised a New Deal and said his biggest task was “to put people to work.”

That’s as appropriate a cue as any for the next president. I hope Mr. Obama’s “new dawn” portends more than just a few nibbles around the edges of change. We need change that brings about more shared sacrifice in wartime and tough times, and a more equitable distribution of the nation’s resources all the time.

I want to know who in the Obama administration will be listening to the young girl on the South Side of Chicago whose future is constrained by a lousy public school, and the factory worker in Toledo whose family’s future has been trampled by unrestrained corporate greed and unfair trade policies.

--Bob Herbert