Mind The Gaffe: What's Missing From The Media Scrum Over Bush's Call To 'Work Longer Hours' | ThinkP

Think Progress

. ...

But that back-and-forth over the “work longer hours” line misses the bigger, subtler error in Bush’s diagnosis of the economy’s present underachiever status.

Bush claimed that if workers were able to get scheduled for more hours, they would “through their productivity gain more income for their families.” Obviously more hours would equal a larger paycheck. But Bush’s suggestion that being more productive will produce individual prosperity for American workers in the 21st century is flat wrong.

The relationship between American workers’ industriousness and their economic security has eroded so severely in recent decades that the two concepts aren’t even on speaking terms these days.

Workers were a staggering 25 percent more productive in 2012 than they were in 2000. But over the same period that bosses started getting a full quarter more work out of their employees, the median wage grew exactly zero percent. Even those with college degrees saw their pay stagnate over the past decade. Over the five-year stretch encompassing the Time of Shedding and Cold Rocks and the first few years of the slow recovery Bush is criticizing, workers gave their bosses an 8 percent jump in productivity – and got back an outright decline in earnings.

Wages and work ethic were already decoupled long before the enormous economic sinkhole that Bush’s brother handed down to President Obama. After charting nearly identical growth trajectories for decades after World War II, productivity growth and wage growth unlinked in the mid-1970s. Productivity has more than doubled in those past 35 years, while wages have grown by roughly 13 percent:

More
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2015/07/09/3678679/jeb-bush-workers-productivity-hours/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=tptop3&elqTrack=true&elqTrackId=8672002a6e004541b3bab8db4d6e854e&elqaid=26297&elqat=1



One also wonder if Jeb's call for more hours will be connected to tinkering w/ Soc Sec, like raising the retirement age...