Today, let's start our little look at history.
We've actually been here before is
sort of the theme I want to develop,
because I want us to put us back as if you are entering
the labor force around 1930.
You've just come off what we call the roaring '20s.
And while you should feel better because the economy was going
so well in the 1920s and profits were up
and the stock market was at record levels,
you probably don't feel very optimistic.
Because despite all this good news,
family income was falling in the 1920s as it is today.
Most of the income went to the top 10%,
just as it is today in our society.
And then of course 1929 comes along,
and we get the Great Stock Market Crash,
and everything starts to fall to pieces.
At that point, over the next several years,
if you were entering the labor force or an existing, more
mature worker, you were expected to lose between 8%
to 20% percent of your income.
If you got unemployed, over 25% of the labor force,
you were really in dire straits.
There was steady loss of income, especially for those people
who were working in small businesses
or working on the farm.
Well, this created all kinds of pressures,
and it led to the election of a new president.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt
was elected in 1932 with pressure from the population
to bring us out of the depression
and find new ways to protect workers' jobs and incomes.
Well, he had quite a job on his hands--
so many people out on the streets,
looking for a job, homeless.
A new term was invented, something
called Hooverville, people pitching
tents in our major cities because they
had nowhere else to live.
The Great Dust Bowl occurred, so people from Oklahoma and Texas
started to migrate with their families
to California in search of a better life.
The Grapes of Wrath, written to describe
the plight of these people who were moving
to try to find a better job and a better opportunity
was probably the best selling book about that time.
And so something was needed.
Well, we actually did get some change in national policy.
This is a picture of the first woman cabinet
member in the United States, Frances Perkins,
who was chosen to be the Secretary of Labor
by President Roosevelt. But she warned him.
When he interviewed her about the job, she said,
Mr. President, you don't want to choose me as a secretary
unless you're willing to think about new forms of unemployment
insurance and minimum wages and social security for people
when they retire.
Well, Roosevelt said, that's exactly why
I want you for this job.
And so we did see what was called the New Deal come
to pass in the 1930s, with a lot of work with the Congress
and with the Roosevelt administration.
And building on many of the innovations that
occurred at state and local government levels
in the previous 20 years, we got much of the labor legislation
that still is the foundation for labor policy
today, starting with unemployment insurance.
Unemployment insurance was first put in place
to try to provide temporary assistance for people
who were out of work who would get called back to work when
the economy got better.
Well, that worked for a long time,
but today almost nobody who gets unemployed
expects to be called back.
Job loss is permanent, and so we need to update the unemployment
insurance system.
It's not just to provide temporary financial assistance
for people out of work.
We need to help them find new jobs
and get new training opportunities
and assistance to move to where the jobs happen to be.
In 1938, we passed the first minimum wage and overtime
legislation, called the Fair Labor Standards Act. $0.25
an hour was the minimum wage at that time.
That has moved up now to $7.25, but the bad news
is it hasn't kept up with inflation.
So we are worse off today at that level
than we were in the mid 1960s.
And we need to update the minimum wage
at the national level to keep up with the rate of inflation
and the growing cost of living.
The same with rules around overtime--
through the '40s, '50s, and '60s over 60% of salaried workers
were still eligible for overtime.
Today that number is down to about 10%.
And so we've got to find ways to allow
low-wage salaried workers, assistant managers
at McDonald's and other places, to be able to get overtime
if they're working 50 and 60 hours a week, as many of them
are.
The National Labor Relations Act provided
for collective bargaining legislation in the 1935 act.
That law promised workers a right
to gain access to a union and collective bargaining,
and it worked quite well for many years.
But today it's broken beyond repair.
Today if an employer wants to resist a worker's right
to organize, over 90% of the time
the employer is going to win.
And the workers will be frustrated.
So we need to find new ways to modernize that law
to provide workers with the voice that they want.
We passed the Social Security Act in 1935
that provided a retirement income for all workers,
based on the hours that they worked
in the labor force over the years and the salaries
that they earned.
And that law still provides a good retirement income
for most workers.
But that law, too, needs to be updated,
because we're living longer; we're not
able to cover all of the debts of the next generation,
and therefore, we're going to have to tweak that law a bit
in order to avoid going bankrupt with social security
over the next 20 years.
All of these laws need to be updated to catch up
with the changing workforce and the changing nature of work,
but perhaps we have to go farther.
Maybe it's also time to pass some new legislation,
to recognize that today it takes two working
parents to earn a decent living for their families.
So maybe it's time for the United States
to become the last country in the developed world
to provide some form of paid family
leave if we have to stay home and take care of a sick child
or take care of an elderly parent that needs help.
It's time to modernize our labor and employment relations
policies.
So, yes, we've been there before in the 1930s.
And we can do it again if you put your creative ideas
and your collective energy together
to modernize employment policies to fit today's
economy and today's workforce.