A Look At America's Unions; Ten Jobs That Pay Six Figures
JACK CAFFERTY, CNN ANCHOR, IN THE MONEY: Coming up on IN THE MONEY why there is so little labor in Labor Day these days. We will look at the state of America's unions. Looking at the last time for tips on the next time. See if Katrina taught America anything about preparing for a natural disaster. And the $100,000 question. Find out about ten jobs that can pay you $100 grand or even more. All that right after a quick check of the headlines.</s>CAFFERTY: Welcome to the program. I'm Jack Cafferty. Coming up on today's edition of IN THE MONEY, union blues. It is Labor Day weekend but do America's labor unions have anything to celebrate, see if organized labor is on its way out or perhaps on its way back. Also ahead, storm warnings. Hurricane Katrina had lessons to teach about handling a disaster. Boy, did it. Find out if Washington has wised up any. And give yourself a raise. You wouldn't believe some of the jobs that pay $100,000 a year, or even more. Stick around, we might have a few surprises you'll enjoy learning about. Joining me today a couple of IN THE MONEY veterans, we have Jennifer Westhoven and we have Andy Serwer. We have gas prices for the first time in a long time apparently coming down. There is one national survey I read said they could hit $2 a gallon by Thanksgiving. That might be a little optimistic, but they're lower right now than they have been since April 20th. What's going on?</s>ANDY SERWER, EDITOR AT LARGE, "FORTUNE" MAGAZINE: Well number one, I mean I think it is a blip. But that's just my take. It is also a big running debate right now whether they are headed to $2; go back to $3 or $4. The folks at the Chrysler Corporation seem to be suggesting they're going to stay up for a while. Other people, maybe rose-colored glasses, think they're going back to $2 but I'm not one of them.</s>JENNIFER WESTHOVEN, CORRESPONDENT, "HEADLINE NEWS: " Do you want to put in your cynicism about the election here?</s>CAFFERTY: Certainly thought to cross my mind. I mean the oil companies have a vested interest in seeing that the Republicans remain in control of the federal government. I mean they wouldn't --</s>SERWER: Coincidence, or not?</s>CAFFERTY: They wouldn't pull prices down before the mid terms now. Would they?</s>WESTHOVEN: Even if it is temporary. It seems like it could help a lot of people, we have been seeing a lot of these corporate earnings from fancier retailers like Williams-Sonoma saying they're having problems, a lot of people are struggling with higher gas prices, furniture sales are up, Wal-Mart, Costco saying the expensive stuff is not selling.</s>CAFFERTY: There are a couple of real things going on. Crude oil is below $70 a barrel. Hasn't been that low in a long time. One of the reasons that I read was the hurricane season hasn't been what it was expected to be and the price of a hurricane season like last year was already built into this year's gas prices.</s>SERWER: You've got that Jack, and you've got Iran and you have Venezuela and Nigeria. Any of these things could erupt or turn bad or anything at any point. Blaming it all on the hurricanes or trying to suggest that the hurricanes are going to be good this year I can tell what the hurricanes are going to be like in October, that's tough stuff.</s>CAFFERTY: All right. Whatever the reason, we'll take it. If it goes to $1, that would be OK too. That will never happen. Funny to have a holiday that uses to be all work wound up being more about play. Back in the beginning, Labor Day was part demonstration, part celebration. Labor unions all across the country held parades on this day to show their strength, the workers then got together for parties afterwards. For the most part as far as American workers are concerned today, Labor Day weekend has now become about getting out of town or getting into a big sale and workers it seems have a lot less to party about. Labor consultant Beth Shulman is going to help us understand how we got to where we are and we are going from here, she is the author of "The Betrayal of Work, How Low-Wage Jobs Failed 30 Million Americans." Beth nice to have you with us.</s>BETH SHULMAN, AUTHOR, "THE BETRAYAL OF WORK: " It is a pleasure to be here.</s>CAFFERTY: Fifty years ago one-third of the non-agricultural jobs in the United States were union jobs: good wages, good benefits, a pretty good middle class life. Now there are 9 percent of the jobs left, nonagricultural jobs that are union jobs. What's going on?</s>SHULMAN: Well certainly what we have seen, well first of all I think it is important to remember that unions were absolutely instrumental in bringing the American dream to a large percent of Americans. We saw manufacturing jobs go from kind of bad jobs, dirty jobs, to the good jobs of the 20th century. And what happened was certainly the decline of the manufacturing sector, globalization, and deregulation. But I think the untold story was the real assault on unions. Certainly by corporations and by government. You know, Americans today, if they want to organize a union, they are confronted by employers firing them, they're harassing them. A human rights watch story showed that in fact a huge percent of workers end up being fired just trying to organize a union. So that's been a large part of the story. But I'm optimistic this Labor Day. I really see a resurgence of the American labor movement in organizing the growing service sector.</s>WESTHOVEN: Well, after all this systematic weakening of workers bargaining power, as you call it, we've really seen though a split between the AFLCIO and some of the other big unions out there. A lot of pundits and headlines that came out of that were people who were basically starting to write the obituary saying this was the death for organized labor. What do you think is the state of it today? What gives you hope that things are coming back?</s>SHULMAN: Well I see great hope. I see if you look at service sector certainly, you're seeing janitorial jobs becoming good jobs when they're organized. If you take a janitor and unionized employer, they're making $13 an hour, have health benefits and pension plans and time off, as opposed to the non-union janitor that is making $8 an hour. Security guards are being organized. We are seeing the same increases. In a lot of the service jobs, like home health care and janitors and hotels, and nursing home aides, security guards, these are the growing jobs in our economy and they can't go anywhere. So once they're organized, they're not going to China, they're not going to India, and they're staying here in the United States. And we're seeing an increasing amount of these jobs being organized across the country.</s>SERWER: Hey, Beth, one of the leading lights of the union organization, Labor Union Movement, I should say, and perhaps the only leading light, is Andy Stern of the Service Employees Union. He is seen by many people as a radical. Do you see the union movement having to radicalize to really make in roads?</s>SHULMAN: I don't think Andy Stern is a radical. I think he is absolutely mainstream in saying, look, profits are up, productivity is up, and Americans' wages aren't even keeping pace with inflation. That's not the American dream. That's not the promise. He's saying, look, if productivity is up, if profits are up, normally what happens is that wages went up, benefits went up. And we're saying, look, he's saying look, and the labor movement is saying, look, Americans are entitled to a fair share of those increases. You know, we look at the fact when unions went down in terms of the mound of people they ended up representing, what we saw was, wages stagnating, the number of people uninsured have skyrocketed to more than 46 million, traditional pension plans have gone by the wayside. What's happening now is unions are organizing workers, more than 60 percent of American workers say if they had the chance to organize a union, they'd want to. And what American labor is saying is, let's go ahead, let's get out there and organize these workers that want to be organized.</s>CAFFERTY: I saw a great bumper sticker the other day, said "Nafta plus Cafta equals Shafta." I think there is something to that. Jobs that used to pay big bucks have been outsourced and sent to places all around the world where the companies can get them done for one-third or less of what it use to cost them. We've got between 12 and 20 million illegal aliens running around this country. Nobody knows much about them, how many there are, who they are, except they've driven American wages down. What about the impacts of those kinds of things on the ability of American middle class workers who get a fair shake in this country these days?</s>SHULMAN: Well, certainly our global trade agreements have never taken into consideration any kind of labor standards, which they need to. And we need to ensure that immigrants have the kind of status they need --</s>CAFFERTY: I'm not talking about immigrants. I'm talking about illegal aliens. Immigrants are different from illegal aliens.</s>SHULMAN: Well, the real issue here is whether or not we're going to allow Americans to organize unions. And right now they don't really have that right. If they do, what we see is that we can change these service jobs that aren't even in the global economy, like a nursing home worker.</s>CAFFERTY: Or like Wal-Mart.</s>SHULMAN: Or a home care worker. Or Wal-Mart, for example. These jobs aren't going overseas, so once they're organized they are going to become the middle-income jobs. You know, there was nothing inherently good about an autoworker or steel worker. They became good jobs. And the same thing that can happen we can do here with regard to the growing service sector in our economy.</s>CAFFERTY: But, let me just follow up though. If there are illegal aliens willing to work for half of what American citizens expect to be paid for, whatever kind of job you are talking about, and as long as there are companies that are willing to hire them, how are you going to overcome that?</s>SHULMAN: Well, we need to ensure that we raise the minimum wage that's been stuck at $5.15 an hour. We need to make sure that there is wage floors beyond which employers can't go. That's the important thing. We need to have some standards here in the United States that say, look, if you work hard, you should be able to support yourself and your family. And we need to have standards here that ensure that.</s>CAFFERTY: All right, Beth. Interesting stuff. There is a lot of work that has to be done if we're ever going to get back to the days when an American middle class job represented the kinds of things it used to back when I was growing up. Hopefully we'll get there at some point.</s>SHULMAN: Absolutely. I see hope in the future.</s>CAFFERTY: Good. Beth Shulman, author of "Betrayal of Work." When we come back on IN THE MONEY, making the best of facing the worst. We will see if America is any smarter about dealing with crises after hurricane Katrina. And beyond petroleum. The BP slogan fits like the company maybe never intended now that its problems go well beyond that pipeline mess in Alaska. We'll look at that in some detail. And return on investment. A new book looks at how effective advertising dollars are. Find out whether Madison Avenue is cheering or weeping as we move forward.