If the Economy Is Back, Why Are Wages Still So Low?
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First off, a new paper by a trio of researchers confirms some old news: Adjusted for inflation, wages began stagnating for both men and women 10 years ago. Men's wages have actually decreased slightly since 2000, while women's wages, which had been rising steadily for decades, flattened out nearly to zero. But it could have been worse. Economists have long known that there's a floor to wages because employers don't like to reduce nominal wages. If you make $10 per hour, they won't cut your wage to $9 per hour. They'll just hold it at $10 and let inflation eat it away. This phenomenon is called wage stickiness.
But in "Wage Adjustment in the Great Recession," these researchers have found that wage stickiness, which is driven mostly by social convention, not economic law, might be dying out. During the Great Recession, employers were increasingly willing to cut nominal wages. Among hourly workers, the usual number who experience wage cuts is around 15 percent. That had risen to 25 percent by 2011. Among nonhourly workers, the number rose from about 25 percent to nearly 35 percent. Increasingly, it seems, wage stickiness isn't acting as a barrier against wage losses.
So what does this mean in the real world? Economist Jared Bernstein points us to the chart below. It shows growth in nominal wages, growth in benefits, and growth in total compensation (wages plus benefits). The news is grim. Total compensation (the gray line) grew at about 3 to 4 percent per year during most of the aughts. Since the Great Recession hit, that's dropped to 1 to 2 percent. This is less than the inflation rate, which means that even when you account for benefits, real compensation has been declining since 2008.
Bottom line: Wage stickiness is disappearing, and with it a social convention that prevented wages from dropping too harshly even during recessions. As a result, wages are getting cut in bad times and never catching back up in good times. This is the world we live in today.
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/06/permanent-wage-decline-great-recession?google_editors_picks=true
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was the only one running the entire clinic, except for volunteer doctors and nurse three times a month.
The board finally hired her to run the entire clinic for $10 per to raise two children. She accepted because she was desperate for paid work in her field. She worked for that wage for 14 1/2 months. Then her electric bill was ridiculous and she tried to find help to get it paid, the board fired her for embarrassing them. They told her how much she had embarrassed them about two weeks before they decided she messed up her sick day on the time sheet and used that as an excuse to fire her.
They had just agreed to give her two paid sick days and a week paid vacation about a month before, which she couldn't ever take because there was no one else to take over the clinic.
These are wealthy people on the bod, and they consider anyone poor as stupid and deserving of it, even when they are the ones keeping someone in poverty.
I've gone broke helping her and the kids survive. We both have to sell our homes now to survive. Thankful to have a home to sell, but damn, does it ever get any easier?
On edit - and she took out student loans, which the school convinced her she would be able to repay because she would be making at least $30,000 to start. 
Maybe if we can just get a multimillionaire or better yet a billionaire to run the NLRB things will get better. 
