Labor Day 2016: Face It, We’ve Failed Our Workers, and Growth is the Answer

By: Joan McCarthy Lasonde*

This isn’t working. The foundation is missing: an economy where people trade services and goods among each other fast enough and at high enough value that people can work and live in dignity.

That missing foundation is the key to inequality, the downward spiral of the middle class and poverty. Tens of millions of Americans are stuck in the despair of unemployment, underemployment or low wages.

Economic growth is essential if that despair is to end. Economists of all stripes now agree that sluggish growth is a crisis. We traditionally had GDP growth of three to four percent. Since 2000, however, we’ve been bumping along closer to one percent.

One percent doesn’t cut it.

That’s why growth is the core of what I will work for in Congress. We need an economy robust enough that employers have to compete for workers. I want wages bid up. I want workers holding the cards because their work is in demand. That’s why I’ll work for things like a flatter, simpler tax code that promotes growth and an end to bureaucratic regulations not based on sensible cost/benefit analysis. And growing the tax base is what we need to pay for safety net programs for those who can’t work.

A rational government would reward job growth. Instead, we treat employers like mules, loading them with the costs of administering social goals — valid goals. But nobody asks whether it’s employers who should be responsible for achieving them.

It’s not just the Affordable Care Act, though that’s the whopper, imposing tens of millions of hours of compliance work on employers. It’s also wage and hour law complexity, retirement plans, health savings accounts, payroll taxes, COBRA, countless litigation risks and all the other things that have made human resources a specialized and huge profession — over 500,000 HR managers in America.

Some of that is rightly imposed on employers, like worker safety obligations. But the question is why job-givers should get stuck with so much of the rest of it as they have.

Labor Day is for honoring workers. Honor them by remembering how poorly they’ve been served by this economy. Honor them by demanding a solution, which is a high growth economy.

*Joan McCarthy Lasonde is a candidate for the United States Congress in Illinois’ Ninth District