Tuesday, October 1, 2019:   America - A World Leader In Screwing The Average Worker
The United States is the only advanced industrial nation that doesn't have national laws guaranteeing paid maternity leave.

The U.S. is the only highly developed country (other than South Korea) that doesn't guarantee paid sick days.

America is the only advanced economy that doesn't guarantee workers any vacation, paid or unpaid. The European Union's 28 nations guarantee workers at least four weeks' paid vacation.

Among the three dozen industrial countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States has the lowest minimum wage as a percentage of the median wage — just 34 percent of the typical wage, compared with 62 percent in France and 54 percent in Britain.

It has the second-highest percentage of low-wage workers among that group, exceeded only by Latvia.

The reason: Labor unions are weaker in the United States than in other industrial nations. Just one in 16 private-sector American workers is in a union, largely because corporations are so adept and aggressive at beating back unionization. In no other industrial nation do corporations fight so hard to keep out unions.

And the results are devastating for those workers with modest incomes. Common practices in corporate America include: hiring hordes of unpaid interns, expecting workers to toil 60 or 70 hours a week, prohibiting employees from suing and instead forcing them into arbitration (which usually favors employers), and hamstringing employees' mobility by making them sign non-compete clauses.

For decades America's workers have been losing out: year after year of wage stagnation, increased insecurity on the job, waves of downsizing and offshoring, and labor's share of national income declining to its lowest level in seven decades.

Just 10.5 percent of all American workers, and only 6.4 percent of private-sector workers, are in unions.

The diminished power of unions and workers has skewed American politics, helping give billionaires and corporations inordinate sway over America's politics and policymaking. In the 2015-16 election cycle, business outspent labor $3.4 billion to $213 million, a ratio of 16 to 1, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. All of the nation's unions, taken together, spend about $48 million a year for lobbying in Washington, while corporate America spends $3 billion.

What is so sad and disturbing is that not only have the rich and powerful managed to win the war on low wage workers, they have manage to convince the average worker that the Democrats are to blame.