[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 47 (Tuesday, April 6, 2004)]
[Senate]
[Page S3742]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              THE ECONOMY

  Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, there is no secret that there is a great 
frustration in the American workplace today. There is a great anxiety 
among American working families. You can sense it, you can feel it, you 
can hear it no matter where you go in America, whether it is in Iowa or 
Wyoming or New York or wherever it is. Something is happening out 
there. You get it all the time from people who have been working, maybe 
have lost their jobs, maybe they took another job, they are not making 
ends meet. They see the economy doing much better. They read this in 
the paper all the time--the economy is getting better, tax cuts are 
going into effect, foreign car sales, the big cars, the Mercedes and 
all those, are up. We see all the higher end items being purchased and 
sold.
  For example, over the recent Christmas holidays, the Sharper Image, I 
believe, which sells high end electronics stuff, and Neiman Marcus had 
great sales. But Wal-Mart was down.
  There is a great sense among American working people that something 
is not quite right with what is going on in this country. Maybe most 
Americans don't have degrees in economics; they haven't studied it, but 
they sense something is going wrong.
  In his recent book, ``Wealth and Democracy,'' Kevin Phillips pointed 
out that there is a trend that different countries go through at 
various stages of their growth. One of those stages is where more and 
more of the output of a country accumulates to capital and less and 
less accumulates to labor, to the working people.
  It is with great interest I note that, after I had read Kevin 
Phillips' book, yesterday in the New York Times an article by Bob 
Herbert brought it home. The title of the piece was ``We're More 
Productive. Who Gets the Money?'' As Mr. Herbert wrote yesterday in the 
New York Times:

       It's like running on a treadmill that keeps increasing its 
     speed. You have to go faster and faster just to stay in 
     place. Or, as a factory worker said many years ago, ``You can 
     work 'til you drop dead, but you won't get ahead.''
       American workers have been remarkably productive in recent 
     years, but they are getting fewer and fewer of the benefits 
     of this increased productivity. While the economy, as 
     measured by the gross domestic product, has been strong for 
     some time now, ordinary workers have gotten little more than 
     the back of the hand from employers who have pocketed an 
     unprecedented share of the case from this burst of economic 
     growth.
       What is happening is nothing short of historic. The 
     American workers' share of the increase in national income 
     since November 2001, the end of the last recession, is the 
     lowest on record. Employers took the money and ran. This is 
     extraordinary, but very few people are talking about it, 
     which tells you something about the hold that corporate 
     interests have on the national conversation.
       The situation is summed up in the long, unwieldy but very 
     revealing title of a new study from the Center of Labor 
     Market Studies at Northeastern University: ``The 
     Unprecedented Rising Tide of Corporate Profits and the 
     Simultaneous Ebbing of Labor Compensation--Gainers and Losers 
     from the National Economic Recovery in 2002 and 2003.''

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator's time has expired.

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