 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 | ||||
Manuel looks for growth as rates fal... SA banks strong, but the global ground... Sacob worried about 'restrictive' labour... Creating a sheriff for the global Wild W... Tax and duty relief for exporter... Raft of jobs summit agreements in offin... Boom time as blue-collar America cashes ... Interest rates cause surge in inflatio... Employment equity on track despite criti... |
Boom time as blue-collar America cashes in
Workers in the US have never had it so good, writes DAVID WASTELL
While much of the rest of the world struggles with the prospect of global economic meltdown, blue-collar workers in America's industrial heartland have rarely had it so good. Unemployment is at an all-time low, wages are high, house prices are rising gently but steadily, interest rates are beginning to fall and there are almost certainly tax cuts of one kind or another on the way. The picture of working-class prosperity is best reflected in Minneapolis, the largest city in the state of Minnesota, set on the undulating plains of the American Mid-West. Forget about the troubles in Thailand, Russia, Japan or Brazil. And do not even worry too much about the falling stock market or the crumbling of the dollar. Here the real economy is doing very nicely, thank you. As one company manager put it: "If anybody in this city isn't working it's either because they can't work, or they don't want to." While President Bill Clinton tried to persuade Congress to agree $18-billion to help the International Monetary Fund to bail out large parts of South East Asia, the talk in Minneapolis was of other matters. Can unemployment, at 1.2%, really fall any lower, and does it make sense to knock down a 10-year-old, 30-storey building simply to make way for another? The genteel clientele of the red-brick and ivy-clad Minneapolis Club crane their necks and mutter misgivings at the parade of tall towers erupting above them. They are concerned that all the city's remaining landmarks will disappear in the frenzy of new building. It is no wonder that America's leaders are having problems focusing the country's attention on the financial meltdown which Clinton has predicted. Unemployment in Minnesota is the lowest of any state, and its economy has grown steadily ahead of the US's healthy average. At the corner of 3rd Avenue South and 7th Street, Winton Walters, 51, surveyed the huge construction site for which he is responsible: the planned 30-storey, headquarters for the financial advice division of American Express. High above the street, some of the 110 or more workers he has recruited for the 30-month project were strolling across steel girders as he ran through typical pay rates, all agreed with local unions. They range from $22 an hour for unskilled workers to $30-plus an hour for welders and other "ironworkers". With many at the site putting in at least 60 hours a week, earning overtime and weekend bonuses, pay packets of $1 920 a week before tax are within reach. Even so, it is difficult to find workers with the right level of skill from within the pool authorised by the unions. The strength of the economy is not confined to the building industry. Don Gerdesmeier, a lobbyist for the local Teamsters union, said: "Things have been very good for a couple of years at least now, and it is in all sectors from fast food to computer technology." The diversity of the state's industries reflects remarkably closely the pattern of employment throughout the US. Even those temporarily jobless are hopeful about their prospects. Bob Dickhaus, 51, who recently lost his sales manager's job, is "definitely optimistic" about finding another suitable post, despite being at a difficult age.
Bernie Hesse, 41, a night manager in an upmarket grocery store, said he and other employees had benefited from unspectacular but steady annual wage increases of about 4% for several years. This year, for the first time, he and his wife Vickie took their family abroad, driving to Canada.
It was a different story in Corcoran, a small but sprawling town of white clapperboard homes and a single church standing among fields rustling with parched corn, 25km west of Minneapolis. Here Rex Bowman and his wife Karen and four children live a comfortable and steadily improving life in a house which they bought for $112 000 five years ago, and which is now worth almost $128 000. Bowman, 38, a carpenter, earns almost $1 000 a week including a little overtime on one of the many construction sites in central Minneapolis, to which he drives each day in his 10-year-old pickup truck. His wife has a dusty minivan, the standard vehicle of most middle-American families, which she also uses to make a daily mail delivery. His children play on bicycles and a trampoline in the one-and-a-half acre garden at the back of the family house, on which he has a $100 000 mortgage and pays about $1 000 a month. Should the American taxpayer give more money to the IMF to help to bail out the rest of the world? Bowman hesitated for a moment before replying: "I think you should take care of your own first, and only then worry about others." Clinton recently said the world was standing at the edge of a financial precipice. But from Corcoran, and places like it around the plains of middle America, that precipice seems a long way away. - © The Sunday Telegraph
|