On most summer days, Laura Millikan's 10-year-old son begs her for a McDonald's ice cream cone. It's a $1 treat. She kisses his head and tells him maybe next week.
Millikan is a single mom living outside Seattle who works two jobs: 30 hours a week as an assistant property manager for an apartment building and a few extra hours at a college, arranging bulletin boards and making photocopies for professors. The two jobs, together, pay her $25,000 a year.
Before the recession, Millikan earned $30,000 a year with full benefits as a property manager at a call center. It was the highest pay she ever had. The company moved to another the state, and she's struggled ever since. She says it has been years since she's had a full-time job, despite sending out endless resumes and earning a college degree in education in 2014 to improve her prospects. She's repeatedly been told she's overqualified for low-wage jobs in retail and not qualified enough for coveted positions in business and tech.
To get by, Millikan has become an expert at cost-cutting. Almost everything in her modest apartment is from a thrift store, garage sale or charity. The only thing she buys new for her son is underwear. He's been asking for a remote-controlled monster truck lately, a toy that's out of her price range. She hasn't been able to find a used one at Goodwill. "I don't ever think I'll get to the middle class," Millikan said in an interview, choking back tears. "I can just about guarantee I won't."
It's a painful reality of today's economy. Jobs are plentiful, but jobs with good wages aren't, leaving many working long hours or multiple jobs but still barely scraping by.
"Full-time jobs that pay enough to live on are practically impossible to find," says Millikan, who is 39.
Half of the jobs in America currently pay less than $18 an hour, according to Labor Department data. That's about $37,000 a year if someone works full-time. Forty percent of jobs in the country pay less than $15.50, according to the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. There's always debate about what constitutes a "good-paying job," but it's notable that manufacturing jobs, which President Trump campaigned on bringing back, pay over $20.50 an hour, on average.
The latest report on America's job market came out in early August from the Labor Department. It showed that wages are up only 2.5 percent from a year ago. That's well below the historic average for the country, and it's about the same rate of increase as the final years of the Obama administration.
Stubbornly low wages helps explain why President Trump's message of American economic "carnage" resonates with his base - and why it's so important for Trump that his supporters get the raises he promises are coming.
"I believe wages will start going up," Trump said three times during his Tuesday rally in Arizona, drawing loud applause from the crowd. "We now have the lowest unemployment rate we've had in 17 years, so you're going to see wages go up, right?"
It's not so simple. Economists are stumped at how unemployment can be so low - 4.3 percent nationally and a mere 2.8 percent in Millikan's home county - and so many CEOs complain they can't get enough good workers, yet wages are barely rising. Some blame robots and overseas outsourcing for keeping wages low. Other says the labor market really isn't as "tight" as it appears, since many Americans in their prime working years have given up looking for jobs.
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http://www.orlandosentinel.com/business/ct-american-worker-wages-trump-20170825-story.html
