The labor rights group Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour (SACOM) first exposed the wave of employee suicides at Apple’s Chinese contractor, Foxconn, and the grueling conditions in which hundreds of thousands of employees work. It’s great that he said ”our number one priority is to restore opportunity and broad-based growth for all Americans” and an A+ speech would have inserted ‘wage’ before growth.Īpple’s ugly labor problems aren’t limited to its Foxconn factories, and they aren’t going away. You always want to see improvement and this speech definitely improves on the July speech. Sure, there are a few misguided distractions in the speech-more exports, but nothing about trade deficits which involves imports, the need for corporate tax reform-but no reason to dwell on those items at this moment. It was nice to see the President use our research on the pay disparity between CEOs and typical workers (273:1) and the wealth disparity between the top one percent and the median household (288:1). These are the basic ingredients needed to generate a different set of outcomes than the disheartening ones produced over the last few decades. And, he said that the Affordable Care Act was an important cornerstone in providing economic security, which it surely is. He called for maintaining the unemployment benefits needed to protect the long-term unemployed. He urged a strengthening of our social safety net, including retirement savings and Social Security. Providing more skills and better education is always critical for social mobility and improved productivity. He noted the need to continue to combat racial discrimination while also asserting the increased prominence of class as a determinant of well-being. Today, the president did better he said “growth alone does not guarantee higher wages and incomes” and said, “the third part of this middle-class economics is empowering our workers.” He followed this with recommendations to strengthen collective bargaining, achieve pay equity for women, rebuild manufacturing and raise the minimum wage. They don’t have income from owning stocks or other financial assets and don’t receive much ‘transfer income’ from the government. After all, a good working definition of the middle class is people and families that rely almost exclusively on the income from work-wages and benefits. In particular, I pointed out he failed to acknowledge that to generate expanded opportunity and a broader middle class requires broad-based wage growth. I was pretty tough on him last July in a similar speech where I said he was better at the diagnosis of the problem than in proposing solutions. President Obama hit all the right notes in his speech today addressing income inequality.

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