In its updated report, The State of Working America 2008-2009, and in a Sept. 2 telephone press conference, co-authors Lawrence Mishel and Heidi Shierholtz described the huge dimensions of the crash caused by policies of anti-worker then-GOP President George W. Bush and his business backers.

And it would have been worse without the stimulus law Democratic President Barack Obama pushed through earlier this year, Shierholtz told reporters.

“Job losses would have been so high that the July unemployment figures would have been 9.6% or 9.7%, not 9.4%,” she explained. “Still, we expect a steady climb in the unemployment rate up and over 10% by the end of this year.” And it’ll rise slightly above that figure for a few months in 2010 before turning downwards, Mishel predicted.

“But we still have a long way to go,” she warned. “Until the economy is adding 122,000 jobs a month to take care of new people coming into the job market, unemployment will stay high.” In August, the economy shed 216,000 jobs.

All this is more than just dry numbers, the two said. One-third of the jobless, a record, have been out of work at least six months, and many have exhausted their unemployment benefits. That translates into bankruptcies, lost homes, no medical care and more ills afflicting workers -- even employed workers -- Mishel pointed out.

“This recession is far beyond the numbers of unemployed and underemployed,” which is also setting a record, he explained. Employed workers are seeing their hours cut, “there’s an implosion in wage growth and about 17% of large private employers have resorted to (unpaid) furloughs” to save money, Mishel said.

A 1-week furlough, he pointed out, is equal to a 2% annual pay cut for a worker and his or her family. There might even be an overall wage decline this year, he added.

“In the popular media, economic experts endlessly debate dynamics and causes of the downturn,” wrote Mishel, Shierholtz and co-author Jared Bernstein, who is now Democratic Vice President Biden’s top economic advisor. “Most of these debates have very little to do with the real economic challenges facing working families today.

“The men and women of the workforce have worked harder and smarter to make the U.S. a world-class economy…And the mantra among economists and policymakers is that ‘As grows productivity, so shall living standards improve.’ Would that it were so.”

Instead, the story -- even before the Bush crash -- was of rising inequality, lower real incomes for all but the richest 5%, “diminished bargaining power of the American worker,” less health care coverage, riskier pensions (if any at all), income constraints that prevent workers’ kids from getting college educations to better themselves, and fewer high-paying jobs for those college grads, due to offshoring and outsourcing.

“We are in the unique position to judge the results of this experiment in reduced worker bargaining power and YOYO (“You’re on your own”) economics,” the authors declared in their report. “The macro-economy is in serious disrepair,” and policymakers must move “beyond temporary patches” to fundamentally remake the economy so that it works for workers, they added.

The EPI authors praise the Obama administration for its moves to right the economy. Indeed, they say that such legislation as the $787 billion stimulus law, “cash for clunkers,” the loan guarantees for the Detroit-based car companies, longer jobless benefits and a $500 million “green jobs” initiative have partially stanched the bleeding.

Mishel predicted Congress would pass a second extension of jobless benefits.

But the three argued in their report that the economy needs a fundamental restructuring to get away from the so-called “free market” policies that let corporations and financiers run amok while smashing everyone else’s dreams to smithereens.

Specifics of the crash in State of Working America are many. Some key ones:

• Falling unionization lowered wages for both union and non-union workers. The union “wage premium” is 14.1%, 17.1% for men compared to their non-union colleagues and 10.1% for women. The gap between wages of average blue-collar workers and average white-collar workers widened by 11 percentage points since 1979, with two-thirds of that attributed to slower blue-collar wage growth due to declining unionization. Blue-collar men were 43% union in 1978 and 19% in 2005, the report notes.

• “Unionization’s impact…extends to non-union wages and labor practices,” EPI adds. “In industries and occupations where a strong core of workplaces are unionized, non-union employers frequently meet union standards or at least improve compensation and labor practices beyond what they would have provided” if unions were absent.

• Average CEO pay was 27 times that of an average worker in 1975, and 275 times that of the worker in 2007. “In other words, in 2007, a CEO earned more in one workday -- there are 260 in a year -- than a typical worker earned all year,” EPI reports.

• While workers’ average incomes stayed flat since 1989, average CEO pay rose 167%.

• The share of “good jobs” in the economy -- those that paid at least $17 an hour and offered health and pension benefits -- dropped by 2.6 percentage points, to 23.6%, from 2000-2006. That’s even though the workforce became older and more educated, both factors that should lead to more good jobs. The share of men with good jobs dropped 10.5 percentage points from 1979-2006, including 4.4 points starting in 2000.

• The top 1% of the nation’s earners now own 40% of U.S. wealth, and the next 4% of the rich own another fifth. The bottom four-fifths of the country has only 15.3% of its wealth. That’s down from 19% in 1962. That year, the top 1% owned one-third of U.S. wealth and the next 4% had 21%. In intervening years, the middle groups’ share of U.S. wealth shrank, while the top groups’ share expanded.

Mark Gruenberg writes for Press Associates, Inc., news service. Used by permission.