Federal Study Paints a Grim Picture of the Workplace : Labor: The gap between high- and low-wage earners is widening, the report says, and there are more working poor.

A federal commission painted a grim picture of a fast-changing American workplace Thursday, citing a growing gap between high-wage and low-wage workers and a sharp increase in the number of working poor--people who have full-time jobs but earn so little that they fall below the government’s poverty line.

In addition, the commission said, secure full-time employment is falling away as companies increasingly hire part-time and temporary workers to reduce labor costs.

Those findings are contained in a 163-page report presented to Clinton Administration officials. It is the first of two due from the Commission on the Future of Worker-Management Relations, the 10-member panel President Clinton appointed last year to explore how to make the United States more competitive through better labor-management cooperation.

The follow-up report, scheduled for release after the November elections, is expected to recommend specific changes in labor laws that have governed workplace relations since the 1930s.

Among the findings, the report notes that a higher proportion of Americans--two of every three--now holds jobs or is seeking employment, largely because almost three in five women are now in the work force, contrasted with one in three women in 1950.

Americans also put in more work hours per year than employees in any other industrialized nation except Japan, the report said, largely because European countries mandate four or five weeks of vacation.

Although the study found a decline in the number of collective bargaining contracts and a much lower number of strikes than in years past, it also reported a surge in litigation and in government regulation involving health and safety, job discrimination and other workplace issues. The number of employment cases in the federal courts increased by 400% between 1971 and 1991, the report said.

The commission, headed by former Labor Secretary John T. Dunlop, envisioned an expanding role for employees in making the decisions that affect their jobs and said that available evidence suggests doing so could improve companies’ economic performance.

The report said about 50 million workers would like to take part in making workplace decisions but have no opportunity to do so. The report estimates that at most, only 5% of all workplaces have effective employee participation systems.

The report was presented to Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich and Undersecretary of Commerce David Barran, who was standing in for Commerce Secretary Ronald H. Brown. Dunlop said the commission hopes to start a national debate on the issues outlined in the document.

“The American workplace has undergone extraordinary transformations over the last six decades and will be evolving still more dramatically in the future,” Reich said. “But our legal framework and many of our notions about worker-management relations were made for a 1930s world, not the 21st Century.”

Reich also said he deplores the growing distance between the earnings of more highly skilled workers and the less skilled at the bottom of the pay ladder.

“A society divided between the haves and the have-nots . . . that becomes sharply divided over time cannot be a prosperous and stable society,” Reich said. “We’re still a long way from there, but the trend is disturbing.”

The report said the declining power of labor unions and the lessened buying power of those earning the federal minimum wage has played a role in widening the gap between the highly paid and the lower paid.

“The stagnation of real earnings and increased inequality of earnings is bifurcating the U.S. labor market, with an upper tier of high-wage skilled workers and an increasing ‘underclass’ of low-paid labor,” the study said.

Referring to the working poor--who remain in poverty despite putting in 40 hours on the job every week--the commission said their numbers have increased greatly over the past 15 years.

“About 18% of the nation’s year-round full-time workers earned less than $13,091 in 1992--a 50% increase over the 12% who had low earnings in 1979,” the report said. “These workers consist disproportionately of women, young workers, blacks, Hispanics and the less educated.”

The workplace has also been affected by government cuts in defense and other programs and by deregulation of the airline and trucking industries, the commission said. At the same time, there has been a labor market shift expanding the number of white-collar jobs requiring education beyond high school.

The commission also reported that a third of the workplaces whose employees vote to be represented by a union never manage to obtain a collective bargaining agreement.

The number of bargaining rights elections and the number of labor-union victories has diminished sharply over the past several decades, the report noted, and and it has become increasingly likely that a worker will be fired for pro-union activity.

“There is a dismal aspect of American labor relations in which the rights of some individual workers are violated by some employers who resist the effort to organize,” the commission said.

Although business groups expressed some reservations about the report, they generally joined union leaders in supporting the commission’s efforts.

The Labor Policy Assn., which represents 200 major corporations, called the report a “sincere effort to begin a long overdue national dialogue on the future of employment policy.”