Pay Gap Causing ‘Unease,’ Herman Says

“The unfinished business of America’s new prosperity” is to narrow the gap between rich and poor, Labor Secretary Alexis M. Herman said Sunday in a Labor Day message.

“These are indeed prosperous times, but still a quiet unease lurks . . . that our nation will declare success before all Americans will have their chance to claim their fair share,” she said.

Herman said she found during a weeklong nationwide tour that “workers are in better shape than in many, many years.” But she also sensed worry that “America’s rising tide may be casting our citizens toward two separate shores.”

On one side is a “new economy, full of opportunity and challenge,” she said. But on the other side, “the same tide may be stranding some Americans on the shoreline of an old economy that is quickly washing away beneath their feet,” Herman said. She was referring to those displaced by downsizing, new technology and offshore production.

Herman’s tour started in Seattle shortly after she played a role in settling the 15-day nationwide Teamsters strike against United Parcel Service. It took her to Minnesota, Texas, Tennessee and West Virginia, ending with the Labor secretary’s traditional Labor Day address this year in the form of a Sunday sermon to more than 1,000 people at Washington’s National Cathedral.

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“On Labor Day 1997, the task before us as a nation, as a moral people, . . . as children of God is to make sure that the economy’s new buoyancy lifts the lives of all Americans, . . . that we do not declare our work completed until America’s new prosperity is shared by all,” she said.