Benefits

No surprise here, but employer-provided benefits are on the wane:

Over the past two decades, companies have moved en masse away from traditional pensions in which employers pay the cost and employees get a set amount after retiring. Employer-based health care coverage has fallen as well, not just for workers in low-wage jobs, but increasingly for those in middle-class jobs. One analysis estimates that there were 5 million fewer jobs providing health insurance in 2004 than there were just three years earlier. Overall, nearly 1 in 5 full-time workers today goes without health insurance; among part-time workers, it's 1 in 4.

Those who manage to keep their benefits often must pick up their share of the higher cost. Employee contributions for family coverage were 49 percent higher in 2004 than they were in 2001, and contributions for individual coverage were 57 percent higher, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

The impact?

"It's not clear how the work will change," said Peter Cappelli, a management professor at the Wharton business school at the University of Pennsylvania. "But any kind of security will go away."

Employers aren't willing to provide the same benefits to employees they did just a few years ago, and so far there has been little discussion about how to address this problem. It seems to me we have two choices: find a stable and sustainable way to entice employers to provide the health care and pension benefits that workers need, or find another way of doing it altogether (e.g. a single-payer healthcare system).

This problem is becoming a crisis on the Republican's watch, yet we've heard very little even in the way of acknowledgment, much less an attempt at solution, from them. Unfortunately for our labor force, this pattern of denial will continue for some time. What we are witnessing here is a failure of the market, and any solution will require a non-trivial amount of government intervention. It is extremely difficult for the modern Republican party to even admit the possibility that the free market can cause problems, much less advocate a greater role for government in managing the economy.

Thus the GOP isn't in a position to do anything for the middle class here beyond fiddling with tax policy, which just isn't going to cut it. This is a real opportunity for the Democrats, and a way for them to make some progress on the "Kansas problem" as well. Let's hope they take advantage of it.