Something bad happened in the past 10 years to young workers in this country: Since 1999, more of them now have lower-paying jobs, if they can get a job at all; health care is a rare luxury and retirement security is something for their parents, not them. In fact, many-younger than 35-still live at home with their parents because they can’t afford to be on their own.

These are the findings of a new report, “Young Workers: A Lost Decade.” Conducted in July 2009 by Peter D. Hart Research Associates for the AFL-CIO and our community affiliate Working America, the nationwide survey of 1,156 people follows up on a similar survey the AFL-CIO conducted in 1999. The deterioration of young workers’ economic situation in those 10 years is alarming.

(Cross-posted from the AFL-CIO Now Blog.)

Nate Scherer, 31, is among today’s young workers. Scherer lives in Columbus, Ohio, where he shares a home with his wife, his parents, brother and his partner.  He spoke at a media conference at the AFL-CIO today to discuss the report.

After getting married, my wife and I decided to move in with my parents to pay off our bills. We could afford to live on our own but we’d never be able to get out of debt. We have school loans to pay off, too. We’d like to have children, but we just can’t manage the expense of it right now…so we’re putting it off till we’re in a better place. My [work] position is on the edge, and I feel like if my company were to cut back, my position would be one of the first to go.

During yesterday’s press briefing, AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka summed up the report’s findings this way:

We’re calling the report “A Lost Decade” because we’re seeing 10 years of opportunity lost as young workers across the board are struggling to keep their heads above water and often not succeeding. They’ve put off adulthood-put off having kids, put off education-and a full 34 percent of workers under 35 live with their parents for financial reasons.

Just last week we learned that about 1.7 million fewer teenagers and young adults were employed in July than a year before, hitting a record low of 51.4 percent.

As AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said:  

Young workers in particular must be given the tools to lead the next generation to prosperity. The national survey we’re releasing today shows just how broken our economy is for our young people…and what’s at stake if we don’t fix it.

Some of the report’s key findings include:

• 31 percent of young workers report being uninsured, up from 24 percent 10 years ago, and 79 percent of the uninsured say they don’t have coverage because they can’t afford it or their employer does not offer it.
• Strikingly, one in three young workers are currently living at home with their parents.
• Only 31 percent say they make enough money to cover their bills and put some money aside-22 percentage points fewer than in 1999-while 24 percent cannot even pay their monthly bills.
• A third cannot pay their bills and seven in 10 do not have enough saved to cover two months of living expenses.
• 37 percent have put off education or professional development because they can’t afford it.
• When asked who is most responsible for the country’s economic woes, close to 50 percent of young workers place the blame on Wall Street and banks or corporate CEOs. And young workers say greed by corporations and CEOs is the factor most to blame for in the current financial downturn.
• By a 22-point margin, young workers favor expanding public investment over reducing the budget deficit. Young workers rank conservative economic approaches such as reducing taxes, government spending and regulation on business among the five lowest of 16 long-term priorities for Congress and the president.
• Thirty-five percent say they voted for the first time in 2008, and nearly three-quarters now keep tabs on government and public affairs, even when there’s not an election going on.
• The majority of young workers and nearly 70 percent of first-time voters are confident that Obama will take the country in the right direction.

Trumka, who is running for AFL-CIO president without announced opposition at our convention later this month, is making union outreach to young people a top priority. He said one of the report’s conclusions is especially striking:

Young people want to be involved but they’re rarely asked. Their priorities are even more progressive than the priorities of the older generation of working people, yet they aren’t engaged by co-workers or friends to get involved in the economic debate.

Currently, 18-to-35-year-olds make up a quarter of union membership. And at the AFL-CIO Convention, we will ask Convention delegates to approve plans for broad recruitment of young workers, as well as plans for training and leadership of young workers who are currently union members. And that’s just the beginning of a broad push towards talking and mobilizing young workers in the coming months and years.

According to the report, more than half of young workers say employees are more successful getting problems resolved as a group rather than as individuals, and employees who have a union are better off than employees in similar jobs who do not.

Read the full report here.

At Wednesday’s rally in support of the Employee Free Choice Act, a number of brave workers who have been hurt by our broken labor law system spoke out to explain why we badly need this vital new law to protect the freedom of workers to form a union and bargain.

These workers are just a few of the nearly 30,000 workers who are harassed, discriminated against and fired every year for trying to exercise the freedom to bargain for health care, pensions and fair wages and treatment. Their stories illustrate, on an honest and personal level, the real problem with the nation’s current labor laws: People who want to form unions are at the mercy of corporations because the laws are badly tilted toward companies, not workers.

A long-time journalist and mother of a young child, Sara Steffens met with her co-workers to try and form a union at the newspaper where they worked in Contra Costa County, Calif. Workers hoped that with a union they could have job security and more of a say in how the newspaper operates. Despite gathering the support of two-thirds of the paper’s employees, they were met with a hostile response.

Our employer reacted the way a lot of companies do. They hired an anti-union consultant and began a pretty aggressive campaign to scare us into voting against the union. Despite all of that, we did win our election…A few weeks later, they announced a major layoff, and I was one…I had been the co-chair of our organizing committee.

I think it’s important that workers feel like they can step up and tackle problems in their workplace, and not have to be afraid that if they speak out they’re going to lose their jobs for it.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Asela Espiritu, a nurse who works for Kaiser Permanente in Orange County, Calif., discussed how Kaiser Permanente stayed neutral and allowed nurses at Espiritu’s facility to pursue a union through the legal majority sign-up process. Thanks to her and her co-workers’ successful efforts, the people who have the most direct experience in patient care have a voice when it comes to how the company operates. That’s good for nurses, for patients and for the company.

With us being unionized, we’re on the same page with management on how we can deliver the best care for our patients. The Employee Free Choice Act will empower workers of all kinds of industries….They will be able to be part of the solution to the crisis we have.

The high-dollar corporate attacks on the Employee Free Choice Act rely on the fiction that unions are sinister outside forces, separate from and unwanted by workers. That myth is leveled by the stories of real people like Steffens, Gares, Lawhorn and Espiritu, who are honest, hardworking people who just wanted the freedom to have a say in their workplace and the ability to bargain for a better life for themselves and their co-workers.

It’s stories like these that illustrate why the Employee Free Choice Act is so urgent and necessary to restore the balance for workers.

(Cross-posted from the AFL-CIO Now Blog.)