The benefits of the stock market rise have gone almost exclusively to the upper 10 percent, who have enjoyed 85.8 percent of the increase. The failure of more educated sections of the work force to reap any significant pay gains refutes the claim of the Clinton administration that education is the road to prosperity for the working class. Newly hired engineers and scientists are earning 11 percent and 8 percent less respectively than in 1989. Entry level wages for college graduates, male and female, were 7 percent less in 1997 than in 1989. Overall wages for the college educated rose just 1.2 percent during the same period, while job insecurity increased.
Wages decline The impact of falling wages has hit the young the hardest.
Between 1989 and 1997 the wages of young workers with a high school education and one to five years of work experience fell 6.5 percent for men and 7.4 percent for women. Pay for men, usually the prime wage earner, fell 6.7 percent in real terms between 1989 and 1997, despite an overall rise in wages in 1996. Pay remained or fell for the bottom 60 percent of all workers, except the bottom 10 percent. The share of workers receiving employer paid health benefits fell 7.6 percentage points between 1979 and 1997. Lower paid workers suffered the greatest decline in coverage proportionately, with high school educated workers suffering a 10.7 percentage point decrease during the same period.