Bernie Sanders: “Your Pay Is Too Damn Low”

[eridani]

http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/18401/your_pay_is_too_damn_low

Workers’ pay has fallen below appropriate levels for all workers, not only because of policy failures, such as not raising the minimum wage, but more generally because workers’ compensation has not kept up with productivity growth from 1973 to the present, as it had from 1948 to 1973, the “golden age” of American capitalism. At the time of the shift, the U.S. economy was beginning to feel pressures from its increasing integration into a global economy that was less controlled by leading governments. Corporations were complaining of a squeeze on their profits. And big businesses were organizing themselves more as a unified force, not just as specific industries, to increase their political influence and to fight unions, consumer advocates (like Ralph Nader), proponents of full employment economic policies, and the emerging environmentalists.

According to a new paper by Josh Bivens and Lawrence Mishel from the Economic Policy Institute, wages did not stagnate because productivity growth slowed (although business-backed policies often did slow productivity growth). Rather, more of wages and salaries went to the corporate elite, and more of income went to owners of capital rather than to workers (and, of course, CEOs benefitted from both trends).

More precisely, from 1973 to 2014 net productivity grew by 72.2 percent, but “ inflation-adjusted hourly compensation of the median worker rose just 8.7 percent.” Rising inequality accounts for more than two-thirds of the gap between pay and productivity. And, Bivens notes, just since 2000, the decline in labor’s wage share of corporate income has cost workers $535 billion. (If this money were shared among all workers evenly, every working American would get a raise of $3,770.) http://www.epi.org/publication/the-decline-in-labors-share-of-corporate-income-since-2000-means-535-billion-less-for-workers/

Many different strategies combine to create the inequality gap between the top executives and owners of capital and workers. One set of strategies involves playing off wage and rights differentials in the global economy. Another set, creating “the fissured workplace,” to use the term coined by current Labor Department Wage and Hour Administrator David Weil, minimizes the responsibility of employers and shifts risk to workers.

[daleanime]

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