Thursday, August 22, 2013

Productivity Up, Wages Stagnant

From Workers Independent News:

Productivity is up, but wage growth has been flat for decades. Jesse Russell reports: 
A new report from the Economic Policy Institute finds that wages in the United States have remained flat for a full decade. The report, titled A Decade of Flat Wages: The key barrier to Shared Prosperity and a Rising Middle Class, found the lack of wage growth was consistent across occupations, ethnicity, and education levels. The report also details while productivity grew by 7.7 percent between 2007 and 2013 wages fell for the bottom 70 percent of wage earners. Going back even farther the report says that since 1979 wage growth has been weak with the average worker only seeing an increase of 5 percent. The report cites a number of reasons for the weak wage growth of the last 3 decades including globalization, deregulation and weaker unions. It suggests fiscal expansion as a way to turn wage growth around by investing in infrastructure and the creation of jobs and suggesting that continued deficit reduction will only slow the job growth needed to jump start wages. Finally, the report calls for increasing the minimum wage and reestablishing the right to collectively bargain in the workplace.

3 comments:

  1. Yes, but the top .01% of incomes has seen their income rise at a rate more than 10 times higher than the rest of us. The top .01% are more important than working people, because the top .01% are the ones who pay our politicians so they know what to do, or else.

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  2. And gee, notice that the productivity gains start going to the rich right around the time we started cutting taxes for the rich in the 1980s. The CEOs and Wall Street gamblers have flat-out STOLEN the gains from worker productivity, and it's not that debatable of a point.

    Anon at 5:38 tells the truth- the only place the expanded profits "trickle down" to is into the pockets of politicians who give more tax cuts and advantages to the corporate class.

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  3. Nope, sorry.

    There is NO general productivity growth, you are flat out ignoring inflation altogether, even if you use the official government inflation numbers (which have been heavily manipulated to make inflation look much lower than it actually is BTW), then you see if productivity have gone up.
    If you get 8-9% more dollars/euros every year, you aren´t getting any better paid, your wage is effectively stagnant.

    Taxing 100% of all the profits of all those evil corporations, everyone making +250K and a 100% cut in military spending won´t be enough to sustain the greater society.

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