It is not your imagination — you are working harder and earning less. Despite significant productivity gains during the past four decades, wages have remained flat.
This is a global phenomenon, not one specific to any country. It is not a matter of the viciousness of this or that capitalist, nor the policy of this or that government. Rather, widening inequality flows naturally from the ideological construct that now dominates economic thinking. Consider Henry Giroux’s succinct definition of neoliberalism:
“[I]t construes profit-making as the essence of democracy, consuming as the only operable form of citizenship, and an irrational belief in the market to solve all problems and serve as a model for structuring all social relations.”
“Freedom” is reduced to the freedom of industrialists and financiers to extract the maximum possible profit with no regard for any other considerations and, for the rest of us, to choose whatever flavor of soda we wish to drink. Having wrested for themselves a great deal of “freedom,” the world’s capitalists have given themselves salaries, bonuses, stock options and golden parachutes beyond imagination while ever larger numbers of working people find themselves struggling to keep their heads above water.
Demonstrating for a $15 an hour minimum wage (Photo courtesy of Socialist Alternative)
On the one hand, U.S. chief executive officers earned 354 times more than the average worker in 2013. And even with the bloated pay of top executives and the money siphoned off by financiers, there was still plenty of cash on hand — U.S. publicly traded companies are sitting on a composite hoard of $5 trillion, five times the total during the mid-1990s.
Working harder without getting paid for it
On the other hand, there is the much different fortunes of working people. A study of four decades of wage trends in the United States, for example, revealed that the median hourly wage is less than two-thirds of what it would be had pay kept pace with productivity gains. Authors Lawrence Mishel and Kar-Fai Gee, writing for the Spring 2012 edition of the International Productivity Monitor, calculated the extraordinary mismatch between productivity gains and wages. Their study found:
“During the 1973 to 2011 period, the real median hourly wage in the United States increased 4.0 percent, yet labour productivity rose 80.4 percent. If the real median hourly wage had grown at the same rate as labour productivity, it would have been $27.87 in 2011 (2011 dollars), considerably more than the actual $16.07 (2011 dollars).” [page 31]
Almost every penny of the income generated by that extra work went into the pockets of high-level executives and financiers, not to the employees whose sweat produced it.
Working people in Canada have fared little better. Labor productivity increased 37.4 percent for the period 1980 to 2005, while the median wage of full-time workers rose a total of 1.3 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars, according to a Fall 2008 report in the International Productivity Monitor. The authors of this report, Andrew Sharpe, Jean-François Arsenault and Peter Harrison, provided caveats as to the direct comparability of productivity and wage statistics, but found the mismatch to be real as labor’s share of Canadian gross domestic product has shrunk. The authors note that, in Canada, almost all income gains have gone to the top one percent. They write:
“If median real earnings had grown at the same rate as labour productivity, the median Canadian full-time full-year worker would have earned $56,826 in 2005, considerably more than the actual $41,401 (2005 dollars).” [page 16]
Wage erosion is also at work in Europe. A Resolution Foundation paper found a differential between productivity and wage gains for British working people, although smaller than that of the United States. It also found that British workers did not lose as much ground as did French, German, Italian and Japanese workers. That conclusion is based on a finding that the share of gross domestic product going to wages in those countries has steeply declined since the mid-1970s.
That German workers also suffer from eroding wages might seem surprising. But it should not be — German export prowess has been built on suppressing domestic wages. In 2003, the then-chancellor, Social Democrat Gerhard Schröder, pushed through his “Agenda 2010” legislation, which cut business taxes while reducing unemployment pay and pensions. German unions allowed wages to decline in exchange for job security, which means purchasing power is slowly declining, reinforcing the trend toward Germany becoming overly dependent on exports.
Making a few calculations from International Labour Organization statistics on labor productivity and wages provided for individual countries, I found that average real wages in Germany declined 0.5 percent per year for the period of 2000 to 2008 while German labor productivity increased 1.3 percent per year. (The only years for which data is available for both.)
You can’t sell it if everybody is broke
Despite the overwhelming evidence of increasing hardship for so many people, economic orthodoxy insists we scream in horror at the very thought of raising wages. Such screaming is based on ideology, not on facts. Low-wage workers in the United States earn far less today than they did in 1968, despite their having a much higher level of education now as compared with then. The federal minimum wage is 23 percent lower than it was in 1968 when adjusted for inflation.
An Economic Policy Institute study by Heidi Shierholz, released in January 2014, found there are nearly three job seekers for every one open position. The lack of jobs reflects larger structural weaknesses, not a “lack of education” as orthodox economists, committed to austerity, continue to claim. She writes:
“Today’s labor market weakness is not due to skills mismatch or workers lacking skills for available jobs, but instead due to weak demand. If today’s high unemployment were a problem of skills mismatch, some sizable group or groups of workers would be now facing tight labor markets relative to 2007, before the recession started. Instead weak demand for workers is broad-based; job seekers dramatically outnumber job openings in every industry, and unemployment is significantly higher at every education level than in 2007.”
Household spending accounts for 69 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product; persistent unemployment and stagnant or falling wages can only lead to continuing economic weakness. Demand is what creates jobs. Raising wages, which in turn would stimulate demand, would, in a logical world, appear to be one route to ameliorating stagnation. In fact, a strong consensus exists that, contrary to what the one percent and their hired propagandists say, raising the minimum wage would be beneficial.
A Center for Economic Policy and Research paper surveying two decades of minimum-wage studies concludes:
“Economists have conducted hundreds of studies of the employment impact of the minimum wage. Summarizing those studies is a daunting task, but two recent meta-studies analyzing the research conducted since the early 1990s concludes that the minimum wage has little or no discernible effect on the employment prospects of low-wage workers. The most likely reason for this outcome is that the cost shock of the minimum wage is small relative to most firms’ overall costs and only modest relative to the wages paid to low-wage workers. … [P]robably the most important channel of adjustment is through reductions in labor turnover, which yield significant cost savings to employers.” [pages 22-23]
Similarly, the National Employment Law Project reports a strong consensus in favor of increasing the minimum wage:
“The opinion of the economics profession on the impact of the minimum wage has shifted significantly over the past fifteen years. Today, the most rigorous research shows little evidence of job reductions from a higher minimum wage. Indicative is a 2013 survey by the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business in which leading economists agreed by a nearly 4 to 1 margin that the benefits of raising and indexing the minimum wage outweigh the costs. …
Two decades of rigorous economic research have found that raising the minimum wage does not result in job loss. While the simplistic theoretical model of supply and demand suggests that raising wages reduces jobs, the way the labor market functions in the real world is more complex. Researchers and businesses alike agree today that the weight of the evidence shows no reduction in employment resulting from minimum wage increases.”
The University of Chicago, the infamous incubator of the “Chicago School” ideology that provides the intellectual “justification” for neoliberalism, can hardly be described as a pro-labor bastion.
Catching up with the demands of 50 years ago
One of the demands of the March on Washington in 1963 was a minimum wage of $2 an hour. Adjusted for inflation, $2 an hour in 1963 would be worth $15.35 today. Yet the federal minimum wage in the United States is $7.25 an hour, and the highest minimum wage mandated by any state government is Washington’s $9.32.
The $10.10 an hour lately proposed by the Obama administration sounds like an improvement when compared with current rates, but in reality it is the usual crumbs on offer by the Democratic Party — the White House is proposing two-thirds of what was demanded 50 years ago!
Rather than settle for the Democrats’ “austerity lite,” a growing movement is demanding the minimum wage be increased to $15 an hour. When a broader perspective is used — drawing on historical demands and, as noted above, that the median hourly wage should be around $28 — the tired arguments that businesses “can’t afford” any raise to the minimum wage fall apart. Sarah White, an activist with Socialist Alternative, which has launched a national campaign for a $15 minimum, writes:
“To fight against the growing movement to raise the minimum wage, mega-corporations are trying to deflect attention from their super-profits by spending huge sums of money on publicity focusing on the ‘concerns of small business.’ Socialist Alternative is very open to helping small businesses — but not on the backs of the workers. Everyone working full-time deserves a decent living. Help for small businesses can be organized by taxes on big business (which are at historically low rates) and eliminating corporate welfare to subsidize small businesses, along with cutting the property tax burden on small businesses. … Raising the minimum wage will help small businesses by increasing the spending power of their potential customers.”
Exorbitant rent increases have forced countless small businesses to close in gentrifying neighborhoods across the country. Commercial rent control that would leave mom-and-pop businesses with a low enough overhead to survive, instead of them having to send all their money to landlords interested in nothing more than squeezing every dollar out of a neighborhood, would do vastly more good than any potential harm caused by a $15 minimum wage.
Close to 60 percent of families below 200 percent of the poverty line have a family member who works full-time, year-round and 47 million U.S. residents rely on food stamps. At the same time, the world’s 1,645 billionaires have an aggregate net worth of US$6.4 trillion, an increase of $1 trillion in just one year.
Individualistic ideology, promoting the idea of personal responsibility for unemployment, low wages and economic insecurity, is a crucial prop holding up the system that leads to such disastrous results. There are no individual solutions to structural inequality.
Systemic Disorder 
[…] The 1 percent get richer thanks to you working harder […]
Nothing is going to change because even though retail stores are posting sorry year end sales stats and sorry new year sales stats, the sad fact is that as stated, when people are broke, they cannot buy. Wal-Mart has been screaming and crying since food stamps were cut because now they are feeling the pullback from those who have had to make meals stretch by heading to food banks. When rents are skyrocketing and food support has been cut, people cannot get blood from a rock. And when the vast majority of us become too broke to buy, what do they think will happen? And just because the stock market is booming, I suppose they expect even that party to last and no fat lady to come a’singing.
Excellent post Systemic!
Yes, excellent post. When you do not feed the roots, the whole rotten structure comes tumbling down
It can’t come down fast enough.
Amen! And you’ve said a mouthful!
Thanks, Shelby! They really do believe the party will go on forever, that you can squeeze limitless blood from a stone, that a finite planet can support limitless growth, that clean air and water will materialize as if by magic. You pay enough “think tanks” enough money and you start to believe your lies aren’t lies.
Just know Systemic, that eventually the ‘truth’ will out the ‘lies’. Many of us are aware that the status quo is most definitely unsustainable. It’s just a matter of time and like you say, it can’t happen fast enough. I concur!
Peter Gelderloos really stresses how profitable repression is in The Failure of Nonviolence. The northern European countries like the UK and Germany that brutally suppress labor and citizen activism are in really good financial shape because they are much more efficient in squeezing every last drop of blood out of their labor force. Countries where militant labor and grassroots movements hold sway – like Greece and Italy – are struggling economically because it’s harder for their capitalists to accumulate wealth.
I think of pacifism as a bourgeois ideology — it is the idea that the oppressed are not entitled to defend themselves against the violence perpetrated against them. Nobody has the right to tell people they don’t have the right to defend themselves.
As to Peter Gelderloos’ thesis, I have to say it is woefully incomplete and overly simplistic. Greek and Italian capitalists have no trouble accumulating wealth, no more so than British and German capitalists. It is German industrialists who are doing well, not German workers — as I alluded to above and discussed at greater length in an earlier post, German workers have absorbed a decade of wage cuts. It is on their backs that the so-called German export miracle is built. I would also question the idea that the U.K. is in “really good” shape — in fact, austerity has been quite punishing there.
If countries like Britain and Germany are doing better than countries like Greece or Italy it is because of where they sit on the global pecking order. Remember, also, that Germany gains a big advantage with the euro — its exports elsewhere to the E.U. are artificially low-priced because if everybody had their own currency, the deutsche mark would have become highly valued while the lira and drachma would have lost value, reducing Germany’s advantage. What is going on here is capitalist competition — some win, some lose, and the increasing intensity of the competition is opening up wider gulfs between the winners and losers.
Italy and Greece have social movements — which do not come close to “holding sway,” incidentally — because they are struggling economically, not the other way around. When the days comes when social movements really do hold sway in all countries is the time when capitalism can be pushed out in favor of a more humane system. That day is not nearly here — although Greece is the closest to breaking the pattern, so far all European countries remain in the stage of alternating their business parties.
I think this is what Gelderloos is trying to say – that Greece is the closest to breaking the pattern – that the indebtedness of their capitalist class relates to the ability of their working class to resist exploitation more effectively than countries like Britain and Germany. He (and I believe) that working class struggle can affect a country’s status on the “global pecking order”. Obviously it’s a matter of capitalist competition, but one really important way in which capitalists compete is by keeping wages low.
The race to the bottom is carried out in all corners of the world because it is the logical development of capitalist competition. The task of the world’s working majority is to overthrow this system, not reform it, because reform is futile. Only we can rescue ourselves and create a better world, one sustainable for our descendants. We can push for reforms, sometimes win them, but the reforms are ultimately taken back because we can’t stay in the streets forever.
We need to unite across borders on the basis of our common class interests and our common humanity, not allow ourselves to be divided by national lines.
these figures and comparisons are breath taking. thanks for your intrepid scholarship.
i’d love to also see an article on the lowest paid, most injured and killed on the job and most exploited workers – the meatpacking and slaughterhouse workers.
perhaps a few of the following articles will inspire you:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2001/07/dangerous-meatpacking-jobs-eric-schlosser
http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/250/meat-packing.html
http://www.foodispower.org/slaughterhouse-workers/
keep up the good, no – great work!
Thank you, Nancy!
From the Mother Jones article: “In 1999, more than one-quarter of America’s nearly 150,000 meatpacking workers suffered a job-related injury or illness.” That followed the opening, which focused on a worker who helped ConAgra bust the union, was injured numerous times doing every dangerous job and when he couldn’t work anymore, they threw him away. A bitterly hard way to learn a lesson.
The wealth will inevitably have to be shared either cooperatively or by force or it all will simply be swept away by a destabilized planet. The global economy can’t continue to grow due to biophysical constraints, and one would think that we, the so-called wise apes, should be intelligent enough to realize that no amount of wealth is worth a wrecked planet. There are numerous indicators in the environment flashing “warning”, but perhaps the most insidious and deadly is the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere:
3-22-2014
Boulder scientists report record-early high CO2 readings at key site
400 parts per million at Mauna Loa reached two months ahead of 2013
…Butler said readings from across the Earth show that the presence of CO2 is steadily growing by about 2.1 ppm each year. In the 1960s, he said, the annual global average growth was lower, about 0.7 ppm per year.
Sites in the Arctic Circle registered CO2 of 400 ppm or higher a year before Mauna Loa reached that level last May. Butler said the South Pole should also reach that level in a few years.
“It’s going up faster,” Butler said. “If we want to stabilize carbon dioxide, we have to be reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent. That would stabilize carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, where it is now.”
But Butler is not optimistic the trend will be reversed.
“I’ve been watching for decades, and I don’t see any changes in behavior, worldwide,” he said. The drivers of climate change continue unabated in the developing world, he said, and he doesn’t see options to fossil fuels, such as solar and wind power development, and utility companies’ deployment of smart grids, becoming a significant enough factor quickly enough to reverse the trend.
“Those would be good things to do. But we’re not doing it,” Butler said. “I expect to see CO2 levels keep rising until changes are made.”…
Behavioral change are needed and that equates to a whole new socio-economic paradigm, before it is far too late.
I couldn’t agree more. An economic system based on endless growth on a finite planet with finite resources can’t last beyond the planet’s limits. This is the last century of capitalism, whether the world descends into barbarism as a dwindling population fights for the last scraps, or the world’s working peoples refuse to cooperate anymore and create a better, sustainable world.
Without courage to let go of the status quo, nothing changes. (hint: solidarity helps)
Which groups of scientists/green activists/politicians are courageous enough to ditch their cars for alternatives? Which groups of governors are courageous enough to ban guns? Which groups of educators ban “indoctrinations” from their college, university? Which groups of feminist/peace activists are courageous enough to say “no means no” to police/veterants? ……
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2585791/Hawaii-law-lets-police-sex-prostitutes.html
Would the top few hundred billionaires treasure anything anymore… if they were all for free, cheap, instant? Would they even notice the minute changes in all of their numerous giant mansions when life is a blur between jets, of “newness” and disposable states/people? to space hotels?
Their fears: worldwide responsible democracy (ownership on every level of state/institutions) & world peace. Rejections of the rumor mills media (worthless lies, half truths), the soulless consumerism, the professional PR artists selling whatever they can for some fiat…. for the concreteness of their neighborhoods, local regional politics (Will the courageous LGBT people give something back by helping/showing others to organize in some places…?) = POWER of the 99%
Time for the real Elites to shine if they want, then they should give generously (not to the Business International NGOs industry) and act responsibly!
The world’s industrialists and financiers will fight to the end to keep their privileges and wealth, and most likely believe they can build a high enough wall and hire enough security guards to keep the world away. But if we unite, instead of allowing ourselves to be divided, the 99 percent can swiftly put an end to inequality and establish a real democracy, where all human beings are entitled to participate in societal decision-making and everybody has enough to live in dignity.
[…] corporations sit on trillions of dollars and the wealth gap continues to widen, the vast majority continue to sink deeper into poverty. […]
At times, it feels like we’re all tilting at windmills here. Everyone works harder while none get richer except for the few who work the least. Meanwhile, as evidenced by countless comments sections across the internet, we can’t even seem to agree who is to blame much less come up with alternative solutions. The deeper the game gets the more I agree with you that alliances and bridges must be built that transcend class, borders, ideology, et al. This is the surest way to reach the tipping points needed to turn the tide.
Now, if you will excuse me, I need to get back to work…
As I said above in response to Danielle, all of the world’s working people uniting on the basis of our common humanity, instead of allowing ourselves to be divided, is the only route to a better, sustainable world. That’s all the time to respond I have, because I will need to get back to work in the morning …
I hope you’re at least whistling while you work…
I would, except Disney holds the intellectual property rights.
Damn, I should have known Walt would take it to his grave.
The ones we are waiting for is… ourselves.
Yes!
Are you guys for real? Hollywood taking over the entire country?
[…] in their homelands or spread across the United States. Here, we see the inevitable trickle-down effects of capitalism which seeks to extract every ounce of profit while ensuring that the workers’ production […]
Reblogged this on Lissa's Humane Life.
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We’re nothing but debt-slaves to them, after all.
[…] persist until the exploited finally wake up and realize their blood, sweat, and sacrifice are what fills the coffers of the über rich? Many at the bottom of the economic hierarchy bend over backwards to apologize for our current […]