Real Wages Fall – Moon of Alabama

August 28, 2006

Real Wages Fall

The NYT headline writer had trouble to express the truth, so it went with this:

Real Wages Fail to Match a Rise in Productivity.

But the simple truth is, real wages not only do not rise with productivity, sea levels or the number of bad TV shows, real wages are falling. From the article:

The median hourly wage for American workers has declined 2 percent since 2003, after factoring in inflation. The drop has been especially notable, economists say, because productivity — the amount that an average worker produces in an hour and the basic wellspring of a nation’s living standards — has risen steadily over the same period.

As a result, wages and salaries now make up the lowest share of the nation’s gross domestic product since the government began recording the data in 1947, while corporate profits have climbed to their highest share since the 1960’s. UBS, the investment bank, recently described the current period as “the golden era of profitability.”

The trick is bargaining power. How can that be reestablished?

Posted by b on August 28, 2006 at 17:31 UTC | Permalink

Comments

On todays KPFA Morning show they had Matt Fellowes and Meizhu Lui talking about just this topic. Matt Fellowes brookings institute paper on “From Poverty, Opportunity: Putting the Market to Work for Working Families,” (2006) and Meizhu Lui co-author of The color of wealth in which I thought would be a good nutritional supplement to b’s post here.
to get directly to the interview slide your bar to 35:50

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Aug 28 2006 18:45 utc | 1

Let us abandon these muddle-headed, idealistic notions of the nation’s workforce being a resource that is worthy of benefitting from the economy. Labor is just another cost factor that is to be minimized like staples, coper paper or post-it notes.
Do staples have a right to participate in the wealth they help create? Of course not, they are to be flattened and then disposed of after use, just like the working classes.

Posted by: ralphieboy | Aug 28 2006 18:54 utc | 2

In developed countries lower income wages under globalisation have to decline as a percentage of GDP. It’s the alternative to exporting these jobs. This fact is in itself nothing new. Notable is that the NY-Times is actually using the median wage measure in an article as opposed to hiding the phenomenon behind average wage figures, which is the standard procedure.

Posted by: Guthman Bey | Aug 28 2006 19:02 utc | 3

“The trick is bargaining power. How can that be reestablished?”
It will be pretty hard to do with a certain segment of the workforce willing to take a mans job by offering to work for less (But complaining later about not being paid enough.)
Bargaining power can only be taken, no-one gives it to you and the only way it can be done is by collective organization. As long as we are willing to accept the premise that we are ‘rugged individualists’ it won’t happen. Workers arise!!….Join the group….Unionize…Again.
Otherwise we will end up with,(after the collapse and rebellion)…Gasp,… Choke,…Communism!! The polar opposite to Corporatism.
If we go to all the trouble of citizen participation in the profits of the ownership system, (which requires bureaucratic supervision anyway.)then why don’t we just go the step further and declare public collective ownership and be done with it?

Posted by: pb | Aug 28 2006 19:40 utc | 4

If you look at the conditions that brought about unionization in the first place, we’re not there yet. That’s what it will take.

Posted by: gylangirl | Aug 28 2006 21:55 utc | 5

Not sure where to post this quote but I think this thread is particularly relevant. Although, I take Wayne Madsen Reports with a huge grain of salt, I think the following quote from Denmark is worth repeating and in fact, I liked the entire post this morning of August 29.
“The fact that only three peace protestors stand in front of the Parliament, where the Social Democrats hold 47 seats, the Socialist People’s Party 11, the Red-Green Alliance 6, and the Faroese Republican Party and Greenland socialist Inuit Ataqatigiit Party 1 each, speaks volumes to the fact that the left everywhere has lost its backbone, intestinal fortitude, and commitment to fight the militarists, the neo-conservatives, and the global corporations. Leftist parties have sold their souls to multi-national conglomerates and the banker’s class at the expense of the workers, anti-militarists, and the poor.”
Ignoring for a moment such labels as “left”, “right”, “conservative” or “liberal”, I do believe that Global Corporatism is a root cause of so many problems regarding the world’s poor and the recent militarism of the United States.

Posted by: Rick Happ | Aug 29 2006 13:58 utc | 6

The trick is bargaining power.
And the trick to THAT is finding something that will put the fear of God into the bourgeoisie. But unless someone knows a way to conjure a militant proletarian revolutionary movement — with mass political appeal — out of thin air, I don’t see it happening any time soon.

Posted by: billmon | Aug 30 2006 0:08 utc | 7

But unless someone knows a way to conjure a militant proletarian revolutionary movement — with mass political appeal — out of thin air, I don’t see it happening any time soon.
Shiites. Militant – no doubt. Proletarian – of course. Mass political appeal – grand. Fear inducing – you bet.

Posted by: citizen k | Aug 30 2006 3:37 utc | 8

Fear inducing – you bet.
Not the right kind of fear, I’m afraid. The ruling class doesn’t seem to be worried about the possibility of American workers joining Hizbullah en masse.

Posted by: billmon | Aug 30 2006 4:22 utc | 9

It’s a stretch, but I think Militant Islam has a good chance in the US. It’s violent, macho, got an unmistakable appeal in terms of certainty, seems conducive to competent organization in the midst of chaos. Kicks ass and takes names – made for America. Another couple of years of fuckup, corruption, and humiliation by the rethugs, ineffectual hand-wringing by the dems, and moronic solidarity organizing by the “left” and who knows. And consider that pissed off, disillusioned, dumped on the streets Vietnam war vets couldn’t join the other side just by saying allah akkbar but there is always going to be a warm welcome for warriors who have weapons experience in the mujhadeen.
The Christians have created a market for moral clarity and religious community, but they’re too dishonest to deliver.

Posted by: citizen k | Aug 30 2006 4:59 utc | 10

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