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DECEMBER 16, 2021

Meyerson on TAP

Those 'Wage Increases' Stories Miss the Big Picture

As a share of the economy, profits hit an all-time high, and wages for
the bottom 90 percent an all-time low.

With employers scrambling to fill key positions, wages are rising in a
host of workplaces. If not the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, it's at
least the beginning of a new, more egalitarian economy-right?

Wrong. More precisely, very, very wrong.

With all the disruptions to normal life over the past couple of years,
readers will be relieved to know that our nation's march to record
economic inequality has not slowed. The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis
reports

that after-tax corporate profits hit an all-time high as a share of the
economy in the third quarter of this year, reaching a previously
unheard-of 11 percent. That broke the previous record of 10.7 percent,
which was set in the second quarter of this year.

And if the share going to profits is rising, the share going to some
other economic components must be falling. Earlier this week, Larry
Mishel and Jori Kandra of the Economic Policy Institute published a
report

on the distribution of wages that noted yet another record set. In 2020,
the report concluded, the wages of the bottom 90 percent of wage earners
constituted the lowest share of all wages paid in a single year since
the government began charting such things in 1937. The bottom 90 percent
earned just 60.2 percent of all wage income last year. To be sure, this
reflected the pattern of who got laid off and who didn't in the course
of the pandemic, but it also marked the continuation of a long-term
trend. Since 1979, the report documents, the wages of the top 1 percent
rose by 179 percent (and those of the top 0.1 percent by 389 percent!),
while those of the bottom 90 percent crept along with a 28 percent
increase.

So while the media is full of stories of wage increases for low-wage
workers, don't be misled: Our economic inequality is roaring ahead!

Woo-hoo.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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The 1937 Project

Or maybe the 1979 Project. Either way, Democrats are blundering into
premature austerity. BY DAVID DAYEN

Will Starbucks Bargain With Its Baristas, or Just Pretend To?

Many newly unionized employers go discreetly AWOL (or worse) when it
comes to negotiating a first contract. Coffee drinkers shouldn't let
Starbucks get away with that. BY TERRI GERSTEIN

The Union of Autoworkers and Grad Students

With last week's victory at the University of California, roughly
100,000 UAW members work for universities. BY HAROLD MEYERSON

France's Éric Zemmour Has Already Transformed America's Far Right

The far-right pundit may not become the next president of France, but
his ideas have influenced American nationalists for a decade. BY MARTIN
GELIN

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