America’s unemployment rate is hovering near half-century lows. There are now more job openings than unemployed workers in the United States for the first time since the government began tracking that ratio. For America’s working class, macroeconomic conditions don’t get much better than this.
And yet, most Americans’ wages aren’t getting any better, at all. Over the past 12 months, piddling wage gains — combined with modest inflation — have left the vast majority of our nation’s laborers with lower real hourly earnings than they had in May 2017. On Wall Street, the second-longest expansion in U.S. history has brought boom times — in the coming weeks, S&P 500 companies will dole out a record-high $124.1 billion in quarterly dividends. But on Main Street, returns have been slim.
Economists have put forward a variety of explanations for the aberrant absence of wage growth in the middle of a recovery: Automation is slowly (but irrevocably) reducing the market-value of most workers’ skills; a lack of innovation has slowed productivity growth to a crawl; well-paid baby-boomers are retiring, and being replaced with millennials who have enough experience to do the boomers’ jobs — but not enough to demand their salaries.
There’s likely some truth to these narratives. But a new reportfrom the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) offers a more straightforward — and political — explanation: American policymakers have chosen to design an economic system that leaves workers desperate and disempowered, for the sake of directing a higher share of economic growth to bosses and shareholders.
Further, the OECD finds that only Turkey, Lithuania, and South Korea have lower unionization rates than the United States, a fact that can be attributed to the myriad ways American policymakers have undermined organized labor since the Second World War. And a government that discourages unionization — and alternative forms of collective bargaining — is one that has decided to cultivate an exceptionally large population of “low income” workers, and an exceptionally low labor-share of national income.Eric Levitz - New Study Confirms That American Workers Are Getting Ripped Off
“I'm glad I live in the UK because all that employment regulation served me well. And the NHS served me well too, as I didn't have to rely on my boss to provide my healthcare for me or my family, so that meant less subservience. These regulations, and government provision, helped give me FREEDOM! “
ReplyDeleteEnjoy it while you can, because the oligarchs and their puppet politicians are bent on privatizing the NHS, so that the UK becomes like the USA.
Politicians accomplish this by increasingly starving the NHS of funds. Their goal is to make medical service so poor that the UK masses scream for relief, even if it means privatization. Then you will be as screwed as are average Americans.
I have been to England and Wales. Elderly people told me (in essence) that they just hoped they got out of there (i.e. died) before things got any worse. For example, if the NHS becomes privatized, they will be finished.
We humans live in a collective reality that is created by our dominant beliefs. The UK and USA are dying because of the dominant belief that the national government runs on loans and on tax revenues, when in reality the national government can create infinite money out of thin air – and does so for wars, weapons, and banker bailouts.
You have the working class Tories who are completely selfish and totally dumb, and the middle class Tories whose businesses are under attack because if lack of custom but beeline the problem is that people don't work hard enough. They keep the ruling elite in power who then go on to screw them. They tax them and use the money to run their protection racket, the war machine. The elite have all got into war and banking because that's where the easy money is.
ReplyDeleteWe still have Austerity Britain ten years after the recession, but people aren't angry about it, why, because the media have buried the issue, and because people believe the government had run out of money, but there's plenty of it stashed away in the Caiman Islands.
We know here what a con it all is, but the average person is clueless. If I tell them, they think it's a conspiracy theory. The truth sounds mad to them.