The Global Wage Report 2014/15, released Friday by the International Labor Organization, documents the stagnation of wages for workers in most of the advanced industrialized countries, even as productivity continues to rise. The result is an ever-rising share of income raked in by the capitalist class, while the share that workers receive from what they produce continues to shrink.
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Forbes, on the other hand, celebrates the rise in productivity.
The International Labor Organisation has just released its latest Global Wages Report. And the headline numbers don’t look all that good, it has to be said. However, buried in the report is some seriously good news. The poor are getting richer, The Great Divergence is unwinding. Given that this divergence has been the thing causing headscratching among development economists for the past century or so, given that unraveling it has been the aim and purpose of a vast amount of political lobbying, international conferences and even global political demands, the fact that the problem is being solved would seem to be just great news.In this view, trickle down is working just fine, and the poor are better off overall. So even though labor share is stagnant or falling for the most part other than near the top, the pie is bigger and that means that labor is getting more in spite of inequality increasing.
Worstall is up to his usual trick of ignoring within country inequality. Not that increasing income at the bottom of the world economy is bad, but comparing only workers in some countries vs. workers in other countries is bound to give an incomplete and biased picture. It may well be that the world's richest are simply playing the labor arbitrage game, with those on the top and bottom gaining at the expense of those in the middle. The fact that he emphasizes how rich workers in advanced economies are is pretty much a rhetorical giveaway.
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