‘We deserve more’: US workers’ share of the pie dwindles ( www.theguardian.com )

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/15086405

Bureau of Labor Statistics releases latest estimate of how much labor receives of national income, showing bleak decline

When Jesse Motte began working at a Starbucks inside a Target store in Columbia, South Carolina, more than two years ago, $15 an hour sounded great. He was excited to start because it was the most he had ever made after working for years in the service industry.

The excitement has dissipated due to his inconsistent and erratic work schedule, the rising costs of necessities and the minuscule raises he and his co-workers receive annually. His most recent annual wage increase was $0.37 an hour.

Motte is not alone. This week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released  its latest estimate for the share labor receives of national income for the first quarter of 2024. The statistics shows the income workers receive compared to the productivity their labor generates.

According to BLS, this income share has declined for non-farm workers from around two-thirds, 64.1% in the first quarter of 2001, to 55.8% in the first quarter of 2024.

Sanctus ,
@Sanctus@lemmy.world avatar

I don't even get annual increases.

DerArzt ,

Same, they toss e those out a few years ago at my work.

Drivebyhaiku ,

A lot of the hangup I see coming from older generations is that around "unskilled labour" that is the hardest to combat. They don't get that labour is requiring less people and less skill in general. My Dad's era something as simple as utilizing maps and finding your way around a stretch of wilderness or even a city was a matter of experience. There was strength in how irreplaceable personal experience was. Now it's GPS assisted and basically any idiot can get where their going in a city they have never been before utilizing the fastest and most direct route. The same goes for computer assisted and manufacturing jobs. High levels of skill that take years to master is now largely something utilized for hobbies or bespoke craft and the fact that to a capitalistic sense we are individually depreciating in value to common pawns is something that is being banked on. The power of labour is dwindling on both an individual and mass scale. There is less skilled labour needed and less labour needed overall. We are all more speedily than ever becoming more replacable with any random body off the street.

But the idea of a meritocracy where the harder jobs are rewarded more remains and makes sense to people. They cling to that hardest. They just don't see that making all the jobs unskilled and making unskilled jobs worth absolute peanuts that pushes hardship onto vast swaths of the population is causing the whole system to fail.

Dagwood222 ,

This is 100% the result of Reagan's trickle down economics, a policy his own Vice President called 'voo-doo economics.*'

In 1980, 'middle class' was still seen as one income supporting a family of four. By the time Bush Sr. was through, 'middle class' meaning two jobs was established as the norm.

*Bush used the phrase before Reagan offered him the Number 2 job; suddenly he was fine with it.

alvvayson ,

It's not just Reagan. The same is happening all over the world, including Europe. And his policies were 40 years ago. At some point, we need to own our own problems.

The real issue is that the rich people worldwide have figured out how to mostly avoid paying taxes, while the middle class bears the brunt of taxation - which prevents them from becoming wealthy - and the lower class gets nothing.

That wasn't Reagan, it would have happened even if FDR had become an immortal vampire and had the New Deal lasted a century.

What we really need is to start taxing the rich and to greatly reduce taxation on the middle class. And we need to really get serious about it.

The US government can spend millions to track down and kill a Shepard in Syria, but they can't find the capital gains on Jeff Bezos portfolio.

PP_BOY_ ,
@PP_BOY_@lemmy.world avatar

And his policies were 40 years ago. At some point, we need to own our own problems.

I've been echoing this online for a while now, glad to know I'm not alone. Ronald Reagan isn't some ghost controlling the country like a Sith Lord. That fuck's been dead for decades by now. Everytime I see someone dredge up Reagan's name for problems we're experiencing right now, I can only think about how the people perpetuating those problems are getting off essentially blameless.

alvvayson ,

Well said, I regret that I have but one upvote to give you, PP boy.

njm1314 ,

Nobody's arguing that he's still pulling strings man. They're saying he got the ball rolling. That is policies have reverberated up until this day. That he started a trend that others continued.

PP_BOY_ ,
@PP_BOY_@lemmy.world avatar

Reagan had one of the highest approval ratings in modern US history; he didn't force these policies on an unwilling country and he sure as hell didn't draft them himself. My original point still stands that blaming current problems on an administration from forty years ago is harmfully reductive. The people we should be blaming are alive today and hold seats in Congress right now. We can worry about the historiography later.

njm1314 ,

Do you feel anyone who's blaming the Reagan policies is claiming we shouldn't do anything about today? Are you suggesting they're all pining for time machines? In fact I'll go further and ask this do you really think you can address the problems of today without understanding how they began? How can you even approach economic policy reform without looking back and understanding what went wrong?

Also there's a long long history in our world of horrible evil brutal leaders being popular at the time. So I don't think we need to go into that absurd argument any further.

alvvayson ,

The people blaming Reagan are fighting a 3 decade old culture war.

Fact is, things really weren't all that bad in the 80s and 90s.

They only really started getting bad after the financial crisis in 2008.

And which party got both the presidency and a majority in Congress that year? Hint: doesn't start with R.

njm1314 ,

A financial crisis that was caused by those and the policies that sprung from those policies. The trends that were started then. The idea that you look at something as gargantuan as the economy and think that it's not affected by things that happened decades before is insane. Also weird to complain about culture War when that's what Reagan began. Though it's policy that we're concerned with at the moment. Policy.

Also the 2008 financial crisis started under Bush. I dont know why you think you could change history on that one.

alvvayson ,

Not changing history. Just saying that democrats had all the power they could want and failed to implement change to make things better. Literally after running on a campaign of Change.

Soggy ,

Things weren't all that bad for land-owning whites, you mean.

And the president wasn't in charge of the banks. Or housing.

Dagwood222 ,

People were talking about it during Reagan's Presidency.

There were giant homeless encampments in all major cities throughout the 1980s.

Read Hunter Thompson's book "Hell's Angels." There's a chapter that talks about the economics of being a biker/hippie/artist circa 1970. A part time waitress in New York could afford to support herself and her musician boyfreind. A biker could put in six months as a Union stevedore and make enough to hit the road for two years of carousing.

And the idea that Obama caused the melt down of 2008 is pretty hilarious.

darthelmet ,

The core problem isn’t tax policy. That’s a symptom of the problem. The problem is power. Capitalists have it as an inherent property of their class. Workers can have power, but only collectively. Individual workers can’t exercise much power. Therefore, in the absence of a check to their power, capitalists use it to enhance it further.

Make people poor and dependent on employment and consumption so that they’re desperate enough to accept poor pay and working conditions.

Atomize workers so they can’t realize their collective power.

Use ownership over media and communications platforms to put out favorable propaganda and discredit those opposed to capitalist interests.

Use bribes campaign contributions to subvert democracy and shape the government to their will, such as tax policy , labor law, business and financial regulations, and imperialist foreign policy.

No lasting gains can be made for the working class while capitalists hold this power. Any policy can be watered down, repealed, or resisted by capitalists given time. There is no structural way for a system built by and for capitalist interests to reign in the power of that class.

alvvayson ,

Dude, I'm really sorry, but the 19th century sent a letter by pony express and they want their economic theory back.

There are struggling "capitalists" that own their own little manufacturing company, restaurant, hair salon or other small business.

And then there are rich as hell "workers" like Taylor Swift who have become billionaires through their own labour. She can fill football stadiums full of people willing to pay top dollar to see her perform, I simply can't.

And I think most people don't have a problem with Taylor being a billionaire.

But the problem arises when middle class people pay half of what they have in tax, while rich people have effective tax rates of <10%. Jeff Bezos had a five figure tax bill as he became the richest man in the world.

A million middle class Americans making $100K are still out earning Jeff by a huge margin, but they are collectively also paying way more tax than Jeff, so Jeff can keep investing his money, while those million Americans live paycheck to paycheck.

darthelmet ,

There are struggling "capitalists" that own their own little manufacturing company, restaurant, hair salon or other small business.
And then there are rich as hell "workers" like Taylor Swift who have become billionaires through their own labour. She can fill football stadiums full of people willing to pay top dollar to see her perform, I simply can't. And I think most people don't have a problem with Taylor being a billionaire.

These are kind of exceptions that prove the rule. Small business owners may often be workers themselves, but they also still profit from minimizing costs and maximizing revenue. They have the same incentives as any other capitalist, even if they have less ability to act on them due to lack of resources and competition keeping them in check. Even to the extent that these are more acceptable forms of capitalists, the trend in the economy for a long time has been towards consolidation and large companies putting smaller ones out of business.

Similarly, while some artists make it big, far more of them end up exploited by record labels, studios, etc. In fact even some of the successful artists have stories about their awful contracts.

There's also the aspect of this which is that once you have enough money to invest it in significant amounts, you indirectly enter into the role of a capitalist, since the profit you derive from those stocks is the same as the profit made from the companies exploiting workers.

But the problem arises when middle class people pay half of what they have in tax, while rich people have effective tax rates of <10%. Jeff Bezos had a five figure tax bill as he became the richest man in the world.

More to the point though, I ask you why/how they end up paying so little in taxes? Tax law didn't fall from the sky. It isn't just that the politicians were stupid or that most people wanted it this way. This is the result of the structure of political power in a capitalist nation.

So how do you address the problem: "Rich people don't pay enough taxes and poorer people pay too much."
I can come up with any number of clever policies to solve our problems, but what good does that do if you can't make the government adopt these policies?

This is why you need a theory for understanding how power is distributed, used, and perpetuated in a society. Otherwise you're doomed to keep asking the question "Why don't they just do this?" It's not a new idea, but it's still relevant.

If you disagree, I challenge you to be able to explain how we got here or how we move forward without any kind of structural critique.

alvvayson ,

You are stuck at step 1, I invite you to move on to step 2 and actually start looking at how we are gonna solve problems.

You can go back all the way to colonial times and feudal times and even earlier to discuss how societies have become less egalitarian since the invention of agriculture.

But we are here, right now and it's best to identify the actions we can take today, for a brighter tomorrow.

darthelmet ,

I mean, how we got here probably can inform us as to how we proceed. But ok, fine. Ignore the first part. Answer the 2nd part.

gravitas_deficiency ,

It’s an income issue as well as a cost of living issue.

I have some friends who had a kid a couple years ago. Both work in tech, and have salaries in the 6-figure range, and childcare was going to be so insanely expensive that they were debating whether or not one of them should straight up quit to be a full time parent for a bit, because childcare was going to be more expensive than one of their monthly take home salaries.

And simultaneously, we have politicians wondering why birth rates are plummeting.

🤦‍♂️

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