Wages Fall... For The Masses

In today's Washington Post, Harold Meyerson observes:

Since July the average hourly wage increase for the 85 million Americans who work in non-supervisory jobs in offices and factories is a flat 3 cents. Wages are up just 2.1 percent since November 2002 -- the slowest wage growth we've experienced in 40 years. Economists at the Economic Policy Institute have been comparing recoveries of late, looking into the growth in corporate-sector income in each of the nine recoveries the United States has gone through since the end of World War II. In the preceding eight, the share of the corporate income growth going to profits averaged 26 percent, and never exceeded 32 percent. In the current recovery, however, profits come to 46 percent of the corporations' additional income.

Conversely, labor compensation averaged 61 percent of the total income growth in the preceding recoveries, and was never lower than 55 percent. In the Bush recovery, it's just 29 percent of the new income coming in to the corporations.

So who is doing extraordinarily well in this recession? As you might expect, corporate executives. Whether in the United States, Australia, or Britain, corporate executives behave pretty much like third world tyrants who treat their national treasuries like a personal cookie jar. (Which is, no doubt, why they are so much more deserving of tax relief than the working classes who have suffered terribly in this recession and continue to suffer in the jobless recovery.)

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