Celebrating Labor Day
By Jim Hightower
August 29, 2018
Workers of America, rejoice!
As our nation of working stiffs celebrates Labor Day with backyard cookouts, an afternoon at the beach, rounds of golf, special sales at the mall or simply kicking back in a La-Z-Boy and doing several rounds of 12-ounce elbow bends, we can all take comfort in the happy news that our economy is whizzing! Yes, corporate economists exult that our US of A is enjoying the second-longest economic expansion on record; profits are off the charts; job creation continues to surge; wages are rising; and consumers are racking up record levels of purchases. What's not to like about all that?
Two things. First, the economists' claim about wage growth is a sham, covering up the shame that top corporate executives and major shareholders are grabbing nearly all of the economic gains produced by America's entire workforce. The so-called nominal wage (i.e. the sum that workers see on their paychecks) has risen only 2.7 percent in the past year, a very mediocre result for the 82 percent of the labor force that is non-managerial worker bees.
Second, that nominal wage is not the worker's real wage, for it doesn't take into account the very real fact that consumer-price increases eat up the buying power of people's paychecks. Indeed, while nominal wages are up 2.7 percent in recent months, the price of everything from gasoline to groceries is up by 2.9 percent, effectively slapping working families with a wage cut. Sure, the economy is whizzing — those at the top of it are whizzing on the working class.
So all the rejoicing this Labor Day is coming from the gated ZIP codes of the rich. For example, in the same year that workers took a pay cut, the CEOs of America's 350 largest corporations had an 18 percent jump in their pay, hauling in an average of $18.9 million each. In a lifetime of labor, the typical American worker would not be paid as much as those honchos took in one year. Those few are getting rich enough to air-condition hell — and I think they'd better be pooling their money for that project.
https://www.creators.com/read/jim-hightower/08/18/celebrating-labor-day
