October 23, 2008 at 11:02 am
More on the need for great not good moves to save American labor (sorry of I carry on and on so, but I am left for dead American labor):
Imagine if the typical top 20 percentile family earned $272,000/yr –instead of the average income of top 20 percentile families being $272,000/yr.
(The Census says $186,000/yr but its family numbers add up to only 67% growth over 40 years while per capita income grew 100%. If family income grew 90% — the difference hidden by top coding income above one million — that would add an extra $86,000 to the top quintile average.)
Wouldn’t just about everybody but Newt Grinchrich agree that the labor of our imaginary top 20 percentile families was not worth that much more than the labor of bottom 20 percentile families ($16,000/yr, not counting food stamps and other helps). Top 20 percentiler’s are not rocket scientists by and large (even if they were!).
That all the excess income (income shift) has been traced to top 3 percentile pockets, overwhelmingly to the top 1 percentile, most especially to the top .1 percentile does not make the situation any less bizarre. CEOs, news anchors and ball players making 25 times what their predecessors did is possibly more extremely out of line with economic common sense…
…creating the necessity to do what we should have done all along – what we would have to do even if a “fairy godmother” wave a magic wand and reset income distribution between the oceans and below the Canadian border to 1973 specs to prevent the income slippage from happening all over again: set up a system of sector-wide labor agreements and institute the highest practicable minimum wage…
…not the (wont even save super market workers from the race to the bottom induced two-tier contracts) card check left-over and not the slow stepped minimum wage increases that will end up a dollar below 1968 by 2011.
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