tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7895164153505105997.post1279123743979317392..comments2024-01-17T00:45:37.075-08:00Comments on Bud Meyers: The Rise and Fall of the Middle-ClassBud Meyershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02065020063363023395noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7895164153505105997.post-30240279090481330762015-02-02T08:54:22.354-08:002015-02-02T08:54:22.354-08:00The New Yorker: A Fair Day’s Wage
The fact that t...The New Yorker: A Fair Day’s Wage<br /><br />The fact that the benefits of economic growth in the postwar era were widely shared had a lot to do with the assumption that companies were responsible, not only to their shareholders, but also to their workers ... Working on the Model T assembly line was an unpleasant job. Workers had been quitting in huge numbers or simply not showing up for work. Once Ford started paying better, job turnover and absenteeism plummeted, and productivity and profits rose ... One of the reasons retailers like Trader Joe’s and Costco have flourished is that, instead of relentlessly cost-cutting, they pay their employees relatively well ... Since the nineteen-seventies, a combination of market forces, declining union strength, and ideological changes has led to what the economist Alan Krueger has described as a steady “erosion of the norms, institutions and practices that maintain fairness in the U.S. job market.” This isn’t because companies are having trouble making money: corporate America, if not the rest of the economy, has done just fine over the past five years. It’s that all the rewards went into profits and executive salaries, rather than wages. That arrangement is not the result of some inevitable market logic, but of a corporate ethos that says companies should pay workers as little as they can, and no more. <br /><br />http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/09/fair-days-wage?mbid=rss<br />Bud Meyershttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02065020063363023395noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7895164153505105997.post-74770298354765132192015-02-01T08:08:53.637-08:002015-02-01T08:08:53.637-08:00Thanks for the comment. If you'll notice, I...Thanks for the comment. If you'll notice, I've edited this post ;)Bud Meyershttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02065020063363023395noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7895164153505105997.post-47344178287565764632015-02-01T03:09:29.879-08:002015-02-01T03:09:29.879-08:00Thanks you for the kind words.
As for your gripe...Thanks you for the kind words. <br /><br />As for your gripe, the first IRS report on 2013 incomes does not present data in a way that the median (half make more, half less) can be computed, only the mean (averages). I also cautioned that data for high income Americans might change when the final data is released next Fall.<br /><br />You cite the median wage data from Social Security that became available last October. Who broke the story of those figures? I did. Each year I am alone, or almost alone, in reporting on this data – and am absolutely alone in doing analysis of the kind I did in October, which you can read here: http://alj.am/1rlCSXS<br /><br />Wages are about 70 percent of individual income. I reported that the 2013 median wage "was up a scant $109, to $28,031. That was still $320 below the 2000 median. It also was slightly lower than the 1999 median of $28,109, a troubling measure of long-term wage stagnation that is eroding the American work ethic and discouraging individual investments in acquiring and refining job skills."<br /><br />I also did an exhaustive three-part analysis of that data comparing 2000 to 2012 last August: http://alj.am/1ANMJfx and http://alj.am/1o4R3y6 and http://alj.am/1sNI3Du.<br /><br />Such long-term trends normally cannot be done because government reports data in fixed income brackets ($15,000 to $20,000) with no inflation adjustments. But I noticed that 2012 prices were exactly a third higher than 2000 ($15,000 becomes $20,000, etc.) and was able to make the exhaustive calculations used in the three columns linked above.<br />David Cay Johnstonhttp://america.aljazeera.com/profiles/j/david-cay-johnston.htmlnoreply@blogger.com