There is no equality

Median household income in 2012 was 9 percent lower than in 1999. There are 7 million U.S. part-time workers who would like to be working full time. Yet corporate profits are at their highest level in at least 85 years.

The Democrats introduced legislation last week to protect low-paid shift workers from last-minute changes in their schedules. The idea not to try to lift low-paid workers out of poverty, but just trying to make their lives a little less miserable. Other policies to help those with low incomes include a push to provide paid sick days to more workers and to create paid family leave. Compared with making it easier for U.S. workers to unionize the campaign is fairly modest and even so none of these ideas are likely to go anywhere anytime soon, at least federally. The legislation for shift workers garnered zero Republican sponsors and the family leave bill was referred to the Committee on Finance, where nothing happened.

Today, job prospects for young men are far less favorable. Real wages for men under age 35 have fallen almost continuously since the late 1970s, and those with only a high school diploma have experienced the sharpest losses. Between 1979 and 2007, young male high school graduates saw a 29 percent decline in real annual earnings — an even steeper decline than the 18 percent drop for men with no high school diploma.

 Once there were the availability of stable, family-wage jobs for young men without a college education. Blue-collar men could marry early, knowing that even if their starting wages were low they could anticipate predictable increases each year — and expect their children and grandchildren to do even better. Over the 25 years between 1947 and 1972, the average real hourly compensation of production and non-supervisory workers nearly doubled, rising by almost 3 percent a year. In 1969, by the time men reached age 25, three-quarters were earning wages that could support a family of four above the poverty line. By 2004, it took until age 30 for the same percentage of men to reach this income level. And while in 1969 only 10 percent of men ages 30 to 35 were still low earners, by 2004 almost a quarter of men in that age range remained low earners.

Traditional working-class jobs are disappearing, and even if a man can find the same blue-collar job that his father or grandfather held, his wages will no longer sustain a family. Between 1947 and 1979, the wages of the average meat-packing worker, adjusted for inflation, increased by around 80 percent, to just under $40,000 per year. But from 1979 to 2012, a meat-packer’s wages declined by nearly 30 percent, to about $27,000.

The inflation-adjusted net worth for the typical household was $87,992 in 2003. Ten years later, it was only $56,335, or a 36 percent decline, according to a study financed by the Russell Sage Foundation. The study also examined net worth at the 95th percentile. (For households at that level, 94 percent of the population had less wealth and 4 percent had more.) It found that for this well-do-do slice of the population, household net worth increased 14 percent over the same 10 years. Other research has shown even greater gains in wealth for the richest 1 percent of households. Exclude the rising value of their homes and the picture is worse: Median net worth began to decline even earlier. “The housing bubble basically hid a trend of declining financial wealth at the median that began in 2001,” said Fabian T. Pfeffer, the University of Michigan professor. When only a small minority of are winning and the vast majority of the population is losing, surely something is amiss.

Capitalism doesn’t mend its ways. The rich keep getting richer. The inequality gap keeps on widening and poverty carries on increasing. The naive trust in free-market trickle-down economics has disappeared. The capitalist culture of prosperity and power deadens society. The so-called ‘invisible hand’ of the markets and its supposed economic remedies merely cut  workers incomes to increase profits, relentlessly imposing its own laws and rules, denying  the primacy of the human person. Today’s economic system blames the poor for their troubles yet  promotes conspicuous consumption, increases inequality, damages the social fabric, increases violence and serious conflicts. The laws of capitalist competition, the survival of the fittest rule. The powerful feed upon the powerless, the vast majority are marginalized: No work, No opportunities. No escape. Human beings have become economic commodities, simply to be used, then discarded. It is no longer just about exploitation or oppression. Today’s excluded are no longer even a part of society, but outcasts and social lepers.

 This deep divisive inequality calls for solutions outside market economics to make possible a balanced and more humane system - socialism