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Thursday, August 30, 2018

Rebel Americans

 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 workers.

  The 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 a wage 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. 

Millions of Americans today -- from Walmart employees to school teachers -- are paid so little that each of them have to patch together two or three jobs to eke out a bare-bones living. In fact, major corporations have made poverty pay central to their profit strategy, with giants like Amazon, McDonald's and Walmart issuing such puny paychecks that their workers have to rely on food stamps and other public programs to make ends meet. That's a corporate subsidy that adds up to roughly $150 billion a year taken right out of the pockets of the American welfare state. 

corporate chieftains, economists, political leaders and others  consider employees as a cost to be cut, not an asset to advance. Working stiffs see the continued offshoring of their jobs and deliberate decimation of their rights and union bargaining power; they see billionaires like Donald Trump and the Koch brothers attack them as "moochers" and "losers"; they see leaders of both political parties whoring for corporate dollars, while rigging the rules to gut everything from overtime pay to health care; and they see their tax dollars pouring into the rapid development of a robot economy that will leave them and their children out in the cold.

 America needs an all-out labor rebellion.

From here

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/help-wanted-heres-why-americas-labor-force-still-struggling-while-corporate

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