There’s no mystery. If the workers don’t punch up in unison corporate will maintain the same wages they ever have. Up until COVID happened, there were nurses working on the same wage scales as 2003. Techs and aides fared no better. Outlandish and difficult to believe that is the only type of hourly wage worker who has experienced this gross level of stagnation in wages.
The actual impressive thing is how they managed to convince working people to actively choose against their own interests
It is because of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall and was predicted as far back as 1880. Now we’re seeing it in reality. The surprising thing isn’t that this is happening, but that it took so long to happen.
Except corporate profits are higher than they’ve ever been. Only thing falling is the workers’ share of the obscene dragons hoards of riches.
Corporate profits are higher than ever largely because corporations have been able to get greater productivity out of workers without increasing pay. If wages had kept up with productivity, profits wouldn’t be nearly as high.
Edit: the reason this is a mystery to so many mainstream economists is because they don’t want to reconcile with one simple fact: in order for profits to keep going up, worker wages must be suppressed while also increasing productivity. Why do you think so many billions of dollars are being spent on AI development? Many see it as the key to ever increasing profits, because the worker, and their pesky demand for adequate compensation can be removed entirely.
someone remind me what happened in the 70s
I can only answer your question with a question: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
It’s crazy seeing how old the graphs on that site are now.
As I understand it, it’s the effect of a number of policy decisions intended in the surface to stabilize the economy. They stopped approving minimum wage hikes, they accepted a higher rate of unemployment due to factory automation, etc. Also, the difference between worker and executive compensation has grown tremendously.
