I'm shocked by how many people buy into the one percent bullshit that US labor costs are high and corporations are on the verge of packing up and heading overseas. In the history of this country, US workers have never been more profitable to their employers. Check out this graph showing the corporate profits that each US employee generates for their employer each year (since 1947).
Corporate profits per employee (via Wolfram Alpha)
US workers have never been more valuable to their employers! Did you notice that since 2000, corporate profits per employee have nearly tripled? In the midst of the Great Recession?! Why haven't we gotten a piece of the record-breaking $1.8 Trillion -- or $11,235 per worker -- profits that we created last year?
Here's a thought. Let's stop listening to the corporate PR fear-mongering nonsense about out-sourcing and down-sizing and rising labor costs. Let's just refuse to take it anymore. The people on top scare us and threaten to take our jobs and bust our unions because they are never satisfied. They want more, and they know that we work hardest when we are scared. They are just assholes.
The fact is that worker productivity is at an all-time high, and worker pay hasn't budged for 40 years.
Curious about how valuable your labor is to your current employer? Simply divide your company's net income by their total employee headcount to calculate the amount of profit you are heaping at your boss's feet each year. Here's some examples:
Corporate Profits Generated By Each Employee in 2012
Walmart: $7,200 (that's $3/hr for 2.2 million workers!)
JP Morgan: $72,000 (pretty typical amount for bank workers)
Microsoft: $260,000 ($23 billion spread over 100k workers)
ExxonMobil:$485,000 (That's $240/hr!)
The question is how are we going to fight back and claim this profit that's rightfully ours? The obvious answer is to unionize. The decline in union membership tracks nearly perfectly with wage stagnation:
We have the upper hand here if we simply work together and seize it. It's high time we stop worrying about losing our employers and they start worrying about losing us.