Great news for the top one percent! This group of people who definitely needed more good news got their highest wages ever in 2017, averaging $719,000. The top one percent also got the satisfaction of knowing that their wages grew by 3.7 percent, much faster than the one percent growth that the bottom 90 percent of earners saw in the same time. Alas, news was more mixed for the top 0.1 percent. While their wage growth of eight percent was faster than any other income group, it still only left them at their second-highest wages ever—$2,757,000.
Taking the long view:
… the top 1.0 percent of earners now earn by 157.3 percent more than they did in 1979. Even more impressive is that those in the top 0.1 percent had more than double that wage growth, up 343.2 percent since 1979. In contrast, wages for the bottom 90 percent only grew 22.2 percent in that time. [...]
The bottom 90 percent earned 69.8 percent of all earnings in 1979 but just 60.9 percent in 2017. In contrast the top 1.0 percent increased its share of earnings from 7.3 percent in 1979 to 13.4 percent in 2017, a near doubling.
Never forget, this is the economy Republicans want.
● Unions can protect workers from deportation. This coalition of 3.5 million is showing how.
● Marriott workers are still on strike in eight cities.
● Get your union-made Halloween candy.
● Oh, great, and by great I mean nope nope nope: New Seattle police union contract overturns key tenets of police accountability law.
● Bankers of the world unite:
You can see how bad working conditions lead to bad behavior by looking at what went wrong at Wells Fargo. The bosses there insisted that workers meet punishing sales goals. They demanded that their employees sell customers additional products they didn’t need, like car mortgages or home loans. This created an environment where workers felt compelled to create fake and unauthorized accounts to reach these corporate benchmarks—the kind of abuse that could easily be checked if employees had a say in their own working conditions.
● The Fight for $15 isn't just a fight for $15.
