Workers Have Lost a Trillion Dollars In Annual Pay Over the Past 20 Years

Membership Ticker

David Corn,
Washington, DC, bureau chief

Dear reader,

This is how it works. The big lie. The endless spin. The outright denial of facts. Again and again and again. In "William Barr's War on Reality, Truth, and the Law," I break down how far the attorney general is willing to go to erase the truth in order to protect the president. I hope you'll give it a read. And if you think we need more reporting that isn't afraid to call a lie a lie, I hope you'll pitch in with a year-end donation so we can reach our big $600,000 goal this month and keep on charging ahead in 2020.

David Corn doesn't mince words because thanks to support from readers, we don't have to. Read his latest about the treachery in the Trump administration, and please support Mother Jones' journalism that calls a lie a lie with a year-end donation today.

Courtesy of EPI, here is labor’s share of business income over the past 40 years:

Since 2000, labor’s share has declined by about a trillion dollars. If you’ve become jaded by numbers this huge and have no idea what they mean on a human scale, it’s simple: this works out to something in the ballpark of $7,000 per worker. If we could just get back to the level of 80s and 90s, we’d all be making about $7,000 more per year.

This is not a huge ask. It’s not like trying to bring back the postwar Golden Age. We’re talking about something that was common as recently as 20 years ago. Since then, the CEO class has decided to add a trillion dollars to its income by taking it away from its workers. This is something that Democratic presidential candidates ought to share when they’re out on the campaign trail.