From Daily Kos: It sure is great to be in the top 1%, this week in the war on workers
By LAURA CLAWSON, for Daily Kos Labor
If you’ve been in the workforce since 1979, how much have your wages gone up? If you’re a little younger, how much have the wages for a job like yours gone up in those years? I bet it’s not 157.8%—unless, of course, you’re in the top 1%.
By contrast, wages for the bottom 90% grew by 23.9% between 1979 and 2018, according to an Economic Policy Institute analysis. The top 1% still lags one group, though, and that’s the top 0.1%, which saw its wages rise by 340.7% in those years.
This is economic inequality in action, and it’s reshaped the economy. “The bottom 90% earned 69.8% of all earnings in 1979 but only 61.0% in 2018. In contrast the top 1.0% increased its share of earnings from 7.3% in 1979 to 13.3% in 2018, a near-doubling,” EPI’s Lawrence Mishel and Melat Kassa write. “The growth of wages for the top 0.1% is the major dynamic driving the top 1.0% earnings as the top 0.1% more than tripled its earnings share from 1.6% in 1979 to 5.1% in 2018.”