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O<\/strong>ver the past four decades, American workers have suffered a devastating loss of economic power, manifest in their wages, benefits and working conditions. The annual economic output of the United States has almost tripled, but, with the help of policymakers from both political parties, the wealthy hoarded the fruits.<\/p>\n In the nation\u2019s slaughterhouses, the average worker in 1982 made $24 an hour<\/a> in inflation-adjusted dollars, or $50,000 a year. Today the average meatpacker processes significantly more meat \u2014 and makes less than $14 an hour<\/a>.<\/p>\n The hundreds of thousands of home health care aides<\/a>, often female, often minorities, who care for a nation of aging baby boomers rarely receive paid time to care for their own families.<\/p>\n Even in the high-flying technology sector, companies have found ways to leave their workers behind. More than half<\/a> of the people who work for Google do not actually work for Google. They are classified as contractors, which means they do not need to be treated as employees.<\/p>\n Picture the nation as a pirate crew: In recent decades, the owners of the ship have gradually claimed a larger share of booty at the expense of the crew. The annual sum that has shifted from workers to owners now tops $1 trillion.<\/p>\n Or consider the power shift from the perspective of an individual worker. If income had kept pace with overall economic growth since 1970, Americans in the bottom 90 percent of the income distribution would be making an extra $12,000 per year<\/a>, on average. In effect, every American worker in the bottom 90 percent of the income distribution is sending an annual check for $12,000 to a richer person in the top 10 percent.<\/p>\n American workers need a raise. But it is not enough to transfer wealth from the rich to the desperate. In confronting the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt understood that a sustainable improvement in the quality of most American lives required an overhaul of the institutions of government.<\/p>\n \u201cThese economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America,\u201d Roosevelt said<\/a> in 1936. \u201cWhat they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power.\u201d<\/p>\n Now as then, the profound inequities of American life are the result of laws written at the behest of the wealthy and public institutions managed in their interest. Now as then, the nation\u2019s economic problems are rooted in political problems. And now as then, the revival of broad prosperity \u2014 and the stability of American democracy \u2014 require the imposition of limits on the political influence of the wealthy. It requires the government to serve the interests of the governed.<\/p>\n Americans especially need to confront the fact that minorities are disproportionately the victims of economic inequality \u2014 the people most often denied the dignity of a decent wage. That inequity is the result of historic and continuing racism, and it should be addressed with the same sense of fierce urgency that has motivated the wave of protests against overt displays of racism.<\/p>\n The Rev. Dr. William Barber II, a civil-rights leader who emphasizes the foundational importance of economic justice, has pointed to the constitution that North Carolina adopted after the Civil War. The document affirms the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But African-Americans were among the state\u2019s legislators for the first time, and the former slaves got another principle<\/a> enshrined as well: that workers are entitled to \u201cthe fruits of their own labor.\u201d They understood that economic security makes other freedoms meaningful.<\/p>\n It is time to ensure that all Americans can share in the nation\u2019s prosperity.<\/p>\n I<\/strong>n February 1970, student protesters broke into a Bank of America branch near the University of California, Santa Barbara. They scattered the bank\u2019s files and pushed a burning dumpster into the lobby, setting the building on fire.<\/p>\n One protester explained, \u201cIt was the biggest capitalist thing around.\u201d<\/p>\n California\u2019s governor, Ronald Reagan, condemning the protesters as \u201ccowardly little bums,\u201d sent in the National Guard. For Reagan and others, the bank fire was more than an isolated act of vandalism. Lewis F. Powell, a prominent corporate lawyer, described it as part of a larger assault on the business of America in a 1971 memo for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.<\/p>\n Powell listed threats including Ralph Nader\u2019s campaign for consumer safety regulations, the rise of the environmental movement and the expansion of social welfare programs. Warning<\/a>that \u201cbusiness and the enterprise system are in deep trouble, and the hour is late,\u201d he urged businesses to fight.<\/p>\n Corporations began to invest in politics on an unprecedented scale. The beer magnate Joseph Coors said Powell\u2019s memo prompted him to create the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that greatly influenced Reagan\u2019s presidential policy agenda. The National Association of Manufacturers moved to Washington from New York. Blue chips including General Electric, Exxon and IBM funded a \u201cboot camp\u201d where economists lectured federal judges on free enterprise. By 1990, 40 percent of the judiciary had been re-educated.<\/p>\n Powell continued his corporate advocacy as a member of the Supreme Court, which he joined in 1972, writing important decisions removing restraints on corporate concentration and campaign spending.<\/p>\n The counterrevolutionaries embraced a radical view of the role of corporations: \u201cThe social responsibility of business is to increase its profits,\u201d as the economist Milton Friedman wrote in an influential 1970 essay in The New York Times Magazine<\/a>.<\/p>\n Workers leaving a General Electric plant in the 1940s. ALFRED EISENSTAEDT\/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION, VIA GETTY IMAGES<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n A turbine for a ship being built by General Electric at its plant in Lynn, Mass. in August 1954. FPG\/GETTY IMAGES<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n A worker at the General Electric plant in Hudson Falls, N.Y., in 1973. THE NEW YORK TIMES<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n Images of Jack Welch on screens above the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange in March. RICHARD DREW\/ASSOCIATED PRESS<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n General Electric, the quintessential American industrial conglomerate, had boasted in a 1953 report that it paid a lot of money in federal taxes.<\/p>\n It also boasted about its payments to\u00a0suppliers, its spending on wages and benefits and its\u00a0investments in long-term research.<\/p>\n The report was explicit: The company\u2019s income was shared among \u201cthose whose services of various kinds made this output possible.\u201d GE understood its success as intertwined with the health of the government, the prosperity of its workforce and the growth of the U.S. economy. Under Jack Welch, GE\u2019s chairman from 1981 to 2001,the company\u2019s primary objective shifted from making light bulbs to making money.<\/p>\n There was no more boasting about paying taxes.<\/p>\n During the first three years of Mr. Welch\u2019s tenure, G.E. recorded $6.5 billion in profits and didn\u2019t pay the federal government a single penny in corporate income taxes. Instead of boasting about paying workers, Mr. Welch boasted about layoffs.<\/p>\n This unapologetic pursuit of profit reached new heights with the deregulation of financial markets.<\/p>\n Lending surged as the federal government lifted strict limits on interest rates and on foreign investment in the United States. Investors bought companies and squeezed them like lemons, while surviving firms scrambled to keep shareholders happy. In 1982, the Securities and Exchange Commission \u2014 led by a Wall Street banker<\/a> for the first time since the Great Depression \u2014 provided a new way for corporations to shovel money to shareholders by voting to let companies buy back shares of their own stock.<\/p>\n Companies also began to compensate executives primarily with options to purchase stock. The chief executives of large American corporations made about 20 times more than the median worker at those companies in the mid-1960s. By 2018, the gap was some 278 times<\/a>.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the union movement declined, removing an important counterweight to corporate power. Unions lost traction partly under the weight of their own shortcomings, including endemic corruption and a focus on preserving employment in declining industries rather than expanding membership in growing industries.<\/p>\n Companies also became more militant in their opposition to unions. Kate Bronfenbrenner, a professor at Cornell University, surveyed workers<\/a> who had participated in unionization drives between 1999 and 2003 and found 57 percent of their employers had threatened to close the business if a union was formed; 47 percent threatened to cut wages or benefits; and 34 percent fired workers who supported unionization.<\/p>\n To sustain the goals of the private sector at the expense of the public interest, corporations poured money into lobbying. They told policymakers that the decline in the fortunes of American workers was the tough-but-fair result of market forces.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople will get paid on how valuable they are to the enterprise,\u201d John Snow, an economist then serving as Treasury secretary under President George W. Bush, explained in 2006. On this theory, thanks to new technologies and increased foreign competition, most Americans just weren\u2019t worth what they used to be.<\/p>\n Politicians didn\u2019t pay much attention to the flaws in that logic: that U.S. workers have fared more poorly than those in other nations, and that wage growth also has lagged far behind the rising value of the average worker\u2019s output. In a recent study<\/a>, the Harvard economists Anna Stansbury and Lawrence Summers tied those trends to the shift in political power from workers to employers.<\/p>\n Wages are substantially determined by a tug of war between workers and employers and, with the help of government, employers have been winning. The hostility of the Republican Party was nothing new, but Democrats also parted ways with workers. As Americans moved from thinking of themselves primarily as workers to thinking of themselves primarily as consumers, the Democratic Party recast itself.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019d love the Teamsters to be worse off,\u201d said Alfred Kahn, an economic adviser to President Jimmy Carter. \u201cI\u2019d love the automobile workers to be worse off.\u201d<\/p>\n Kahn and other economists insisted that reducing union wages would benefit everyone else. And as unions faded, the government demurred from championing the rights of workers. The purchasing power of the federal minimum wage peaked in 1968; it\u2019s been falling ever since. The Economic Policy Institute estimates<\/a> that employers illegally deprive workers of more than $50 billion in wages each year by underpaying them or requiring unpaid work; violators are rarely punished.<\/p>\n Workers could track the loss of power in their paychecks: Weekly wages have stagnated since the late 1970s. Newer employers, like mobile phone companies, simply refused to treat workers in the same way as older employers like the landline telephone companies. And old-line companies that survived, like the heavy equipment maker Caterpillar, gradually forced workers to accept less compensation.<\/p>\n \u201cWorking on the railroad is a mentally taxing and challenging job; I would say it has gotten harder and the compensation is now less than it once was,\u201d said Daniel Lyon, a 63-year-old locomotive engineer from Cheyenne, Wyo. \u201cAnd the cost of everything has gone up all these years.\u201d<\/p>\n Employers also took advantage of the growing number of women in the work force. As the share of female workers in a given industry increased, wages fell for employees of both sexes<\/a>.<\/p>\n Over the past decade, as the gilded class enjoyed the longest period of uninterrupted economic growth in American history, many middle- and lower-income Americans borrowed to maintain their standard of living. Household debt as a share of the economy has roughly doubled since 1980. Many less affluent Americans effectively are paying wealthier Americans for the money that they once were paid in wages.<\/p>\n In recent months, the government has reinforced those patterns, responding to the coronavirus pandemic by pumping into the economy trillions of dollars aimed mostly at preserving wealth rather than jobs. The government has backstopped corporate borrowing while allowing companies to lay off millions of workers. As a result, stock prices have soared even as people stand in long lines at unemployment offices and food pantries.<\/p>\n And those who waited longest for new opportunities after the 2008 financial crisis have often been among the first to lose their jobs. Black people and women have been especially hard-hit<\/a>. Astonishingly, just 54 percent<\/a> of black men in America were employed in May, up slightly from a modern low of 53 percent in April.<\/p>\n T<\/strong>he coronavirus recession has driven unemployment in America to the highest levels since the Great Depression. For many workers, for many years to come, the limits of the political horizon may seem to be defined by the bitter truth that a poorly paid job is better than none.<\/p>\n Yet this is the moment to insist that workers deserve more.<\/p>\n The nation has ample resources to ensure that every worker is paid enough to afford housing, food and other necessities of daily life. Anything less is intolerable. Yet in 2017, more than 17 million workers<\/a> \u2014 disproportionately minorities and women \u2014 labored for wages too meager to lift their households above the federal poverty line.<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/newsgraphics\/2020\/04\/08\/inequality-embeds\/assets\/images\/gettyimages-72403042-1440.jpg\")
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