![]() ![]() overall continued to get much richer, but most of the increased wealth went to the top, not to normal people. ![]() Then the link between productivity and pay was severed: The U.S. The meaning of Biden’s statistics is that for decades after World War II, America got much richer overall, and average worker pay went up at the same rate. One person with the latest version of Microsoft Excel can do a lot more math than one person with Napier’s bones. One person with a bulldozer can move a lot more dirt than one person with a shovel. Over time, as technology advances and society learns how to use it, each worker can produce more. Productivity is a simple but extremely important economic concept. The basic bargain in this country has been broken. Productivity has grown four times faster than pay has grown. You know what the workers’ pay grew? By 100 percent. During a speech last May at a community college in Cleveland, Joe Biden explained one of them:įrom 1948 after the war to 1979, productivity in America grew by 100 percent. The stunning victory of the wealthy over everyone else can been measured in several straightforward ways. As Warren Buffett - current estimated net worth $101 billion - has said, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” The significance of Reagan’s actions is rarely discussed today in the mainstream, and for understandable reasons: It was the first huge offensive in a war that corporate America has been waging on this country’s middle class ever since. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.” It’s easy to imagine strikers expressing the same sentiments as a Trump voter who famously lamented, “I thought he was going to do good things. PATCO was dominated by Vietnam War-era veterans who’d learned air traffic control in the military and were one of a vanishingly small number of unions to endorse Reagan in 1980, thereby scoring one of the greatest own goals in political history. The careers of most of the individual strikers were similarly dead: While Bill Clinton lifted Reagan’s ban on strikers in 1993, fewer than 10 percent were ever rehired by the Federal Aviation Administration. By October of that year, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, or PATCO, the union that had called the strike, had been decertified and lay in ruins. 5, 1981.įorty years ago, on August 5, 1981, President Ronald Reagan fired 11,345 striking air traffic controllers and barred them from ever working again for the federal government. All strikers were fired on the order of President Ronald Reagan on Aug. Members of PATCO, the air traffic controllers union. ![]()
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