> Wages for the bottom 75-80% of the pop have been suppressed through
> union-busting, downsizings, outsourcing, and fear. Meanwhile, people at
> the top have been using their power to pay themselves very well. Wall
> Street has successfully pressured the managers of public companies to
> raise profits aggressively, which stokes the union-busting, downsizing,
> outsourcing, and fear agenda. The enormous growth of the financial
> sector has meant huge profits and bonuses for financiers, since they
> take a cut of everything that passes through their hands.
>
> Doug
May I try?
Wages for the bottom 80% of the pop have been ever more increasingly, easily suppressed in the US for close to 40 years now. This is because there has been a both a huge decrease in well-paying jobs that are available to people with high school educations *and* a huge increase of people in the job market, largely because women have entered the paid workforce in droves.
The first phenomenon---tremendous loss of good-paying stable jobs that the great majority of people were seen as qualified to get---was caused *firstly* by the sweeping introduction by capitalists of all kinds of workforce automation and technology, especially the computer, starting in the 70s. When a single person at a computer workstation could do the work of 3, then 10, then more...of course, under a capitalist regime, those jobs simply went away. Plus millions of formerly well-paying factory jobs have been throughly automated out of existence for decades now, never mind outsourcing. These technologies were put to this use by a capitalist class aggressively in search of only one thing, greater profits. The success of automation in general then made the rest of the continuing aggression against the working class possible, as the capitalists realized they had most of us on the run.
So, you have an economy in which millions of *decently paid jobs* have simply gone away for the vast majority of citizens. Most people are not considered to be qualified to hold a good paying job. You need a degree for that, or a very special skillset. There's a labor surplus for good paying jobs now. That's going to depress wages; but on top of that, add the response of the working class (and middle class, trying to stay middle class) to this situation: send more people in the household out to make money, to try to maintain the household standard of living. Mainly that means women entering the paid workforce in numbers never seen before. Women chose between traditional domesticity lived as renters counting every penny and paid employment that made it (hopefully) possible to raise a family in one's own home and maybe have some disposable income too. But of course: more workers on the job market = more labor glut = wages even more stagnant. More of everything going the capitalists' way, because they are holding wages flat but their profits are growing, and they are keeping what they used to share more with their workers.
So you have more and more people competing for anemic paychecks. Wages are not keeping up with the cost of living. Even with two breadwinners, most households are not getting anywhere, and as time passes they begin to actually lose ground. Now what? Am I wrong in understanding that at this point, all that money the capitalists had coming out of their ears and in the banks was utilized to create the personal household credit boom--the capitalists started selling their enormous excess profits back to the workers in the form of credit cards and loans; without such credit, most workers could never have continued to maintain their standard of living and levels of consumption. The interest payments to capital from this deal meant even more money gushing into the capitalists' coffers, which fed the explosive growth of the financial sector, which was entrusted with all this loot and became ever more powerful and skillful at devising all kinds of ways to continue the con, play the markets, and take more and more control over commerce in general so that they now get a huge piece of any and all action.
The big question I always come back to: why was it so easy to take advantage of the great majority of the populace? Why did the average American not put two and two together? Why, when told "Sorry, but to qualify for a decent-paying job you need to get a very expensive piece of paper first", did we just hang our heads and shuffle away? What is it about Americans that made it so simple to fleece them, to cow them?
Or do I have it all wrong?
Maria