How the System Favors Corporations Who Break the Rules Over the Working-Class | Alternet
"They’ll laugh all the way to the, well, to the bank. Just like oil companies snicker as they grab government subsidies [welfare] even though they’re among the most profitable corporations in the world. Just like hedge fund operators chuckle while luxuriating in their special, super-low tax rate.
Over the past 35 years, the rules have been written to facilitate trickle-up economics. The theory was that in a financial structure that guaranteed the rich received all income gains in the economy, millionaires and billionaires might let a couple of nickels slip out of their bulging pockets for workers to try to catch.
Unfortunately for workers, Brooks Brothers suits have really deep pockets. Almost nothing fell out of those pouches for workers. Their wages stagnated for decades while the rules facilitated the pinstriped boys getting richer and richer.
Last year, the pay gap between CEOs and typical workers widened to 373-to-1. That means for every $1 a worker earned, the CEO took $373. In just 7 minutes of slurping coffee or gazing out his penthouse office window, the typical CEO was handed more money than the average worker earned for 40 hours of labor.
Those numbers were very different before the dawn of trickle up. In 1965, the CEO-to-worker compensation ratio was 20-to-1. For every $1 a worker earned, the CEO got $20. And still, corporations made profits! And lots of people wanted to be CEOs! It was a time when the economic rules enabled workers to receive a larger share of the wealth that their labor helped create.
After trickle up, CEO compensation skyrocketed while worker pay languished. From 1978 to 2013, CEO compensation increased 937 percent, while the typical worker’s pay rose 10.2 percent. That trend continued last year, when CEO pay jumped up 16 percent while worker wages inched up 2.9 percent, which is hardly at all considering the 2.1 percent inflation rate."
