Workers Are Getting a Bit More of the Economic Pie (and Shareholders Less)

Re:Workers Are Getting a Bit More of the Economic Pie (and S... by grej on Tuesday May 03, 2016 @02:23PM (#11623017)

The article notes that a greater percentage of national income is going to workers now, which may very well be true according to how the accounting is done. However, how much of that is because many large corporations are booking a great deal of their profits outside of the US, reducing the denominator in kind of an artificial way? I didn't see anything in the article that mentioned the potential effects of corporations booking profits to overseas cost centers.

The chart the NYT shows depicts worker compensation percentage of national income. I'd be interested to see what overall worker compensation and overall corporate profits look like in inflation-adjusted terms, separately.

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Re:Workers Are Getting a Bit More of the Economic Pie (and S... by crpatino on Tuesday May 03, 2016 @02:33PM (#11623090)

Another possibility is to look at the compensation for upper management. C-level officers are usually paid in stock as well as cash, but the staff reporting directly to them are salaried employees.

If you actually look at the graph (presented in the same article) it does not look like "the trend is reversing" at all. It rather looks like a very clear downwards trend with a strong cyclic component. So, when the times are good, the salaried bosses might just be handing out productivity bonuses to their reports, and passing the bill to the shareholders.

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Re:Workers Are Getting a Bit More of the Economic Pie (and S... by No1 on Tuesday May 03, 2016 @04:43PM (#11624071)

> C-level officers are usually paid in stock as well as cash, but the staff reporting directly to them are salaried employees.

A great point, but note that the writer considers C-level officers to be workers in this case. The headline might as well be Workers Pay Probably Keeping up with Inflation, Execs Doing Great, but that's not really news.

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Re:Workers Are Getting a Bit More of the Economic Pie (and S... by heimatau on Tuesday May 03, 2016 @10:52PM (#11625832)

Very very true. I'm doing research on this.

Chart 3 demonstrates this clearly. Non-management workers are receiving less compensation. http://0-search.ebscohost.com.skyline.ucdenver.edu/login.asp...

- Note, sorry it's behind a pay wall.

Alt cite: MAGDOFF, F., & FOSTER, J. B. (2013). Class War and Labor's Declining Share. Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine, 64(10), 1.

EDIT: Was able to find a public link, through Google Scholar: http://search.proquest.com/openview/4be2b770b6d137e018c146e5...

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Re:Workers Are Getting a Bit More of the Economic Pie (and S... by jackcosgrove on Tuesday May 03, 2016 @03:12PM (#11623380)

Exactly, take away the cyclical component of the wage graph and it's still trending down.

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Re:Workers Are Getting a Bit More of the Economic Pie (and S... by maxerickson on Tuesday May 03, 2016 @02:41PM (#11623144)

Broad measures of wages are also showing growth.

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