Re:Wage Stagnation
by crdoconnor on Tuesday February 26, 2019 @11:10AM
(#19255446)
Wages are not correlated to productivity in the slightest. Productivity simply establishes a floor on wage levels.
And that's the core of the problem. Wages used to go up with productivity, but not anymore. Plenty of money is being made, it just doesn't end up in the wages of regular employees.
A couple of years I came across a claim that compared to 50 years ago, the ratio between a CEO's salary than that of a regular employee of the same company, has shot up by one or two orders of magnitude. CEOs make way more than they used to, regular employees don't.
Re:Wage Stagnation
by crdoconnor on Tuesday February 26, 2019 @12:13PM
(#19256202)
Yeah, it's clearly relative power and competition that determines wage level, not productivity.
Sorry there is a huge causal relationship if not the only reason. Wealth is not relative dollars but purchasing power. In a system where a hat maker and a shoe maker double their production, they respectively see no "wage increase" but they are both twice as rich.
Productivity -> more goods/services -> richer society, wages be damned.
It's less about that as it is about your three remaining employees being rewarded handsomely for the highly productive work they do on their computers, but the seven who you let go and who now work at Walmart are no longer paid wages that are coupled to that increased productivity.