Public Employee Press

The World of Work
The rising tide lifts only the captains

End-of-the-year bonuses on Wall Street provided more evidence of the country’s vast economic inequality, with differences unseen since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

While workers continued to produce more, their slice of the pie shrank.

But bonuses at the top five Wall Street firms totaled an estimated $36 billion to $44 billion. From 2000 to 2006, labor productivity rose 18 percent, but weekly wages adjusted for inflation only increased 1 percent, according to a study of the country’s 93 million production and non-supervisory workers by the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University.

Where did all the gravy go? The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office recently showed how President Bush’s tax cuts have worsened economic inequality.

In 2003, the richest 1 percent of households got 12.2 percent of U.S. after-tax income. By 2004, according to the CBO, Bush’s tax cuts had handed these households an extra $128 billion as they took home 14 percent of all income.