The top executives at the big global corporations are certainly enjoying all of this free trade. Their salaries have soared. All of this free trade has been very hard on American workers as factory after factory has closed, but it has allowed the big corporations to get exceedingly wealthy. The top executives at the big global corporations are certainly enjoying all of this free trade. Their salaries have soared.
Know your Place
In 1950, the ratio of the average executive’s paycheck to the average worker’s paycheck was about 30 to 1. Since the year 2000, that ratio has ranged between 300 to 500 to one. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.
That is what globalism is all about.
The elite makes out like bandits as they exploit third-world labor pools, while the American middle class finds itself slowly being crushed out of existence.
According to the United Nations Gini Coefficient (which measures the distribution of income), the United States has the highest level of inequality of all of the highly industrialized nations. Increasingly, all of the rewards are going to those at the top, while the vast majority of Americans are left wondering why things just don’t seem to work out for them.
According to economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, two-thirds of income increases between 2002 and 2007 went to the wealthiest 1% of Americans.
Life is good if you are in the top one percent.
Unfortunately, that does not include any of us.
Instead, the American middle class is gradually being pushed into lower-paying service jobs. But it is really hard to feed a family by cutting hair or by greeting the folks who come walking into the local Wal-Mart. If you talk to many Americans, they just can’t seem to figure out why they can’t make things work out even though they are working as hard as they can. Millions of Americans have found themselves taking on second (and in many cases third) jobs in an attempt to provide for their families.
But what they don’t understand is that the global elite has turned labor into a globalized commodity. American workers are not faced with a level playing field. Just check out some of the pay levels around the world that American workers must compete against…