There was famously an inflection point 40-50 years ago where wages decoupled from productivity to the downside. I'm sure it wasn't perfect before then, but things did change.
The last time we hit this low point was in the Gilded Age, when the economic producers essentially revolted and forced governments to regulate against capitalistic greed. As you correctly identify, in the early 80s U.S. leadership figured out that if you issue debt more freely then you can get the economic growth of ‘household spend goes up’, ‘production and GDP goes up’, and ‘foreign currencies weaken versus the dollar’ without having to force* corporations to pay out profits as wage increases against their will. One bonus outcome is that you end up with lifelong debtors who are forced to accept work circumstances that they wouldn’t have to accept if they still had wage negotiating power. Too bad about the demonization of unions in tech, eh?
* A tax on (gross revenue – wages – cogs) with rate (cpi + fedrate) ^ 0.9 would be an excellent start, with an exponential factor that halts ‘shift the tax to consumers through simple price increases’ — the more you earn, the more you have to raise prices, which raises inflation, which raises your future tax by more than your price increase; the more revenue you pay out as wages instead of shareholder dividends, the lower you can set prices, which lowers inflation, which lowers your future tax — and adding the FFER lever allows the Fed to perform their mission to control (price) inflation not only with banks but also with businesses. For example, (8% inflation + 4% fedrate) ^ .9 is ~14.8%, which is a completely acceptable surcharge for businesses having raised prices so high that it caused an 8% inflation year!
Obviously wages and productivity had to decouple. Wages measure human labor, while productivity measures all output, including that which comes from automation. ~50 years ago is when automation started to become more than a curiosity in industry.
Human productivity to wages have kept pace with each other, though, so there is nothing to suggest anything has changed for the human. It is not like the robots are seeking promotions (yet).
The PLC, Programmable Logic Controller, was 1968. After which it started to become possible to have automated assembly lines with a few humans monitoring specialized robots.
Yeah, that's one specialized piece of automation in a long line of automation throughout history. I'm not sure why taking humans off of the assembly line is a larger deal than taking humans out of agriculture, textile production, or printing?
The only thing that is significant is that shift brought us to reaching peak human productivity. Prior to that, humans were not able to be as productive. Consider agriculture: You might be able to be maximally productive some times of the year, but usually you were waiting on Mother Nature to do her thing. This is why wages were able to grow alongside productivity as we started moving away from a pure agrarian world — having less reliance on external factors limiting what humans could produce. Once humans reached peak human productivity their human-based measures stagnated, but productivity itself did not stop as automation advances have kept that ball rolling. Taking people off the assembly line saw them move into jobs, mostly "knowledge-based" ones, where there was no way to become even more productive. You can only sit around in so many meetings each day, so to speak.
Maybe there is a new frontier where humans can start to become more productive again. Some say that is AI, but that remains to be seen. For now, we've hit our known limit. There is no longer anything outside of human control, like waiting for a crop to grow, that limits our human productivity. The only limiting us is ourselves, and it may be a fundamental limit.
What limits the length of the lever? The agricultural lever is already crazy long, the manufacturing lever, same. We could be doing the same with less, not more with the same.
Depends on where in the world you're looking. In India, something like 50% of the population works in agriculture. At the scale of India's population that's a significant fraction of the population of the planet, it's more than twice the population of the entire US.
If this is what i think it is, then yes. Life for humans has rarely been fair but that inflection point is startling. It tracks the wealth gap growing too irrc.
When I looked at this, the first thing which popped into my mind came from the 95th percentile graph... third one I think.
If you're a CTO, CEO, CxO, you have direct, in depth knowledge to how the company is doing. You also likely have insight into how that translates into free capital to spend on wages. Many companies are not public, and even when companies are, earning reports aren't easy for a line worker to fully understand.
So if you have that knowledge, it's much easier to push back when someone says a wage increase isn't possible. Such as the board, or the CEO (eg, if CTO, or whatever).
This by no means "makes it fair", it's simply that the inequality may be from knowledge, and therefore bargaining power.
Another aspect of things, is that every CxO class worker can agree, their knowledge is very very important, irreplaceable in fact! Upper management, you see, is quite valuable, as of course (from their perspective) "I'm irreplaceable and valuable!". Who doesn't think they have value, after all?
But.. those line workers, or even those engineers, well.. they're like cogs. One as another.
Some might attribute malice to the above thoughts by CxO class individuals, but it can also simply be driven by self-belief in innate value, and by good old ego.
We were talking about the 1970 inflection point in wages vs productivity. The inability of line workers to understand corporate finance does not seem to be a likely explanation for the 1970 inflection because it did not inflect in 1970.
My theory is: when it started being a bad thing to have any cash reserve.
With some reserve on the side, a company can survive bad times and not fire people. This is the kind of behavior employee will appreciate and make some diehard loyal.
But this available money is money not making more. So that's a bad thing these days and so the only easy variable available to survive is to remove excess workforce. It took some time for people to understand loyalty has been one-way only but now employers are reaping what they've sown.
Is there any data to support your theory? Because most of the companies at the top of the S&P 500 have enormous cash (and equivalent) reserves.
It makes sense to burn reserves and keep good employees around through a temporary cyclical economic downturn. But most of the large layoffs lately have been driven by secular changes that management expects to be permanent.
30 years ago and prior for a generation or two. Employees had pensions instead of 401ks where tenure built up a guaranteed fixed income payment at retirement. Now we're all tied to the stock market.
Oh, and back then a single income could support a working-class family to buy a decent house, two cars and maybe send a kid or two to college.
Those pensions could also be tied to the market, or more often the profitability of the company that ran it. There are many, many cases of underfunded pensions by bankrupt companies causing issues. All being equal, I'll take the job hopping and my own retirement account.
I agree it's more expensive than ever to afford to raise a family, though. There's also a malaise in the air that I don't think broader society has felt since the late 1970s, too.
401k became a thing in part because of deep structural problems with employee pensions. Pensions don't "guarantee" anything in practice and many people lost them or had steep cuts. It is a promise, not a law of physics. 401k/IRA wasn't created for no reason. Pensions are exposed to much more idiosyncratic risk than a 401k and companies are poorly positioned to manage those risks.
Some people might not want to take responsibility for retirement savings in the same way they might not want to take responsibility for providing themselves housing but the alternative is strictly worse.
The only pensions that kind of work is government pensions because they can paper over the structural deficiencies with taxation. But even that has significant limitations as we've seen.
A 401k isn't required to be invested in the stock market. It is advisable but not required.
Defined benefit pensions schemes ultimately need heavy regulation and a government backstop otherwise failure is inevitable.
That said, they can work great in tandem with the stock market.
The Kensington & Chelsea local government pension scheme in London, here in the UK, is an example.
The local authority (not central government) ultimately has the responsibility on paying out these liabilities, but it's one of the few councils that just dumped their pot in to global equities, and as a result they are 200% funded relative to their commitments and have stopped making further contributions.
The money that was flowing into the pension scheme can now flow in to local services.
Pensions are mostly a pyramid scheme scam. It’s why basically all government run pensions have more liabilities than assets and effectively keep taking from taxpayers to not collapse. And why many company run pensions disappear in a bankruptcy.
I prefer having the money under my control, personally.
The balance of power between capital and labor fluctuates; qualitatively it definitely felt different ten years ago. For whatever reason labor seems to have much less power today. Not zero, just less. It isn't that companies used to be more loyal out of some moral obligation. They were forced to be more loyal by market dynamics that used to be more favorable to labor.
I'm having a hard time finding data on employee tenure that would support this. There seems to be a recent dip but it's only significant relatively, not in absolute numbers based on what I expected. Which was something like 25 years tenure not that long ago but that wasn't the case, more like 5.
The thing that changed was perception. People no longer believe loyalty to employer is worthwhile, just as they no longer believe hard work is what gets people rich.
They no longer believe it is worthwhile, because the landscape changed: companies found they no longer needed to treat their employees was well as they had. (Driven largely by the shift around that time toward quarterly results over long term sustainability, as I understand it.) And thus began a race to the bottom.
Globalization played (plays) a huge part in this timeline too. If I can outsource your job to a place that really does treat their employees as disposable, you should just be happy to be employed. And even if I don’t want to offshore, how does my product/service succeed or remain sustainable if my competitors are all offshoring (or indeed come from offshore)? I’m not defending this attitude just distilling and illustrating through extreme language what I see as a reality of global competition.
Post-WW2, America had a lock on global manufacturing and was like last man standing in a burned down world.
It was/is an illusion to think that could be a permanent state.
The pre-war employment situation in America looked nothing like post-war. Your race to the bottom narrative is probably better framed as reversion to a multi-polar world with bonus features of higher global prosperity and capability, lower barriers to access foreign markets (whether laborers or consumers), and mature logistics infrastructure. In short - more people than ever want YOUR job, and to live in YOUR house, and have YOUR safety net, such as it is, it’s not just some focus on quarterly reports.