Dragonlady
Designing Woman
It's not the same value of work. You're wrong. Productivity has increased over the last 40 years but wages have gone flat.Corporations have already said that the windfall won’t be used for employee raises or job creation. It’ll be paid out to the shareholders.
And considering how many pensions, 401k's and other investment vehicles of all classes are shareholders, how is that such a bad thing?
Worker wages, as a percentage of overall costs, are at levels not seen since the Guilded Age. Workers haven’t seen their wages increase in any real way since Reagan.
The working class no longer has savings and are dependent on earned income credits and other government assistance. That assistance is funded by middle class taxpayers.
Corporations and the wealthy don’t need more money, workers do. Trump sold the tax cuts to a skeptical public on the idea that companies would give their workers raises. Without raises, the Middle Class is paying for the food stamps and the EIC’s.
That’s what’s wrong with it.
Working class jobs are being replaced with automation because it is cheaper to build and maintain a robot than to pay wages to workers that demand increasing pay for the same value of work.
Then you have sub-working class jobs, like fast food jobs, that were never meant to be careers being passed off a such because they were something that was not being automated until recently with the calls for the "livable wage", which again asks companies to pay above the value of work being added to the product and/or service.
Productivity increases are due to equipment provided and purchased by the employer for use by the employees.
The same was true in the Industrial Age and yet workers got to share in profits of increased productivity through their unions. The middle class was built by unions getting workers better wages.
Reagan told Americans that once the unions were gone, workers would get a raise. The opposite happened. Once the unions were gone, management got raises, the workers got nothing.
Walmart actually succeeded in lowering the wages of retail workers nation wide by destroying retail jobs across the country. Companies which failed to follow their model were driven out of business by their inability to compete. Once the competition was gone, Walmart was the only game in town and they paid minimum wage.