Overworked America: 12 Charts That Will Make Your Blood Boil

[FreakinDJ]

Why "efficiency" and "productivity" really mean more profits for corporations and less sanity for you.



In the past 20 years, the US economy has grown nearly 60 percent. This huge increase in productivity is partly due to automation, the internet, and other improvements in efficiency. But it's also the result of Americans working harder—often without a big boost to their bottom lines. Oh, and meanwhile, corporate profits are up 20 percent


You have nothing to lose but your gains

Productivity has surged, but income and wages have stagnated for most Americans. If the median household income had kept pace with the economy since 1970, it would now be nearly $92,000, not $50,000.













Proud to be an American

The US is part of a very small club of nations that don't require...





http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/06/speedup-americans-working-harder-charts

[metroins]

1. Would love it

If they didn't use red and green in the same chart.

Makes me have to ask my wife which line is which.

[1939]

2. Your charts only go through 2009 or 2010

and leave out the Obama recovery.

[Sherman A1]

3. Indeed

I would very much like to see the information beyond those charts into more recent years, however I suspect it would not be a huge improvement over what we see posted.

[FreakinDJ]

5. 2011 article

but not much has changed

The root problems go back 40 years

By the early 1980s, the Treaty of Detroit had been unilaterally repealed. Three signal events—Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker’s deliberately induced recession, President Ronald Reagan’s firing of striking air-traffic controllers, and General Electric CEO Jack Welch’s declaration that his company would reward its shareholders at the expense of its workers—made clear that the age of broadly shared prosperity was over.

Profits of America’s still largely domestic corporations suffered. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, which had inched past 1,000 in 1972, tanked with the oil embargo the following year and didn’t climb back to that level for another decade. Although the biggest contributor to inflation was the increase in energy prices, a growing number of executives and commentators laid the blame for the economy’s troubles on the wages of American workers. “Some people will have to do with less,” Business Week editorialized. “Yet it will be a hard pill for many Americans to swallow—the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more.”

With the second oil shock, inflation surged to 13.5 percent. Volcker responded by inducing a recession. “The standard of living of the average American,” he said, “has to decline.” Raising the federal funds interest rate to nearly 20 percent throughout 1981, the Fed chairman brought much of American business—particularly the auto industry, where sales collapsed in the face of high borrowing costs—to a standstill. By 1982, unemployment had risen to a postwar high of 10.8 percent.


http://prospect.org/article/40-year-slump

More shocking then the Fed Chair deliberately inducing a Recession was the reasons he did it. Freidman's "Trickle Down" theory cited "Unemployment as a means to control inflation". Sounds reasonable to thoroughly economically insulated Political insiders and Wealthy Elite - until you look at the footnote cited - The Kenyan Economy in 1847

[NCTraveler]

4. A lot of small business owners such as myself haven't sold out.

Most of my competition is from large national companies.

I am in a profession where agents are expected to give out their cell numbers, be on call 24 hrs a day, they don't get paid sick time or maternity leave, no pay for vacations, etc.

I have policies in place that buck each one of those items. We are a family team and work as such. I know their families and they know mine. We are there for each other. They also share in the profits.

We need to get back to that mindset and legislation has to be enacted. It won't happen out of the goodness of people's hearts.

[snot]

6. K&R'd & bookmarked.

If only trade agreements would focus on
raising labor, environmental, and other standards worldwide
tracking and reducing externalized environmental costs worldwide
strengthening bank and esp. credit derivatives regulation worldwide
etc.