General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: A segment of DU is very invested in painting a dystopian picture of the US [View all]cascadiance
(19,537 posts)Some employers still could be paying just a little above minimum wage, and people would still be living in poverty on those "non-minimum wage" jobs.
It is not whether they are on "minimum wage" that should be the measure. It is what is their salary and what is that compared to the cost of living, and how has that shifted over time versus a decade or two ago. People's wages that aren't in the upper 1% of earners have been flat or actually have gone down.
In the past, people used to expect their wages to rise to follow the trends of productivity stats. They don't do that anymore. The only category of people these days that benefit at all from higher salaries of industry productivity gains are the very wealthy segments. A healthy economy pays its average workers the way the left of this graph shows in earlier times. The right of the graph shows how the wealthy have in effect STOLEN the wages of those that are being paid less than them, just because THEY CAN, when they are the ones in many situations how the profits are divided up in salaries to different parts of the companies they manage.
That is why we have a pay ratio of execs vs. the average worker so much higher than the 20/1 to 30/1 ratios we used to have in 1980 and earlier. That ratio is magnitudes higher today.