Corporate profit climbs 87% while worker pay rises 4.5%

By Art Pine
Bloomberg News

May 11, 2004

U.S. corporate profits surged 87 percent from the third quarter of 2001 to the end of 2003, according to Commerce Department figures. Wages and salaries grew 4.5 percent.

The increase in workers' pay was the smallest for the first nine quarters of any recovery since World War II, said Barry Bosworth, who directed the White House Council on Wage and Price Stability during Jimmy Carter's administration. After inflation, real wage gains were 1.1 percent, Bosworth said.


Labor's share of the income of non-farm businesses, the broadest measure of what workers gain from the economy, fell to 60.2 percent in the fourth quarter of 2003, the lowest level since 1947 and down from 64.6 percent in the third quarter of 2001, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said. Executive pay hasn't been as restrained as that of workers. Salaries of chief executives rose 8.7 percent on average in 2003 at 70 companies studied by Bloomberg, while U.S. employees' average pay inched up 1.5 percent.



http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/printedition/chi-0405110029may11,1,6460534.story?coll=chi-printbusiness-hed

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Bush has been going around the country saying his tax cuts are working. He is correct, but they are working in the way they were really designed. They were designed to increase the power and wealth of the few at the very top at the expense of the rest of us.
:kick:

Leave the rich people alone, don't you know they are the source of all good in the world?

What will it take to wake people up?



http://www.wgoeshome.com

and perhaps 35% to 80% is spent on wages -

and profit is 3 to 10%

so the same dollar could have a 2.5 to 27 times larger impact (in terms of a percentage increase) on profit as on wages.

That said - we are being screwed!

gone up 47% in the last three years. We are getting screwed!