Productivity–Pay Tracker

Change 1973–2017:

Productivity

+77.0%

Hourly pay

+12.4%

Productivity has grown 6.2x more than pay

What happened in 1973?

Many corporate executives joined up with Koch backed organizations like ALEC, the  American Legislative Exchange Council which started in 1973 where one of their major goals was to destroy the power of worker unions in the private sector. Currently, they would love to break up the public sector unions made up of folks like teachers, fire fighters, police officers, etc.

As per a May 18, 2012 Mother Jones article by Paul Abowd, “Much of the recent controversy surrounding the American Legislative Exchange Council has focused upon the way it brings together its key members, major corporations and state legislators, to craft legislation behind closed doors. Largely unnoticed has been the influence wielded by a third group of ALEC members: think tanks.”

“Two of those state-level think tanks took center stage at last weekend’s ALEC Task Force Summit in Charlotte, North Carolina. The Arizona-based Goldwater Institute and the Michigan-based Mackinac Center for Public Policy successfully shepherded five model bills through ALEC’s Commerce, Insurance, and Economic Development Task Force—all targeting public-sector unions.”

“Goldwater representative Byron Schlomach introduced two bills, one requiring that public employees annually approve their employer’s automatic deduction of union dues from paychecks. Another would prohibit union officials from taking paid leave from public-sector jobs to perform union duties.”

“The Mackinac Center sent labor policy analyst Paul Kersey to introduce three more bills targeting unions. One of those model bills is already Michigan law, requiring public-sector unions to make public audits of their financial activities. Another Mackinac proposal would require public-sector union members to vote on their union membership every three to five years, and a third would make it easier for public and private employees to decertify their unions.”

“Members of the ALEC’s commerce task force confirmed that the five union bills were approved in Charlotte.”

“The think tanks’ bills will become model legislation if the group’s board of directors does not initiate a formal review of the bills within 30 days. ALEC will then likely encourage its member legislators to introduce the model bills back in their home states. Since its founding in 1973, ALEC has successfully pushed hundreds of laws at the state level. According to the its website, every year legislators introduce nearly 1,000 bills based on ALEC model legislation, and 20 percent of them become law.”

Dozens of state-based think tanks, many of them part of a Heritage Foundation-affiliated umbrella group called the State Policy Network, have long held sway within ALEC. “A very large proportion of the bills are sponsored by these think tanks,” says Nick Surgey, a legal associate at Common Cause, which claims ALEC is actually a lobbying group and is violating its nonprofit status. “But behind that next layer is another set of unknowns about who is pushing the think tanks’ agenda.”

“Some, though not all, of Goldwater and Mackinac’s other financial supporters have been revealed. They have been supported with grants from the Charles Koch Charitable Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, and the State Policy Network—groups that also fund ALEC. Together, Goldwater and Mackinac draw money from 12 of the same conservative foundations, according to analysis by Media Matters Action Network. In 2010, the last year for which information is available, the think tanks had budgets of approximately $3.5 million each.”

While the republican President Donald Trump and his corporate crony buddies are selling the American peoples on the concept that those foreigners (or the others which could be any minority group) are taking away jobs, look at what they are doing:

Even though the republican President Donald J. Trump has been doing his level best to decry the fact that foreigners are taking away the jobs from Americans, he has continued to this date to hire mostly foreign help via H-2B visas (99%) to staff temporary positions (seasonal) at his many resorts, including at Mar-a-Lago.

While he rails against US corporations going overseas to manufacture goods, the following represents his purchasing practices for his own hotel businesses.

Added tidbits:

Many of these huge profitable corporations like International Paper and General Electric have been paying -0- dollars towards the IRS federal taxes.

Here are Some Key Findings from a 3/9/17 ITEP study that evaluated profitable companies only for an eight year period  from 2008-2015:

• “As a group, the 258 corporations paid an effective federal income tax rate of 21.2 percent over the eight-year period, slightly over half the statutory 35 percent tax rate.”

• “Eighteen of the corporations, including General Electric, International Paper, Priceline.com and PG&E, paid no federal income tax at all over the eight-year period. A fifth of the corporations (48) paid an effective tax rate of less than 10 percent over that period.”

• “Of those corporations in our sample with significant offshore profits, more than half paid higher corporate tax rates to foreign governments where they operate than they paid in the United States on their U.S. profits.”

In conclusion, blaming others won’t change our less than rosy economic conditions. Instead if we all join together, our numbers create a force to be reckoned with that gives us average Joe workers tremendous power. This is what those on top would do just about anything to prevent. We do not begrudge the success of the rich but they have to learn that we cannot be ignored and easily deflected into blaming our fellow brothers and sisters who are traveling on the same boat, paddling upstream and getting nowhere Corporation executives are going to have to do their part to lift up the middle class/ poor by sharing their companies’ spoils.

We don’t have to sit back while those in the White House and the US Congress pass bills that neglect the quest for a better quality of life by average every day workers while mostly rewarding the very rich individuals and large corporations with the major 2017 tax cuts bill, while some like the republican Senator Chuck Grassley, of Utah blames us for not being rich.

This November 2018, back all Democratic candidates as they are the ones truly championing the causes like the protection of worker unions of average American workers.