The Decline of the Reward for Work

by Clyde Weiss  |  February 11, 2013

You always thought that if you worked hard, you’d be rewarded for your work with decent wages and benefits. But something has been eating away at that reward, and it’s not just inflation.

“There has been, over the past decade, a sharp decline in the reward for work,” writes Thomas B. Edsall, author of The Age of Austerity and other books, and a professor of journalism at Columbia University.

Writing in The New York Times, Edsall details this decline by citing the research of Cleveland Federal Reserve economists Margaret Jacobson and Filippo Occhino. They explain why workers’ wages have not kept up with their productivity, a standard measure of how well workers are compensated for their labor.

They attribute the widening gap to the decline in U.S. manufacturing and politically motivated changes to workers’ ability to organize that depressed unionization rates. That adversely affects the economy, the study argues.

Workers aren’t powerless against this widening gap. They can help reverse the trend by increasing the bargaining power of labor. That means fighting a corporate-driven agenda to undermine workers’ rights in Illinois, Iowa, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and other states.

AFSCME members are doing just that, and we will continue to fight because unions built the working middle class and it will take unions to protect it.