The 40-year disconnect (USA)

Click here if you wish to access this reproduced article from its source, by David Ruccio from Real-World Economics Review. 

As Steven Rattner explains,

    Wage increases haven’t been paltry because the efficiency of the American worker has flagged; indeed, productivity has continued to chug along. But those productivity gains have simply not been passed on to workers. Between 2000 and 2012, productivity rose by 22 percent while wages increased by 7.7 percent. The divergence was particularly great over the last three years of that period – productivity up 4.6 percent and real wages down 1.1 percent. For this failure of the American worker to be rewarded for his growing output, blame a variety of factors, perhaps most important, globalization, which has allowed companies to move production to whatever part of the planet offers the lowest cost labor. In that respect, American workers remain in a race to the bottom.

Actually, it’s American employers who remain in a race to the bottom—and, during 2013, they continued to win.