Labor Day in US – How the working man and woman are treated

According to U.S. government data, in the past 12 months the working people of America have received about the smallest share of national economic output since at least World War II.

When you adjust for inflation, real median household income is down about 10% since the start of the millennium and is now lower than it was in 1989. No kidding.

For the past 35 years, the American economy has “persistently redistributed rewards away from workers and toward shareholders,” wrote economists Daniel Greenwald and Sydney Ludvigson, of New York University, and Martin Lettau, at the University of California at Berkeley, in a recent paper. They calculated that this trend, not “rising productivity” or technology, is the main reason the stock market has done so well over that time.

Our grandparents would be amazed at how America treats the working man and woman today.

Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor. Read the whole story at Labor Day is a joke – MarketWatch.