Workers' Wages Fall, Corporate Profits Soar

Workers’ Wages Fall, Corporate Profits Soar

By Benjamin Landy

Henry Blodget, the Editor-in-Chief of Business Insider, has compiled an excellent series of graphs this week illustrating the various ways that the distribution of wealth has grown more unequal over the last fourty years. Inspired by the Occupy Wall Street protests, Blodget highlights the ongoing economic injustice: middle class wages remain stagnant and the unemployment rate hovers near historic highs, but corporate profits and incomes for the nation’s wealthiest members are reaching levels unseen since the late 1920s.

I combined two of Blodget’s more powerful graphs and reconfigured them to compare the change in wages and corporate profits as a percentage of GDP since 1960.

Wages vs corporate profits change of gdp

The data is shocking: with the exception of a brief respite from 1967 to 1972, workers’ wages have been steadily declining as a share of the economy for over fourty years. At just 14 percent, wages have never been lower as a percentage of the economy than they are today.

Corporate profits, meanwhile, have never been better. As a percentage of the economy, today’s profits are surpassed only by a brief period in 2007, just before the stock market crashed, propelling the US economy into the Great Recession. If the current trend continues, they will soon be even higher.

And just in case you were wondering who is benefiting from those skyrocketing corporate profits, here’s a reminder: