CLASS WARFARE - YOU DAMN RIGHT IT IS!
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Thursday, November 3, 2011 Did you know that 50% of American workers earn less than $26,364 a year? Well it's true - This is just simply outrageous and immoral. When we have a consumer based economy and the consumer does not have disposable income to spend, we have an economy that does not work.
What you already know is that the gap between rich and poor has been widening lately. But some new numbers from the Congressional Budget Office put the issue into stark relief.
As the chart below shows, between 1979 and 2007, the share of after-tax income going to each of the bottom four income quintiles--the bottom 80 percent--has dropped. The only quintile that has increased its share is the top 20 percent. And the top 1 percent has more than doubled its share.
That top 1 percent saw its income skyrocket by 275 percent. Those between the 80th and 99th percentile--that is, the top 20 percent, excluding the very top 1 percent--also did pretty well, seeing their income rise by 65 percent. Income for the bottom 20 percent, meanwhile, grew by just 18 percent.
What has happened between 1979 and now has been an all-out assault on collective bargaining rights which has killed wage improvements not only for Union members but all workers. Let's look at this year alone, Wisconsin strips away collective bargaining rights from public employees. New Hampshire, Maine and Indiana looking to implement right to work laws and in Ohio, the republicans stripped the collective bargaining rights way from 350,000 workers. The good news here is the people are fighting back at the ballot box and have a chance on November 8th to repeal the anti-union law SB-5.
The Occupy Wall Street movement has made inequality a key focus of its protests, and has used the slogan, "We are the 99 percent." After starting in lower Manhattan last month, the movement has spread across the country, and has succeeded at helping to put the inequality issue into the media and political spotlight.
Your union, the UAW has endorsed the Occupy Wall Street movement and we encourage you to participate in any way that you can. You are the 99% and you matter!
