On December 28, 2012, Christopher Petrella writes an Op-Ed piece in Truthout in which, according to Petrella, the key to reducing income inequality and assuring general prosperity is to tackle the widening wage-to-productivity ratio and assure everyone a living wage.
Surging income inequality is fundamentally attributable to the grotesque divergence of pay and productivity for low- and middle-income workers since the mid-1970s. Though wages and productivity rates tracked evenly from 1948-1972, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), hourly compensation for low- and middle-income workers has grown less than half as fast as gains in productivity since the mid-1970s. Beginning in the mid-1970s, employers began taking advantage of historically high levels of surplus labor by suppressing wages. US labor shortages, which were a mainstay of the national economy since at least the formal abolition of race-based slavery, all but disappeared in the mid-1970s as a result of emerging automated technologies, the growth of outsourcing, the introduction of women into the “formal” labor market, and the passage of pro-immigration statutes in 1964.
The widening chasm between productivity and pay helps to explain why in the third quarter of 2012 after-tax corporate profits achieved a record share of the GDP – while total wages simultaneously plummeted to their lowest-ever GDP ratio.
From 1979-2007, the after-tax income of the top 1 percent of income earners grew 13.5 times as fast as the after-tax wages of the bottom 20 percent of workers. But here’s the catch. The pre-tax income of the top 1 percent grew at nearly an identical rate – 13.9 times as fast – as the bottom 20 percent of workers over the same period of time. These data suggest in exceptionally clear terms that a regressive tax system isn’t the primary driver of our nation’s widening levels income stratification.
Christopher Petrella’s argument is seriously flawed because is it based on one-factor economic thinking in which productivity gains are attributed to labor.
The role of physical productive capital ––land; structures; infrastructure; tools; machines; human-intelligent machines; super-automation; digital computer processing; certain intangibles that have the characteristics of property, such as patents and trade or firm names; and the like owned by individuals––is to do ever more of the work, which produces income. Full employment is not an objective of businesses. Companies strive to keep labor input and other costs at a minimum. Private sector job creation in numbers that match the pool of people willing and able to work is constantly being eroded by physical productive capital’s ever increasing role. Over the past century there has been an ever-accelerating shift to productive capital––which reflects tectonic shifts in the technologies of production. The mixture of labor worker input and capital worker input has been rapidly changing at an exponential rate of increase for over 235 years in step with the Industrial Revolution (starting in 1776) and had even been changing long before that with man’s discovery of the first tools, but at a much slower rate. Up until the close of the nineteenth century, the United States remained a working democracy, with the production of products and services dependent on labor worker input. When the American Industrial Revolution began and subsequent technological advance amplified the productive power of non-human capital, plutocratic finance channeled its ownership into fewer and fewer hands, as we continue to witness today with government by the wealthy evidenced at all levels.
People invented tools to reduce toil, enable otherwise impossible production, create new highly automated industries, and significantly change the way in which products and services are produced from labor intensive to capital intensive––the core function of technological invention. Kelso attributed most changes in the productive capacity of the world since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution to technological improvements in our capital assets, and a relatively diminishing proportion to human labor. Capital, in binary economist Louis Kelso’s terms, does not “enhance” labor productivity (labor’s ability to produce economic goods). In fact, the opposite is true. It makes many forms of labor unnecessary. Because of this undeniable fact, Kelso asserted that, “free-market forces no longer establish the ‘value’ of labor. Instead, the price of labor is artificially elevated by government through minimum wage legislation, overtime laws, and collective bargaining legislation or by government employment and government subsidization of private employment solely to increase consumer income.”
Furthermore, according to Kelso, productive capital is increasingly the source of the world’s economic growth and, therefore, should become the source of added property ownership incomes for all. Kelso postulated that if both labor and capital are interdependent factors of production, and if capital’s proportionate contributions are increasing relative to that of labor, then equality of opportunity and economic justice demands that the right to property (and access to the means of acquiring and possessing property) must in justice be extended to all. Yet, sadly, the American people and its leaders still pretend to believe that labor is becoming more productive.
Technological change makes tools, machines, structures, and processes ever more productive while leaving human productiveness largely unchanged (our human abilities are limited by physical strength and brain power––and relatively constant). The result is that primary distribution through the free market economy, whose distributive principle is “to each according to his production,” delivers progressively more market-sourced income to capital owners and progressively less to workers who make their contribution through labor.
Unfortunately, ever since the 1946 passage of the Full Employment Act, economists and politicians formulating national economic policy have beguiled us into believing that economic power is democratically distributed if we have full employment––thus the political focus on job creation and redistribution of wealth rather than on full production and broader capital ownership accumulation. This is manifested in the belief that labor work is the ONLY way to participate in production and earn income. Long ago that was once true because labor provided 95 percent of the input into the production of products and services. But today that is not true. Capital provides not less than 90 to 95 percent of the input. Full employment as the means to distribute income is not achievable. When capital workers (productive capital owners) replace labor workers (non-capital owners) as the principal suppliers of products and services, labor employment alone becomes inadequate. Thus, we are left with government policies that redistribute income in one form or another.
Thus, as Kelso asserted, “the government continues to discharge its responsibility for the health and prosperity of the economy through coerced trickle-down; in other words, through redistribution achieved by the rigging of labor prices, by taxation to support redistribution and job “creation,” or subsidization by inflation and by all kinds of welfare, open and concealed.”
Kelso once wrote: “It doesn’t make any difference what’s going on in the scientific world or the business world or the industrial world, we still believe full employment will solve our income distribution problems. This is what major political figures have always maintained.”
Kelso also was quoted as saying, “Conventional wisdom says there is only one way to earn a living, and that’s to work. Conventional wisdom effectively treats capital (land, structures, machines, and the like) as though it were a kind of holy water that, sprinkled on or about labor, makes it more productive. Thus, if you have a thousand people working in a factory and you increase the design and power of the machinery so that one hundred men can now do what a thousand did before, conventional wisdom says, ‘Voila! The productivity of the labor has gone up 900 percent!’ I say ‘hogwash.’ All you’ve done is wipe out 90 percent of the jobs, and even the remaining ten percent are probably sitting around pushing buttons. What the economy needs is a way of legitimately getting capital ownership into the hands of the people who now don’t have it.”
In a democratic growth economy, based on Kelso’s binary economics, the ownership of capital would be spread more broadly as the economy grows, without taking anything away from the 1 to 10 percent who now own 50 to 90 percent of the corporate wealth. Instead, the ownership pie would desirably get much bigger and their percentage of the total ownership would decrease, as ownership gets broader and broader, also benefiting the traditionally disenfranchised poor and working and middle class. Thus, productive capital income would be distributed more broadly and the demand for products and services would be distributed more broadly from the earnings of capital and result in the sustentation of consumer demand, which will promote economic growth. That also means that society can profitably employ unused productive capacity and invest in more productive capacity to service the demands of a growth economy.
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