Saturday 17 September 2011
The late American jobs machine ☀
Business firms began to increase their emphasis on maximizing shareholder value, in part because of a shift in executive compensation toward stock options. The overall shift in structural responses in the labor market after 1986 were caused by … the role of the stock market in boosting compensation at the top, … the declining minimum wage, the decline of unionization, the increase of imported goods, and the increased immigration of unskilled labor. Taken together these factors have boosted incomes at the top and have increased managerial power, while undermining the power of the increasingly disposable workers in the bottom 90 percent of the income distribution.
