Global Economy’s Stubborn Reality: Plenty of Work, Not Enough Pay
" he said, "because we’d have better wages." Last year, only 10.7 percent of American workers were represented by a
union, down from 20.1 percent in 1983, according to Labor Department data. that A lot of us wish it were union,
"Many of those who lost jobs and went back to work landed in jobs
that pay less." In November 2016, a week after Donald J. Trump was elected president on a pledge to bring jobs back to America, the people of Elyria, Ohio — a city of 54,000 people about 30 miles west of Cleveland — learned that another local factory was about to close.
That year, Norwegian wages increased by only 1 percent after accounting for inflation, and by only a half percent the next year.
In 1972, so-called production and nonsupervisory workers — some 80 percent of the American work force — brought home average wages equivalent
to $738.86 a week in today’s dollars, after adjusting for inflation, according to an Economic Policy Institute analysis of federal data.
Samak said that Both the Norwegian employer and the Polish worker would rather have low paid jobs,
What he has not seen in many years is a pay raise, not even as Norway’s unemployment
rate has remained below 5 percent, signaling that working hands are in short supply.
