USA going down

from David Ruccio

In the United States the average worker’s pay was up last year but the situation of the average worker got worse.

Huh?

As David Cay Johnston explains,

There were fewer jobs and they paid less last year, except at the very top where, the number of people making more than $1 million increased by 20 percent over 2009.

In other words, median pay fell (again) in 2010, by 1.2 percent, to $26,364. While the number of Americans with any work fell (again) last year, down by more than a half million from 2009 to less than 150.4 million.  See the chart.

The only reason average (mean) pay was up last year (to $39,959 last year, up $46 over 2009) was because the number of workers making $1 million or more rose to almost 94,000 from 78,000 in 2009 (and the number of workers making more than $50 million also rose in 2010 to 81, up from 72 the year before).

Yep, the plight of the average (median) worker went down, in terms of both pay and employment, while the situation for those at the very top continued to improve.

According to Johnston,

The data show why protests like Occupy Wall Street have so quickly gained momentum around the country, as people who cannot find work try to focus the federal government on creating jobs and dealing with the banking sector that many demonstrators blame for the lack of jobs.

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