"First Look at US Pay Data, It’s Awful":
In case you were wondering:
First look at US pay data, it’s awful, by David Cay Johnston, Reuters: Anyone who wants to understand the enduring nature of Occupy Wall Street and similar protests across the country need only look at the first official data on 2010 paychecks... The figures from payroll taxes reported to the Social Security Administration on jobs and pay are, in a word, awful.
These are important and powerful figures. ... 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.
The median paycheck -- half made more, half less -- fell again in 2010, down 1.2 percent to $26,364. That works out to $507 a week, the lowest level, after adjusting for inflation, since 1999.
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.
More significantly,... close to 10 million workers who did not find even an hour of paid work in 2010. ...
What these figures tell us is that there was a reason voters responded in the fall of 2010 to the Republican promise that if given control of Congress they would focus on one thing: jobs.
But while Republicans were swept into the majority in the House of Representatives, that promise has been ignored. ... Instead of jobs, the focus on Capitol Hill is on tax cuts for corporations with untaxed profits held offshore, on continuing the temporary Bush administration tax cuts -- especially for those making $1 million or more - and on cutting federal spending, which mean destroying more jobs in the short run. ...
The data show why protests like Occupy Wall Street have so quickly gained momentum around the country... Will official Washington look at the numbers and change course? Or do voters need to change their elected representatives if they want to put America back on a path to widespread prosperity?
And, from the WSJ:
Real hourly wages fell 0.1% in September from August. After rising briefly at the start of this recovery, real hourly pay is back to about where it was two years ago — despite the fact that worker productivity has risen more than 5% since then.
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