Happy Labor Day - Courthouse Version

Just in time for Labor Day, here's a handy illustration of how labor is getting shafted by Corporate America:

Why is this happening? Jared Bernstein of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, who put together the graph, says companies have raked in the dough by selling into emerging markets while cutting costs through outsourcing and automating domestic jobs. I'd say the demise of unions certainly also plays a role .

As the chart also makes clear, widening income inequality in America is no longer just a matter of stratified wages. Today's investment class—the CEOs, the hedge fund managers, the bankers—owns a stake in an economic system that no longer needs to share much of its wealth with anyone else. In other words, it takes money to make money. And of course, spending some of it to buy off Washington doesn't hurt either.

Why do both left and right clamor for more jobs? Would those who get to opine for a living be willing to perform the jobs they'd impose upon others? And why jobs? If work is the only way one can be worthy of an income, why not also clamor for self-employment and start-ups? Must the jobless look forward to having a boss their entire lives? And are more jobs needed, or even possible?

Instead of clamor for jobs, why not clamor for a shorter workweek and divide the necessary work among more people? How'd 40 hours a week get to be some sort of magic number? Why aren't automation and globalization whittling that down to 30, 20, 10, going, going, gone? Juliet Schor in her "Overworked American" (1991) calculated that if increases in productivity (more output from less labor input) over the course of a baby boomer's career were applied not to things like fatter CEO salaries, but to shrinking the workweek, it'd now be 6.5 hours. Why isn't it?

It has been drastically shorter in the past. In his "Stone Age Economics" (1974), Marshall Sahlins calculated some aborigines worked 15 hours per week. In his "Six Centuries of Work and Wages" (1884), James E. Thorold Rogers, member of Parliament, calculated that after a plague, peasants worked 14 hours per week. (Those were the Dark Ages, and now at 40 hours we're the enlightened ones?) What happened was plagues left fewer people to work prime land so, for a while, surviving aristocrats could not exploit farmers. The key in both instances was access to bountiful land which let humans choose to work as much or as little as they liked.

Now, days with billions of humans on the globe, land is not quite as accessible, but it could be made more affordable. When that happens, jobs sprout and wages climb, as has happened several times: