Wage Stagnation and the Purpose of the Corporation
Episode 33 • 17th October 2025 • Beneath the Cypress and Star • BlueRidge Pundit
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Summary

Wage stagnation raises two connected questions: how much value workers produce, and how the gains are distributed. This October 17, 2025 episode examines inflation-adjusted pay alongside the corporation's purpose, comparing shareholder primacy with approaches that consider employees and other stakeholders. It distinguishes economic measurement from the ethical argument about what businesses owe the people who sustain them.

Key Takeaway

  • A larger paycheck does not necessarily mean greater purchasing power after inflation.
  • Labor productivity, total compensation, and the typical worker’s wage measure different things.
  • Technology, institutions, bargaining power, and the distribution of gains all belong in the explanation.
  • A corporate purpose statement becomes meaningful when it drives decisions and measurable outcomes.

Why Have Wages Stagnated?

The question why have wages stagnated requires a defined period and worker group. Economy-wide averages can conceal differences across industries and the wage distribution. A historical finding about median hourly pay should not be presented as proof that every worker’s earnings stayed unchanged in every subsequent year.

In their 2017 Brookings Institution analysis of weak wage growth, Jay Shambaugh and Ryan Nunn distinguish productivity growth, labor’s share of income, and the distribution of pay among workers. They discuss technology, trade, market structure, and reduced economic dynamism. The article’s numerical estimates belong to its historical period, while its framework helps explain why rising output need not produce equal gains for everyone.

The episode builds on that distinction to ask how workers’ bargaining position affects their participation in prosperity. Its argument is that business performance and household security should be examined together, rather than assuming a single corporate metric captures both.

Wage Stagnation, Productivity, and Measurement

To understand the wage stagnation–productivity relationship, start with U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics research on the productivity–compensation gap. Labor productivity measures output per hour. Compensation includes wages and salaries plus benefits; it is broader than take-home pay. Inflation adjustments also differ depending on whether the question concerns the prices of business output or the goods and services workers buy.

Those choices help explain why two charts can tell different stories without either necessarily being fabricated. Check the time period, industry coverage, inflation measure, and whether the series represents average compensation or typical-worker wages. A chart of aggregate output alone cannot tell you how a particular household’s purchasing power changed.

Shareholder Primacy and Corporate Purpose

The governance debate asks how directors should weigh the interests of investors, employees, customers, and communities. Martin Lipton’s Harvard Law School Forum essay on corporate purpose argues for profitable, sustainable businesses that consider the stakeholders essential to long-term success. It presents a particular position in a contested debate, rather than a declaration that all companies follow one model.

Supporters of investor-centered governance emphasize managerial accountability and a clear objective. Critics ask whether that objective undervalues worker stability or external costs. Stakeholder approaches raise their own accountability question: who can test whether management’s promises actually influenced pay, investment, or working conditions?

The episode proposes connecting stated purpose to observable choices. Examples include tracking real pay, retention, training, and the allocation of business gains over time. Such measures create questions that can be investigated; a broad claim to value people does not answer them by itself.

Work, Wealth, and the Wider System

Our pillar on economic inequality in the United States connects earnings to the cost of a secure life. Continue with capitalism and exploitation for a critical account of value distribution, and Milton Friedman’s approach to free market economics for the intellectual background to the corporate-purpose debate.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q1: What is wage stagnation?

It describes weak or flat pay growth over a specified period, often measured in real terms (after inflation). The population and wage measure should be identified.

Q2: Does productivity growth guarantee everyone a raise?

No. Aggregate gains and their distribution are separate questions; workers can experience very different outcomes.

Q3: Are wages and total compensation identical?

No. Total compensation includes benefits, wages, and salaries.

Q4: What does shareholder primacy mean?

It prioritizes shareholder interests in corporate governance, although its implications and alternatives are contested.

Q5: How can a company demonstrate a broader purpose?

Connect commitments to decisions and measurable outcomes, including worker pay and investment, rather than relying on a mission statement alone.

Related Episodes

Sources & Further Reading

Transcripts

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Welcome to the Deep Dive. Today, we're really getting into something fundamental, something I think a lot of people feel in their bones, even if they don't track the numbers. Yeah, we're talking about wages, specifically why, for most American workers, paychecks have felt

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Well, stuck for decades now. Exactly. And our mission here isn't just to say, yeah, wages are stagnant. We all know that. We're diving into the why. Why did pay stop tracking productivity? Was that deliberate? Was it policy, corporate strategy? And crucially, what can actually be done about it? What are the real levers we can pull to try and rebalance things for the average worker?

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So just to define our terms up front, when we talk about wage stagnation, we mean real wages. That's your pay after you account for inflation staying flat or just creeping up incredibly slowly. Right. Even while the economy grew and workers got more productive, before the late 70s, these things moved together. If the economy did better, workers did better. Simple as that, mostly. But then something changed. And this central paradox, it's kind of shocking when you lay it out.

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It really is. So get this. Between 1979 and 2019, economy-wide productivity, basically, how much value is generated per hour worked its sword. Went up by almost 60 percent, 59.7 percent to be precise. Nearly 60 percent more value created per hour. That's huge. Think of all the innovation, the tech, the effort that represents. Massive achievement. Absolutely. So the big question.

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What did the typical worker, the person actually doing that work, see in their paycheck, including benefits, over those same 40 years? Okay, brace for impact here. Their total compensation rose only 13.7%. 13.7% compared to nearly 60% productivity growth. Exactly. That's a gap of 46 percentage points, a huge divergence. It means most of the economic gains generated since 1979 just bypassed the typical worker's wallet and went somewhere else.

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Mostly upwards, I'm guessing. Overwhelmingly upwards. Yeah. And that decoupling, that 46 point gap, that's what we're digging into because the sources we're looking at argue this wasn't just, you know, bad luck or some neutral market force like automation taking over. Right. They're suggesting it was intentional. That's the argument. An intentional outcome driven by specific policy choices, specific corporate strategies, all designed basically to keep labor costs down and push those productivity gains towards, well,

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capital and the very top earners. OK, that's a heavy claim. Let's unpack that. We need to see the evidence. All right. So if this was intentional, the first place to look is, well, where did the money go? How unequal did this distribution actually become?

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And the picture is incredibly stark. It really is a tale of two or maybe three different economic realities, depending on where you started on the ladder. It's not like everyone's wages just grew slowly together. Break it down for us. Yeah. What happened at the bottom? So for low wage workers, let's say the 10th percentile over those four decades, 1979 to 2019, their real wages barely budged up just 3 percent total after inflation over 40 years.

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3%, that's essentially standing still for 40 years. It's brutal stagnation, yeah. Just treading water at best. Okay, what about the middle, the median worker, the person right in the center of the distribution? That's where we see that overall 13.7% growth figure, which sounds okay, maybe, until you remember it's over 40 years. Right, do the math. That's less than what, 0.2% per year? Less than 0.2% a year on average, exactly. So imagine starting a job in 79, you work hard, you get more productive, technology helps you produce 60% more value,

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And four decades later, your actual buying power has barely increased. It's demoralizing. Understatement. Okay, so that's the bottom and the middle. Now, the top, what happened there? This is where the story flips completely. We go from stagnation to explosion. For the top 1%, their wages over the same period rose 160%. Whoa, okay. 160% compared to 13.7% for the middle and 3% for the bottom.

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See the divergence. And it gets even more extreme. For the absolute highest earners, the top 0.1%. Go on. Their wages went up 345%. 345%. That's a different stratosphere entirely. It's not just a gap. It's a chasm. It really is. And the most visible driver, the almost cartoonish example of this, is CEO pay at large firms. From 1978 to 2019, their compensation went up nearly 1,200%.

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1,200%. 1,200%. It's almost unbelievable, but it's indicative of this fundamental shift in who gets the rewards of economic activity. That top 0.1%, they went from taking home about 1.6% of all earnings in 79 to 5% by 2019. So that value that workers were producing, that 46-point gap, a huge chunk of it clearly went straight to the very, very top. That's where the evidence points, yes. It's a massive redirection of wealth.

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Now, the sources try to put a number on what this cost the middle class, right? This inequality tax. Yes. And this is a really powerful way to think about it. They calculated what would have happened if incomes had grown more equally, if everyone had shared proportionally in those productivity gains since 1979. So if the pie grew, everyone's slice grew roughly the same amount.

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Exactly. Under that scenario, by 2007, the average income for households in the middle three-fifths, the broad middle class, would have been $17,867 higher. $17,867 more. Per year. Per year. That's roughly 23% more income than they actually had. Wow. Think about what that means for a family budget. That's mortgage payments. That's college savings. That's health care. That's fixing the car.

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It's the difference between feeling secure and feeling constantly squeezed. It's a huge hit to middle class living standards and it's directly linked to that unequal distribution, that inequality tax.

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OK, but hang on. There's this persistent argument you always hear. Well, it's about skills. People just need more education for the modern economy. The skills gap narrative. Does that explain this? You hear it all the time. Right. But the data just doesn't really support it as the main driver. Not even close. Wage stagnation, even wage erosion has hit educated workers, too. Even people with college degrees.

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Yes. Get this. The sources show that the real average hourly wages for young college graduates, people who did everything right, were actually lower in 2013 than they were back in the late 1990s. Lower. So the college premium, the supposed guarantee, it shrunk.

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It eroded significantly. And it wasn't just wages. Look at benefits like health insurance. The share of young college grads who got health insurance through their employer plummeted from 61 percent back in 1989 down to just 31 percent by 2012. Wow.

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So less pay and fewer benefits, even with a degree. Exactly. So you can't just wave this away as a skills gap. Educated workers were producing more, just like everyone else, but they also weren't seeing the rewards. This points away from individual worker failings and towards systemic issue. A system failure. Or maybe a system redesign.

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That's the question. Why were workers, even educated ones, getting a shrinking slice of the pie they were baking? It leads us straight into this major shift in corporate thinking, the ideology that sort of gave permission for this to happen. Right. To understand how this became normalized, you have to understand the dominant corporate philosophy that took hold. Shareholder primacy. Shareholder primacy. OK, sounds well, like shareholders come first.

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That's essentially it. It's the theory of corporate governance saying that the primary, maybe even the only, duty of a company's management is to maximize the value for its shareholders, its owners, above employees, above customers, above the community. And this idea wasn't just floating around, was it? It got a huge boost from a very famous economist. A massive boost. You really have to point to Milton Friedman's 1970 essay in the New York Times magazine. Its title says it all.

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The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.

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1970. So right before this whole wage stagnation trend kicked off. Exactly. The timing is critical. The economy was shaky. There were pressures from environmental groups. Unions were still relatively strong. Friedman basically offered CEOs a clear, simple mandate. Which was? Forget all that other noise. Your job as a manager is to act as an agent for the owners, the stockholders. And what do they want? They want to make as much money as possible. So maximizing profit is the only goal.

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Within the rules of the game, like legally and ethically, according to Friedman. But yeah, the core responsibility is profit maximization for the shareholder. Anything else paying workers more than the bare minimum required, investing in pollution controls beyond what's mandated, spending on community projects. Friedman basically saw that as spending the shareholders money inappropriately, like an unauthorized tax.

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OK, I can see how that thinking would change things. Suddenly cutting costs, laying off workers, fighting unions. That's not just allowed. It's maybe even seen as the right thing to do managerially. Precisely. It provided the intellectual justification, the sort of moral cover for the shareholder value movement that really exploded in the 1980s. And critics argue this directly led to what they call short term ism.

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Focusing only on the next quarterly report. Yeah. Boosting the stock price now, often at the expense of long term investment, employee well-being or environmental sustainability, because those things might not immediately maximize shareholder returns this quarter. We see examples all the time, right? Skipping R&D, huge stock buybacks instead of wage increases. All arguably driven by this shareholder first mindset.

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But interestingly, there's a modern critique of Friedman, even from economists who kind of agree with his starting point. People like Oliver Hart and Luigi Zingales. OK, what's their angle? Do they reject shareholder primacy?

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Not exactly. They accept that managers should serve shareholder interests, but they challenge Friedman's core assumption about what shareholders actually want. Which was just more money. Right. Hart and Zingala say, hang on, shareholders aren't just abstract profit bots. They're real people. And real people often care about more than just money. They're often pro-social. Meaning they care about, like, fairness or the environment.

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Exactly. They buy fair trade coffee, maybe an electric car. They donate to charity. They get utility or welfare from things beyond just financial return. So Hart and Zingales argue, if shareholders care about these things in their own lives, why wouldn't they want the companies they own to reflect those values, too? So the goal shouldn't just be maximizing financial value for the shareholder, but maximizing their overall welfare or utility, which includes non-financial things.

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Precisely. Maybe a shareholder is willing to accept slightly lower dividends if the company pollutes less because they value clean air. Their overall welfare might be higher. OK, that makes intuitive sense. And they point out a logical flaw in Friedman's argument. Friedman said if shareholders want social goals, they can use their dividends to pursue them individually, like donating to charity themselves. Right. You can undo the company not donating by donating yourself.

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Yes. But Hart and Zingales argue that only works for some things. It doesn't work for negative externalities like pollution. An individual shareholder can't easily undo the pollution a company creates at the same cost the company could have avoided it. Or bringing it back to our topic, an individual shareholder can't easily undo the damage to a community caused by the company offshoring jobs to suppress wages.

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Exactly. The company is usually the most efficient actor to prevent or fix its own negative impacts. If it doesn't, the shareholder might be worse off in terms of overall welfare, even if the stock price is high for a while. So maximizing shareholder welfare, not just value, opens the door to considering employees, the environment, the community.

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It does. It provides a theoretical basis for moving away from that strict Friedman doctrine towards something more like stakeholder capitalism, which we'll come back to. But the key takeaway here is that the ideology justifying wage suppression had this powerful influence, even if its core logic is now being seriously challenged. OK, so we have this ideological shift. Shareholder primacy giving companies the justification.

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But justification isn't enough. How did they actually do it? What were the tools used to suppress wages and create that 46 point gap? The research points to several concrete policy choices and power shifts. The sources we looked at highlight three really big ones that together explain more than half of that productivity pay divergence. More than half. OK, what's the first one?

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The first is something maybe people don't immediately connect to wages, but it's crucial. Excessive unemployment, basically allowing the job market to be too slack too often. And the Federal Reserve plays a big role here, right, with their dual mandate.

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Exactly. The Fed is supposed to aim for maximum employment and stable prices. Before 1979, there was arguably more weight on the employment side because a tight labor market where jobs are plentiful and workers are scarce gives workers bargaining power. Employers have to compete for them, which drives up wages.

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But then came the high inflation of the 70s. Right. And the Fed, especially under Paul Volcker, shifted gears dramatically. Taming inflation became the absolute top priority, even if it meant higher unemployment. Since then, the Fed has generally tolerated a higher average unemployment rate, about 6.3 percent from 79 to 2017, compared to 5.3 percent in the decades before. So they deliberately kept the labor market looser.

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They were quicker to raise interest rates to cool the economy down, often based on theories like NARU, the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment, which basically posits a tradeoff. If unemployment gets too low, wages rise, and that sparks inflation. So they tap the brakes. Keeping a lid on wage growth to prevent inflation. That was often the effect, yes. They systematically undermine the single best source of worker leverage, a truly tight job market where employers are desperate to hire.

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And can we quantify the impact of that choice? We can. The estimates suggest that if unemployment had just averaged 5.5 percent instead of 6.3 percent over those decades, median wages would have been about 10 percent higher by 2017 if it had averaged 5 percent.

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maybe 18% higher. Wow. So Fed policy choices directly shaved off a significant chunk of potential wage growth for the average person. That's what the evidence suggests. It was a major deliberate factor. Okay. Factor one, excessive unemployment driven partly by Fed policy. Lesson number two.

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Number two is much more visible. The erosion of collective bargaining. The decline of unions. We know union density has fallen off a cliff. Dramatically. Union coverage went from about 27% of the workforce in 1979 down to less than 12% by 2019. And crucially, this wasn't just some natural decline. No, it was driven by intense corporate opposition, the rise of a whole union avoidance industry, weak labor laws that make organizing difficult and penalized violations lightly, and political appointments less favorable to labor.

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it became much harder for workers to organize and bargain collectively. And the cost of losing that collective power. It's huge. The research estimates this decline directly suppressed the median hourly wage by about 7.9% between 79 and 2017. That's like losing $1.56 an hour.

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Which adds up over a year for a full-time worker. Over $3,250. And for men who were historically more unionized in manufacturing, the hit was even bigger and estimated 11.6% wage suppression. Over $5,100 a year lost due to deunionization. And this doesn't just hurt union members, does it? There's that spillover effect.

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Absolutely critical point. Unions don't just raise wages for their members. They set standards that non-union employers often have to meet to attract and retain workers. When unions decline, that upward pressure on all wages weakens. So the decline actually increased overall inequality.

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Significantly. Deunionization is estimated to explain about a third, 33.1 percent, of the growth in the wage gap between high wage men, 90th percentile, and middle wage men, 50th percentile. Because unions disproportionately helped middle and lower wage workers, their decline removed a key force for wage compression. OK, so factor two, collapsing union power. What's the third major piece?

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The third is corporate driven globalization and offshoring. And again, the emphasis is on driven. Not just something that happened, but something that was actively pursued. Exactly. Enabled by specific trade deals and policy choices, particularly from the 90s onwards, there was a deliberate corporate strategy to move production overseas to low wage countries and increase imports. This directly pitted American workers against much lower paid foreign labor.

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Putting downward pressure on wages here, especially in manufacturing. Massive downward pressure. The estimates suggest this factor reduced wages by about 5.6% for the median worker. That's another $2,000 or so lost annually. Okay, so excessive unemployment, weaker unions, globalization offshoring. Those three alone account for more than half the pay productivity gap. That's what the analysis suggests. They were huge drivers. But there are other factors too, right? Something about market structure.

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Right. Monopsony. This is kind of the flip side of monopoly. Monopoly is one seller. Monopsony is one buyer or in this case, very few buyers of labor in a local market. So like a town dominated by one big hospital system or maybe two big warehouse employers.

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Exactly. If you're a nurse or a warehouse worker in that town, you don't have many options. Those few employers have monopsony power. They don't have to compete hard for labor by raising wages because where else are you going to go? And this is a real issue. Increasingly recognized as one, yeah. Some research, especially looking at manufacturing, suggests that this local labor market concentration could explain 30% or more of wage stagnation. Employers simply have more leverage to keep wages down when workers lack outside options. But globalization makes this worse.

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It can create a double whammy. If a few plants close due to offshoring, the remaining employers in that area face even less competition for the workers left behind. Their monopsony power actually increases. Giving them more power to suppress wages for those who didn't lose their jobs? Precisely. And interestingly, the data also confirms that unions act as a counterweight here. Even in concentrated markets, places with unions tend to have higher wages. They provide a check on that employer power.

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OK, so we have the big three plus monopsony. Anything else contributing to this erosion of worker power? Yeah, there's also been a sort of relentless chipping away at basic labor standards. That's a minimum wage. The federal minimum wage is the poster child stuck at seven dollars and twenty five cents an hour since 2009. Adjusted for inflation, it's worth less now than it was in nineteen fifty six.

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1956. That's incredible. It's a policy choice with huge consequences. If the minimum wage had just kept pace with productivity growth since 1968, it would be over $18 an hour today. $18 versus $7.25. That's a massive difference at the bottom.

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Huge. And then you have things like the explosion of non-compete clauses. These used to be for like top executives with trade secrets. Now they're everywhere, affecting one in five workers, even low wage workers like fast food employees or security guards. It explicitly stops them from taking a better paying job down the street. It's purely about suppressing wage competition.

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And outsourcing to like companies replacing their own janitors or cafeteria staff with lower paid contractors. Exactly. Outsourcing functions specifically to cut labor costs by hiring contractors who pay less and offer fewer, if any, benefits. All these things add up. It's a multipronged assault really over decades that systematically shifted bargaining power away from workers and towards employers and shareholders.

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OK, so the picture painted is pretty clear. Wage stagnation wasn't an accident. It resulted from deliberate policy and corporate choices that weakened worker power. So logically, the solutions must involve reversing those choices, restoring some leverage. That's the core idea. Yes. If the problem was created by policy, it can be fixed by policy. And we actually got a glimpse of how powerful policy can be very recently.

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You mean during the pandemic recovery. Exactly. Think about what happened in 2021 especially. The government stepped in with really strong relief programs, enhanced unemployment benefits, stimulus checks, child tax credit payments. Right. Providing a financial cushion for millions of people.

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A crucial cushion. It meant workers weren't desperate. When jobs started coming back, they had more power to say no to low wages, to hold out for better offers or to quit bad jobs and look for something better. The great resignation phenomenon. So that safety net gave workers bargaining power they hadn't had in ages.

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The most power they've had in decades, arguably. And what happened? We saw strong real wage growth, especially for low wage workers, for the first time in a long time. It proved that when policy supports workers and creates a tight labor market, wages can rise significantly. So that's the proof of concept. What does that mean for long term policy solutions beyond temporary pandemic measures?

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Well, first and foremost, it highlights the importance of maintaining labor market tightness. We need a sustained commitment from policymakers, including the Fed, to pursue genuine full employment. Meaning letting the job market run hot, even if inflation ticks up a bit, prioritizing wages over absolute price stability.

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That's the argument. Don't hit the brakes prematurely. Let wages grow robustly across the board before worrying too much about overheating. Full employment is the best poor worker policy there is. OK, so keep the job market tight. Yeah. What else? We need to address the power imbalance directly, right? Like with unions. Absolutely. Strengthening labor rights is critical. This means serious labor law reform to make it easier for workers to organize unions and bargain collectively without facing a legal retaliation that often goes unpunished now.

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Stronger penalties for union busting. Yes. And simplifying the organizing process. Alongside that, we need to raise the floor. A much higher federal minimum wage indexed to inflation so it doesn't erode again. Back towards that $18 level or even higher. That's the debate, but significantly higher than $7.25 and indexed. Plus, expanding overtime protections to cover millions more salaried workers who currently don't get paid extra for working long hours.

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And what about tackling that corporate concentration, the monopsony problem?

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That requires promoting corporate competition, more aggressive antitrust enforcement to challenge mergers that increase employer power in local labor markets. We need to think about competition policy not just for consumer prices, but for worker wages, too. And trade policy. A fundamental rethink. Rejecting trade agreements that are primarily about protecting corporate investment abroad and making it easier to offshore jobs. Future agreements need enforceable labor standards built in.

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OK, so those are the big policy levers. What about that ideological piece, the shareholder primacy thing? Is that shifting? It seems to be, at least on the surface, there's a lot more talk now about stakeholder capitalism. Even the Business Roundtable, which represents CEOs of major corporations, put out a statement a few years ago saying companies should serve all stakeholders, employees, customers, suppliers, communities and shareholders. So moving away from Friedman's only shareholders matter view.

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That's the stated goal. Focusing on long term sustainable value for everyone, not just short term profits for owners. It's a significant rhetorical shift, at least. Rhetoric is one thing. Action is another, right? It's easy to sign a statement. Harder to actually raise wages if it cuts into next quarter's profits. That's the skepticism. Absolutely. And this is where we need to bring in a cautionary note from another school of thought. Public choice theory. OK, what's the warning there? Public choice economists like James Buchanan and Gordon Tulloch

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basically argue that we shouldn't assume government policies will automatically work out as intended, even if they sound good. Why not? Because policymakers and bureaucrats are people too, often acting in their own self-interest or responding to political pressures. And policy often gets captured by well-organized special interests who lobby intensely to shape the rules in their favor. They call it rent seeking. So even if we pass laws meant to help workers, corporations might lobby to create loopholes or ensure weak enforcement.

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That's the risk. The groups with the most resources and organization, often large corporations or industry groups, can exert disproportionate influence on how laws are written and implemented. Think about protectionism, for example. OK. In theory, it might protect some domestic jobs. In practice, it often ends up benefiting specific politically connected companies or industries much more than the average worker, while consumers pay higher prices.

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So the public choice perspective warns us to be realistic about the political process. Just having the right policy ideas isn't enough. You have to fight for them constantly against powerful interests trying to water them down or capture them. Exactly. It adds a layer of complexity. We need policies to rebalance power, but we also need strategies to prevent those policies from being undermined by the very power structures they're trying to address. It requires vigilance in the market and in politics.

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So wrapping this all up, our deep dive really suggests that the story of wage stagnation over the last 40 years isn't about unstoppable market forces or workers not keeping up. No, the evidence points much more strongly towards it being the result of specific, identifiable choices, policy choices, corporate strategies, ideological shifts, all converging to weaken worker bargaining power and redirect economic gains towards the top.

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The shift to shareholder primacy, the Fed prioritizing inflation over employment, the decline of unions, globalization aimed at cutting labor costs, growing monopsony power, eroding labor standards. It all fits together. It creates a coherent picture. And the flip side is we also know what works to reverse it. The pandemic recovery showed that when policy supports workers and labor markets are tight, wages can grow strongly.

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It proves that wage growth isn't just some mysterious economic output. It's very much influenced, maybe even directed by political and policy decisions. It's a political variable. Absolutely. And we saw how much the decline of unions contributed to inequality, disproportionately hurting middle and lower wage workers.

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Which leads us to our final provocative thought for you, the listener, to chew on. Given everything we've discussed, the intentional nature of wage suppression, the measurable impact of de-unionization, the way unions historically acted as a check on corporate power,

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What level of collective bargaining, what percentage of union coverage in the workforce do you think is actually necessary today? Necessary to effectively counteract decades of anti-union campaigns and corporate consolidation and to reestablish a more balanced, equitable distribution of economic gains? Is it 20 percent? 30 percent? More? What does real equilibrium look like in today's economy?

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That's maybe the fundamental question for the future of shared prosperity. How do we ensure that productivity gains translate into better living standards for everyone, not just a select few? Definitely something to think about. Thanks for diving deep with us today. Thanks for having me. We'll see you next time on The Deep Dive.

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