Protest of the day

Workers in Bangladesh have managed to shut down more than 300 garment factories in protest over pay and working conditions after a building collapse killed more than 1,100 people.

Chart of the day

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The chart is based on a recent report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which reveals two key findings:

• In January 2012, only 56 percent of the 6.1 million workers who (from January 2009 through December 2011) were displaced from jobs they had held for at least 3 years were reemployed.*

• Among long-tenured workers who were displaced from full-time wage and salary jobs and who were reemployed in such jobs in January 2012, only 46 percent had earnings that were as much or greater than those of their lost job.

Workers are clearly paying the costs of recovery during the Second Great Depression.

*An additional 6.7 million people were displaced from jobs they had held for less than 3 years (referred to as short-tenured). Combining the short- and long-tenured groups, the number of displaced workers totaled 12.9 million from 2009 to 2011.

Where has all the surplus gone?

Where has all the surplus gone?

Well, in 2011, as for the past three decades, it’s gone to line the pockets of the Chief Executive Officers of the nation’s largest corporations.

With the filing of 2011 proxy statements, now we know a large chunk of the surplus went to CEOs. The median pay of the 200 top-paid CEOs of publicly trade companies in the United States was $14.5 million, according to a study conducted for the New York Times.

Here are the top 15:

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The median pay raise for all 200 over was 5 percent.

Only 5 percent? That’s on top of the tens and, in some cases, hundreds of millions of dollars they were already bringing in. In the midst of the Second Great Depression, when the average income and wealth of the population is falling, and when unemployment remains obscenely high.

U.S. corporations are extracting more surplus from workers in the United States and around the world. And a large chunk of that surplus is showing up in the compensation paid to corporate executives. So, pay for performance and shareholder-imposed limits don’t solve the problem because the CEOs are being paid to create the conditions for getting more surplus out of their workers.

And then they get to share in the booty. That’s where the surplus has gone.

Where has all the surplus gone?

Where has all the surplus gone? As in 2010, a good chunk of it has gone to pay Chief Executive Officers of major U.S. companies.

According to a new Associated Press study, the head of a typical public company in United States made $9.6 million in 2011. This figure was up more than 6 percent from the previous year, is the second year in a row of increases, and is the highest since the AP began tracking executive compensation in 2006.

According to my calculations, using Bureau of Labor Statistics data, the typical CEO therefore made 254 times the typical U.S. worker (whose annual pay in 2011 was $37,813).

Here’s the list of the 20 highest-paid CEOs:

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The Wall Street Journal makes much of the fact that “chief executives increasingly are being paid based on their companies’ financial results and share prices.”* But that’s not a solution. It’s the problem. U.S. corporations are managing to extract more surplus from their workers precisely because workers’ wages failed once again to grow in any significant manner during 2011. And CEOs are getting a large cut of the increased surplus they managed to supervise.

So, let me amend my question: where have all the surpluses come from? Workers have created them every one.

*But see if you can find any kind of correlation here: