We in the tech world do not experience this…but hte stats show that the average wages of American worker, in the last 40 years, have not not budged in terms of their purchasing power! But it did for the top tier workers and this disparity is not right and is a #ProWoSo.
Today’s average hourly wage, adjusting for inflation, has just about the same purchasing power as it did in 1978. Also, the top tenth, in 1970 earned 6.9 times that of bottom tenth and in 2016 it has gone up to 8.7 times. There are several reasons why their wages are stagnated:
- Corporations focusing on short term gains to satisfy shareholders and caring for the employees
- Labor market discrimination
- Low minimum wage
- Imbalance of market power and diminishing of the unions to counter that
- Outsourcing of production to countries with lower wages!
JFF, which works on accelerating the alignment and transformation of the American workforce & education systems to ensure access to economic advancement for all, in partnership with Schmidt Futures, is launching the $1 Billion Wage Gain Challenge to raise the wages of at least 100,000 workers by $10,000 or more. The deadline to submit ideas in Jan 13, 2019.
Good luck to all Pieneers!
As always, know of anyone or any startup working on this, please let me know, I will update this post.
[Image Credit: Thanks to skeeze via Pixabay]
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