Paul Rosenberg wrote recently about how wage theft against the bottom 15 percent of the workforce is "so widespread that workers in just three cities-Los Angeles, Chicago and New York City (total population about 15 million)-had roughly $2.9 billion in wages stolen from them in 2008." The workers surveyed had lost an average of 15 percent of their legal wages. Now that kind of theft is in outright violation of the law, not that anyone who can do something about it cares.
There's also the wink-and-a-nod theft, where the real price paid for labor (real wages adjusted for inflation) hasn't gone up in decades while productivity and profits have increased. It sounds infuriating, but abstract, in the way of most talk about increased shareholder expectations and bloated executive salaries. Blah. Yadda. But this is not abstract:
$63,385
That figure happens to be the value added per person employed in the United States for 2006 (via.) That's an average, of course; the productivity of everyone in the workforce added together and divided by the number of workers. It's not a direct correlation, but here's a figure to compare it to:
$48,200
That was the United States' median household income for 2006. That's the total number of households, perhaps with multiple wage earners, divided by half and measured against the value at the 50 percent mark; half the households in the US in 2006 made at least $15,185 (or about 24 percent) less in total, pre-tax income than the value added to the economy by one, average worker.
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