Corporate Profits at All-Time High; Wages at All-Time Low: Can We Call it Class War Yet?

This week, David Segal at the New York Times broke the news to America that not only was Apple -- the computer and gadget manufacturer formerly seen as a symbol of good old American ingenuity -- making its profits on the backs of abused factory workers in China, but also on poorly paid store employees here in the US.


Apple store workers, he wrote, make up a large majority of Apple's US workforce—30,000 out of 43,000 employees in this country—and they make about $25,000 a year, or about $12 an hour.


Lawrence Mishel at the Economic Policy Institute notes that that's just a dollar above the federal poverty level. This for a company that paid nine of its top executives a total of $441 million in 2011.


“The discrepancy between Apple’s profits/executive pay and its compensation to its workers is a particularly glaring example of what is occurring in the wider economy,” Mishel writes.


Read the full story here...