Why are wages so low? What is the cause for low wages in America? In this video, I go through the complicated topic of wages. I walk you through some trends I've noticed and why wages haven't been tracked with productivity since the 1970s.

📖 TABLE OF CONTENTS:
0:00 Wages Have Not Tracked Productivity Since the 1970s
1:57 CEO Pay VS Worker Pay
2:42 Minimum Wage
4:40 Universal Basic Income
5:19 Low-Wage Workers
8:10 Outsourcing Work

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- Economic Policy Institute Study: [ Ссылка ]
- CEO Pay Study: [ Ссылка ]
- Historical Minimum Wage Data: [ Ссылка ]
- History of the Minimum Wage: [ Ссылка ]
- Inflation Calculator: [ Ссылка ]
- Andrew Yang's UBI Proposal: [ Ссылка ]
- Democrats' Position on Raising the Minimum Wage: [ Ссылка ]-
- Who Employs Low-Wage Workers: [ Ссылка ]
- Uber Driver Earnings: [ Ссылка ]
- Small-Scale UBI Experiments: [ Ссылка ]
- National Low-Income Housing Coalition Study: [ Ссылка ]
- History of Health Spending: [ Ссылка ]
- Historical College Tuition Increase: [ Ссылка ]

Summary of the Reasons:

Reason #1: CEO pay has increased rapidly since the 1960s and 1970s. The Economic Policy Institute found that CEO pay went up by almost 1000 percent over a similar period of time. In 1965 the average CEO made 20 times as much as their average worker, but when this study was released in 2019 that gap had increased to 278 CEO dollars for every one worker dollar. The money that was previously going back into working class paychecks has instead been going to CEOs for at least two generations.

Reason #2: We haven’t increased the minimum wage. Currently the federal minimum wage is just $7.25 per hour. The American minimum wage has a long history, it was first created in 1938, so toward the end of the Great Depression, and at that time the federal minimum wage was just 25 cents an hour. Now that sounds terrible but 25 cents in 1938 would be worth around $4.60 today, that’s not a great wage but it’s a lot more than 25 cents. From there the government gradually increased the minimum wage based on inflation and other factors, and it had reached one dollar per hour by the year 1956, which is equivalent to more than $9.50 today, which means that the minimum wage, at least at the federal level, has actually decreased by around 25 percent over the last 64 years.

Reason #3: Low-wage workers don’t have as much bargaining power. Minimum wage workers are generally replaceable, their jobs tend to be easier to automate out, and turnover is typically more common in low-wage positions compared to jobs with better pay. So when you consider the impact of all these factors it’s clear that people who are earning minimum wage or close to minimum wage won’t have much leverage when negotiating with their employer, especially if that employer is a large corporation.

Reason #4: Outsourcing puts pressure on wages. Obviously outsourcing isn’t new, it didn’t start in the 1970s, but the truth is that a reliable supply of cheap labor from other countries makes it easier for American companies to avoid paying higher wages to their American employees. The specifics are going to vary from case to case, but for example imagine that a business can pay workers overseas $5 per hour for the same work that they would have to pay $7.25 for in the US. So it’s not just that American workers are competing with other American workers, they’re also competing with people in other countries that may not have the same minimum wage or the same labor protections.

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