Robert Reich: Job And Wage Numbers Show Fed Is Winning, Big Corporations Doing Great, And Workers Are Losing Ground – OpEd

 January 9, 2023  

By Robert Reich

Job growth and wages are slowing. Employers added 223,000 jobs in December, the Labor Department reported Friday — lower than the average in recent months. 

Average hourly wages rose by 4.6 percent in December, according to the report. That’s a slowdown from 4.8 percent in November.

All this is music to the ears of Fed Chair Jerome Powell because the Fed blames inflation on rising wages. The Fed has been increasing interest rates to slow the economy and thereby reduce the bargaining power of workers to get wage gains. 

At his press conference on December 14 announcing the Fed’s latest interest rate hike, Powell warned that “The labor market remains extremely tight, with the unemployment rate near a 50-year low, job vacancies still very high, and wage growth elevated.”

But aren’t higher wages a good thing? 

The typical American worker’s wage has been stuck in the mud for four decades. 

Most of the gains from a more productive economy have been going to the top — to executives and investors. The richest 10 percent of Americans now own more than 90 percent of the value of shares of stock owned by Americans. 

Powell’s solution to inflation is to clobber workers even further. He says “the labor market continues to be out of balance, with demand substantially exceeding the supply of available workers.” 

But wait. If the demand for workers exceeds the supply, isn’t the answer to pay workers more? 

Not according to Powell and the Fed. Their answer is to continue to raise interest rates to slow the economy and put more people out of work, so workers can’t get higher wages. That way, “supply and demand conditions in the labor market [will] come into better balance over time, easing upward pressures on wages and prices,” says Powell.

Putting people out of work is the Fed’s means of reducing workers’ bargaining power and the “upward pressures on wages and prices.” 

The Fed projects that as it continues to increase interest rates, unemployment will rise to 4.6 percent at the end of next year — resulting in more than 1 million job losses. 

But fighting inflation by putting more people out of work is cruel, especially when America’s safety nets — including unemployment insurance — are in tatters. 

As we saw at the start of the pandemic, because the U.S. doesn’t have a single nationwide system for getting cash to jobless workers, many fall through the cracks, depending on what state they live in. 

When the pandemic began, fewer than 30 percent of jobless Americans qualified for unemployment benefits. 

The problem isn’t that wages are rising. The real problem is that corporations have the power to pass those wage increases — along with record profit margins — on to consumers in higher prices. 

If corporations had to compete vigorously for consumers, they wouldn’t be able to do this. Competitors would charge lower prices and grab those consumers away.

Corporations aren’t even plowing their extra profits into new investments that would generate higher productivity in the future. They’re buying back their shares to boost stock prices. Through the end of 2022, American firms announced stock buybacks exceeding $1 trillion.

A rational response to inflation, therefore, would not increase unemployment in order to reduce the bargaining power of workers to get higher wages. 

It would be to reduce the pricing power of corporations to pass those costs along to consumers along with rising profit margins, by making markets more competitive. 

Corporate pricing power is out of control because corporations face so little competition. 

Worried about sky-high airline fares and lousy service? That’s largely because airlines have merged from 12 carriers in 1980 to 4 today.

Concerned about drug prices? A handful of drug companies control the pharmaceutical industry.

Upset about food costs? Four giants control over 80% of meat processing, 66% of the pork market, and 54% of the poultry market. 

Worried about grocery prices? Albertsons bought Safeway and now Kroger is buying Albertsons. Combined, they would control almost 22 percent of the US grocery market, with revenue over $200 billion. Add in Walmart, and the three brands would control 70 percent of the grocery market in 167 cities across the country.

And so on. The evidence of corporate concentration is everywhere.

It’s getting worse. There were were over a thousand major corporate mergers or acquisitions last year. Each had a merger value of $100 million or more. The total transaction value was $1.4 trillion. 

The government must stop putting the responsibility for fighting inflation on working people whose wages have gone nowhere for four decades. Put the responsibility where it belongs — on big corporations with power to raise their prices. 

One possibility: Any large corporation in an industry dominated by five or fewer giant corporations that raises its prices more than the Fed’s target of 2 percent should be presumed to have monopoly power, and slammed with an antitrust lawsuit.

Robert Reich

Robert B. Reich is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center for Developing Economies, and writes at robertreich.substack.com. Reich served as Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, for which Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the twentieth century. He has written fifteen books, including the best sellers "Aftershock", "The Work of Nations," and"Beyond Outrage," and, his most recent, "The Common Good," which is available in bookstores now. He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine, chairman of Common Cause, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and co-creator of the award-winning documentary, "Inequality For All." He's co-creator of the Netflix original documentary "Saving Capitalism," which is streaming now.