Global Economy’s Stubborn Reality: Plenty of Work, Not Enough Pay<br />" he said, "because we’d have better wages." Last year, only 10.7 percent of American workers were represented by a<br />union, down from 20.1 percent in 1983, according to Labor Department data. that A lot of us wish it were union,<br />"Many of those who lost jobs and went back to work landed in jobs<br />that pay less." In November 2016, a week after Donald J. Trump was elected president on a pledge to bring jobs back to America, the people of Elyria, Ohio — a city of 54,000 people about 30 miles west of Cleveland — learned that another local factory was about to close.<br />That year, Norwegian wages increased by only 1 percent after accounting for inflation, and by only a half percent the next year.<br />In 1972, so-called production and nonsupervisory workers — some 80 percent of the American work force — brought home average wages equivalent<br />to $738.86 a week in today’s dollars, after adjusting for inflation, according to an Economic Policy Institute analysis of federal data.<br />Samak said that Both the Norwegian employer and the Polish worker would rather have low paid jobs,<br />What he has not seen in many years is a pay raise, not even as Norway’s unemployment<br />rate has remained below 5 percent, signaling that working hands are in short supply.
