American Workers Have Been Left Out Of The Economic Recovery

Most of the statistics show that the American economy is back on track and doing great. But there are some statistics that politicians and corporations don’t want us to see, and those statistics paint a different picture. While corporations are doing better than ever, American workers are not seeing the rewards of a booming economy, and 14% have seen absolutely no increase in their pay in the last 12 months. With inflation rising and wages stagnating, an economic disaster could be closer than we think, as Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins explains.

Support us by becoming a monthly patron on Patreon, and help keep progressive media alive!

Spread the word! LIKE and SHARE this video or leave a comment to help direct attention to the stories that matter. And SUBSCRIBE to stay connected with Ring of Fire's video content!

Support Ring of Fire by subscribing to our YouTube channel

Be sociable! Follow us on:

Follow more of our stories at

Subscribe to our podcast

You know, when you look at it on paper or when you see it in a tweet from a Republican politician, the economy looks like it's doing really well, right? I mean, stock market has had some downs recently, but overall it's up. So if you own stocks, which is less than half the country, you're probably doing pretty well. Uh, if you're a major CEO, you're enjoying your massive tax break to the tune of several million dollars a piece. If you're in the top one percent in general, things are great. Uh, unemployment is way down. Three point seven percent, a few hundred thousand new jobs created every single month. Things are great in the United States, right? No, no, they're not. Because when you only take a handful of statistics and try to use that to paint the broad picture of what's happening in this country, you're obviously leaving out a lot of major indicators to the strength of the economy.

And the biggest thing to determine the strength of the US economy is the buying power of the middle class. And unfortunately, according to statistics, the buying power, the income of the American middle class is not growing at all in these times of recovery. Fourteen percent of American workers reported no increase whatsoever in their rate of pay in the last 12 months, 14 percent. Now you may think that's a small number, right? It's only 14 percent. But when you take into consideration the last time the economy was doing this well, we had the same kinds of numbers with unemployment and stock market going crazy and all of that. Um, it was fewer than 10 percent reported, not getting raises. And one of the reasons is because there's nobody left to hold these corporations accountable. You see, they get to make all the money. They make billions of dollars. They get to even lay people off and still pocket tons without giving any raises to their employees.

Why? Because we've killed unions here in the United States. We have allowed these right to work laws pop up and Republican controlled states that basically effectively kill unions in those areas. And without that union power, without those union voices telling employers that you're doing better. Because of our hard work, so we deserve a little bit more without those voices. Corporations never do the right thing and that's something we have to break ourselves of. We have to stop listening to the stupid Republican talk about corporations will do the right thing if we just let them do their thing. No, they won't know. They won't. You know what corporations will do if nobody's looking over their shoulder, they're going to poison our rivers. They're going to poison our oceans, are going to poison our land. They're going to poison our air. They're going to poison their employees. They're going to strip employees, have benefits.