The Jobless and Wageless "Recovery"

Steven Greenhouse at NYT's Economix has disturbing - but not really surprising - news on the unequal benefits at the center of a historically weak economic recovery. 

Regular folks aren't making signficant gains, while the corporate and economic elites are doing just fine and taking the lion's share of increases in national income. The arc of inequality that's predominated over the last thirty years continues, in extremis:

Economists at Northeastern University have found that the current economic recovery in the United States has been unusually skewed in favor of corporate profits and against increased wages for workers.

In their newly released study, the Northeastern economists found that since the recovery began in June 2009 following a deep 18-month recession, “corporate profits captured 88 percent of the growth in real national income while aggregate wages and salaries accounted for only slightly more than 1 percent” of that growth.

The study, “The ‘Jobless and Wageless Recovery’ From the Great Recession of 2007-2009,” said it was “unprecedented” for American workers to receive such a tiny share of national income growth during a recovery...

“The lack of any net job growth in the current recovery combined with stagnant real hourly and weekly wages is responsible for this unique, devastating outcome,” wrote the report’s authors, Andrew Sum, Ishwar Khatiwada, Joseph McLaughlin and Sheila Palma.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, average real hourly earnings for all employees actually declined by 1.1 percent from June 2009, when the recovery began, to May 2011, the month for which the most recent earnings numbers are available...

The study called that $27 billion loss in aggregate wages and salaries during the seven quarters after the recovery began “the first ever such decline in any post-World War II recovery”...

With regard to corporate profits, the report noted that the preliminary estimate for the first quarter of 2011 was $1.668 trillion, an increase of $465 billion of just under 40 percent since the recovery began.

“Aggregate employment still has not increased above the trough quarter of 2009, and real hourly and weekly wages have been flat to modestly negative,” the report concludes. “The only major beneficiaries of the recovery have been corporate profits and the stock market and its shareholders.”