In the short term salary compression is just the result of our current economic situation. American workers need jobs desperately and they are not in a position to demand the same wages and benefits they had before catastrophe of the Bush/Cheney years. Employers know this and can offer less for more... less pay, more work. In the longer term I suspect Americans will need to get used to much less... in terms of wages and benefits... than we are used to getting.
In the 65 years since WW2 we Americans have had a wonderful run. We've lived high on the hog and we've done wonderful things. We won the cold war, went to the moon, invented the personal computer, all that! Now we've exhausted the legacy that the "the greatest generation" bequeathed us. We've just had a lot of fun spending other people's money... our inheritance, our grand children's future, and China's labor.
In the broader sense, we Americans, at less than 5 per cent of the world’s population, can't continue to consume in excess of 30 to 40 per cent of the world's production of resources, goods and services. Not forever... and not even for much longer. Eventually the workers of other nations will demand a bigger piece of the pie. After all, they're the ones actually making most of the pie now.
So we need to start getting used to less pay for more work. Less pay may be direct... as reported in the article... or it may come as inflation or a weaker dollar. They're really the same... it's just a question of whose ox gets gored. And I'll bet the ox belonging to the wealthy oligarchy that now owns our government will not be the ox that gets gored... but then I'm just a cynic.
I don't believe our real wages will rise again unless we invent another new technological miracle as revolutionary as the PC. I don't mean just a better telephone... I mean a game changer... robot factories, nuclear fusion, genetically altered food. Personally, I don't think marketing fraudulent securities made up of worthless "assets" will do the job for us.
Well, we're still the the 600 pound gorilla in the room, but at the end of the Clinton/Gore years we weighed in at a solid 1200 pounds! Even 18 months ago we were probably still at 900. I hope we're not down to 300 pounds 18 months from now.
Of course, we are still the world's only military superpower. We could try “conquer and pillage” as an economic system. It kept the Romans in bread and circuses for centuries!
