August 21, 2024                                                         Home   Subscribe  Open in Browser

On the opening night of the Democratic National Convention this week organized labor took the center stage. The presidents of our nation’s largest unions addressed the thousands gathered in Chicago directly.

The labor leaders gathered on stage put some real heat on an ongoing reality TV viewers seldom get to see addressed. They highlighted many of our key issues, including corporate wealth concentration.

“Corporate greed turns blue-collar blood, sweat, and tears into Wall Street stock buybacks and CEO jackpots,” UAW President Shawn Fain told the crowd. “It causes inflation. It hurts workers. It hurts consumers. And it hurts America.”

Seriously tackling wealth concentration — and making sure workers get a fair share of the wealth they create — requires an energized labor movement, regardless of which party is in charge of the government.

Chris Mills Rodrigo
for the Institute for Policy Studies’ Inequality.org team

A Dedication to Fighting the 21st Century’s Robber Barons

This week’s frontline face: Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan.

What she’s doing to help create a more equal world: Khan's leadership has transformed the agency tasked with enforcing our nation’s antitrust laws. Under Kahn, the FTC has advocated for consumers, workers, and small businesses as it takes on unfair corporate concentration.

That fight has earned Kahn plenty of enemies, including within the party that nominated her to power. Billionaire Democratic Party mega-donor and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman has reportedly been pushing Kamala Harris to commit, if elected, to removing Khan from her perch.

What makes this fight so important: "Corporate consolidation,” as Khan recently noted in an address to the American Federation of Teachers, “can have consequences in every sector."

Added the FTC chair: “When big banks merge, they may become too-big-to-fail and need bailouts. When film studios merge, sometimes certain stories don’t get told. And when tech companies merge in ways that undermine competition, they can degrade product quality, threatening our safety and privacy online.” 

Tipping Remains a Racist Relic of Slavery. Let's Get Rid of It!

Tipped workers get paid differently. To be more exact: Tipped workers get paid worse. Ever since the 1938 passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act, tipped workers have faced a subminimum wage enshrined into law.

The federal tipped wage floor sits today at just $2.13 per hour, with customers on the hook to make up the difference between that paltry pay and the minimum wage.

This subminimum system, Nina Mast of the Economic Policy Institute notes in a new Inequality.org analysis, leaves service workers making very little and prone to abusive situations. 

"To address the discriminatory treatment of tipped workers in the South and across the country,” Mast writes, “lawmakers must eliminate the tipped subminimum wage and give tipped workers the same basic protection afforded to other workers in almost all other jobs.”

The latest UBS Global Wealth Report finds that in 2023 the world’s 26 richest billionaires held a combined fortune of an unfathomable $2.9 trillion. These 26 individuals, all gathered together, would not fill up a school bus, but they hold more wealth than the total goods and services produced by most countries. For an interactive version of this chart and more on global inequality, click below.

Today’s Young Mega-Millionaires, They Just Wanna Have Fun

Today’s Millennial and Gen Z super rich are flocking into “alternative investments,” everything from fine wines and watches to classic cars and crypto. The overall “alternative asset” category, notes a new Bank of America study, has an amazing 94 percent of wealthy 43-and-unders interested in it.

Private equity kingpins, not surprisingly, are plugging themselves into this “alternative asset” frenzy, doing their best, for instance, to make investing in classic cars an effortless pleasure. They’re also doing their best to keep in place the federal tax breaks that keep themselves and their deep-pocketed investors really happy at tax time. Inequality.org co-editor Sam Pizzigati has more.

At Starbucks, a My-Way-or-the-Highway Chairman Emeritus

This week’s dour deep pocket: billionaire Howard Schultz, the three-time former CEO of the Starbucks coffee-shop empire who still currently rates as the firm’s largest individual shareholder.

What has Schultz sour: the inability of his hand-picked CEO successors to stick to the Schultz script.

Two years ago, Schultz stepped down from his third CEO stint and hailed his new successor, Laxman Narasimhan, as “a strategic and transformational leader.” But Narasimhan’s approach to transforming Starbucks included making labor peace with unionizing Starbucks workers, a real no-no for Schultz. A fervent union-hater, Schultz as Starbucks CEO had refused to bargain with workers at any Starbucks outlet that dared to vote for union representation.

By this past spring, Schultz was openly blasting Narasimhan’s management team and demanding “contrition.” Last week, with Schultz cheering, Starbucks ousted Narasimhan and named Chipotle CEO Brian Niccol his Starbucks chief exec successor. One Niccol claim to fame: During his Chipotle stint, the NLRB has charged, Chipotle shut down a Maine store after workers there tried to unionize.

The last word: The task awaiting the latest Starbucks CEO, notes Financial Times analyst Roula Khalaf, comes with a significant “complication”: a “backseat barista” by the name of Howard Schultz.

This newsletter and the whole Inequality.org project are powered by donations. We’re not raking in cash from the billionaire class, though. We’re counting on people to see why this reporting, research, and advocacy matters, and then to become paid subscribers, by making a recurring monthly donation of any amount. Make a monthly gift as a paid subscriber. Start your paid subscription today.