According to most measures, the economy is humming along, healthy and growing. Which, in capitalistic theory, is a good thing, but it turns out that once again, it’s mostly those who are already wealthy that are benefitting from the economic gains.
A new report from The Roosevelt Institute, a think tank, demonstrates how in the past several years, corporate profits have been increasingly paid back to shareholders, rather than reinvested by hiring more people and paying them better, The Washington Post reported. The Financialization Project, as it’s called, looks at the changes in our savings, power, wealth and society over the past 35 years.
The main findings include:
In the 1960s, 40 percent of earnings and borrowing used to go into investment. In the 1980s, that figure fell to less than 10 percent, and it hasn’t risen since.
Instead of investment, borrowing is now correlated with shareholder payouts, which have nearly doubled as a share of corporate assets since the 1980s.
Companies even borrow money to make the shareholder payouts, because with low interest rates, it’s a cheap way to push stock prices higher, the Post reported.
The project calls the 1980s the “shareholder revolution,” which began with hostile takeovers and investors demanding more control over the firm’s cash. Rather than putting profits into expansion and employee welfare, managers would pay them out in dividends, the Post reported.
Wal-Mart and McDonald’s are just two well-known players in the “shareholder revolution,” while Apple, Google and Facebook are newer converts to the system. The Walton family, heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune, is the richest family in the U.S. In 2014, three Waltons — Rob, Jim and Alice (and the various entities that they control) — received an estimated $3.1 billion in Wal-Mart dividends from their majority stake in the company. Wal-Mart associates make an average of $8.81 an hour.
Last week, Wal-Mart announced it was going to give employees pay raises, quite welcome news. If the tighwadiest of them all can offer raises, perhaps other companies will follow suit.
McDonald’s, still the king of fast food despite falling sales in the past few years, decided last year to deliver up $20 billion in shareholder payouts over the next three years, The Wall Street Journal reported. Between 2011 and 2013, McDonald’s buybacks and dividends totaled $16.4 billion, according to securities filings. Meanwhile, their employees were among many workers of fast food chains who went on strike in 190 cities in December 2014, (and previous years) demanding a $15-an-hour wage.
The Financialization Project found that while high-tech companies at first didn’t subscribe to the “shareholder first” philosophy, they quickly came under, and capitulated, to intense pressure to do so, the Post reported. Especially Apple, which amassed a lot of cash. But rather than give retail workers raises, (never mind the Chinese workers who assemble the phones) Apple started a stock repurchase and dividend program that will pay $130 billion to investors this year.
J.W. Mason, an economics professor at John Jay College who wrote the Financialization report, told the Post that societal pressure will be needed to get businesses to spread their wealth.
“There is, at some point, a value judgment that we can’t avoid,” he said. “We might say that actually, business activity has other goals in addition to generating profits for shareholders, and it’s not good for society if we keep paying workers low wages.”
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
