This is why so many Americans are angry at and frustrated with those with wealth and power [View all]

[YoungDemCA]

Since 1979, hourly pay for the vast majority of American workers has diverged from economy-wide productivity, and this divergence is at the root of numerous American economic challenges.

- Between 1979 and 2013,productivity grew 64.9 percent, while hourly compensation of production and nonsupervisory workers, who comprise 80 percent of the private-sector workforce, grew just 8.2 percent. Productivity thus grew eight times faster than typical worker compensation.

- Much of this productivity growth accrued to those with the very highest wages. The top 1 percent of earners saw cumulative gains in annual wages of 153.6 percent between 1979 and 2012–far in excess of economy-wide productivity.

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Hourly wages of the vast majority of American workers have either stagnated or declined since 1979, with the exception of a period of strong across-the-board wage growth in the late 1990s.

- Median hourly wages rose just 0.2 percent annually between 1979 and 2013, compared with an annual decline of 0.2 percent for the 10th percentile worker (i.e., the worker who earns more than only 10 percent of workers) and an annual gain of 1 percent for the 95th percentile worker.

- Between 2000 and 2013, hourly wages of the vast majority of workers either fell (bottom 30 percent) or were essentially flat (next 40 percent), and only the 95th percentile saw wage growth closely approaching 1 percent annually.

- The late 1990s was the only period between 1979 and 2013 when wage growth was robust and broadly shared; in fact, wage growth was actually strongest for the bottom 40 percent.

http://www.epi.org/publication/raising-americas-pay/

Some helpful graphs: