Wages of average workers trailing far behind surge in corporate profits

U.S. companies are about to wrap up their fourth consecutive year of spectacular profit growth, filling corporate coffers with cash and keeping the bull market alive on Wall Street.

Total earnings of the blue-chip Standard & Poor's 500 companies have risen at double-digit percentage rates for 18 consecutive quarters, an unprecedented streak.

But to many rank-and-file workers, the booming bottom line may only serve as a reminder of what has been missing from their own paychecks.

Wages of average workers have just begun to improve in recent months after badly lagging behind inflation for most of this decade. Amid the surge in corporate profit, many workers have faced terminated pension plans, reduced health-care benefits and rising outsourcing of jobs overseas.

The swelling earnings of business — and of many top executives — have become part of the debate about widening U.S. income disparities. When they take control of Congress next month, Democratic Party leaders will focus intently on those disparities, they say, and on trade agreements that some contend enrich multinational businesses while destroying American jobs.

"I'm very passionate about this, and I'm going to be joined by some people who are equally passionate," said Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D. "Some reinforcements are coming."

Corporate leaders say they should not be forced to defend the profitability of their businesses.

"It is a competitive world, and companies want to innovate and compete and win," said Larry Burton, executive director of the Business Roundtable, an association of 160 chief executives of major companies.

What's more, "a lot of us who are workers also are capitalists," said Barry Bosworth, an economist at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. Small investors gain as rising corporate earnings boost the value of stocks held in retirement-savings plans and other investment accounts.

The Dow Jones industrial average has rocketed 16 percent this year.

Among the biggest U.S. businesses, Bank of America earned $15.9 billion in the first nine months of this year, up 23 percent from a year earlier. Technology giant IBM posted a 25 percent jump in profit in the period, to nearly $6 billion. McDonald's results rose 15 percent to $2.3 billion.

By one government measure of profit margins, U.S. businesses overall were more profitable in the third quarter than in any three-month period since 1951, according to David Rosenberg, an economist at brokerage Merrill Lynch.

In part, corporations simply have benefited from the strength of the domestic and global economies since 2001. As demand for their products and services has risen worldwide, so have their sales and profits.

But many companies' tight controls over spending also have helped earnings to balloon. And because labor is the largest expense for business overall, the damping of growth in wages and benefits has been a key contributor to corporate America's profit success in this decade, analysts say.

"Companies are saying, 'We can't afford anything' " when it comes to providing for U.S. workers, said Larry Mishel, president of the liberal Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.

In the context of soaring earnings, "That's not irony, it's hypocrisy," he said.

One measure of the split between what employees get and what business retains shows up in national income accounts calculated by the Commerce Department.

Corporate earnings generated in the United States totaled $1.42 trillion at an annualized rate in the third quarter, or 10.7 percent of the economy's gross domestic income, government data show. That was the highest share of income that companies claimed since the 1960s and was up from 6.2 percent at the end of 2000.

By contrast, total labor compensation accounted for 56.4 percent of gross domestic income in the period. That percentage has fallen from 58.4 percent in the fourth quarter of 2000 and has been in general decline since the early 1980s. (The rest of national income includes rental and interest income and proprietors' profits.)

What's striking to many experts is that labor's share of the economic pie has failed to grow over the last decade even as U.S. workers have become more productive. In essence, those productivity gains have flowed to companies and their shareholders, not to the rank and file.

"We've had nine years of great productivity growth, and most workers see no gain for it," said Dean Baker, co-director of the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington.

In recent months, however, some measures of worker incomes have begun to improve. In the 12 months ended in November, average hourly wages rose 4.1 percent, the biggest pickup since the late 1990s, Labor Department data show.

On Wall Street, many analysts think that the profit locomotive will slow sharply in 2007, in part as companies pay more to lure workers in a tight labor market. They also note that the corporate bottom line is inherently prone to boom-and-bust cycles. In 2001, earnings collapsed with that year's recession.

"I think we're pretty close to the top" in profitability, said Jim Floyd, an analyst at investment research firm Leuthold Group in Minneapolis.

But some analysts worry that wage gains will slow again if the U.S. economy continues to decelerate.

Stephen Roach, an economist at brokerage Morgan Stanley in New York, believes that the persistent threat of outsourcing helps keep a lid on worker pay demands, particularly at the lower end of the income scale.

That also has been a theme of some in Congress — Democrats and Republicans — who have railed against trade agreements that they say encourage U.S. companies to move jobs overseas or to use outsourcing as a lever against domestic workers.

"All these companies say the same thing: 'We have to (move overseas) to compete,' " Dorgan said. "It's not about competing — it's about fattening their profits."

Yet few analysts believe that Democrats or Republicans would try to roll back the forces of business globalization.

"You can't protect jobs by stopping cheap underwear coming from China. It'll just come from Bangladesh," said James Glassman, an economist at J.P. Morgan Securities in New York.