MeriTalk · https://www.meritalk.com/articles/gao-pledges-fraud-battle-tech-advances-with-higher-2027-budget/
Labor's share of the economy fell to its lowest since 1947, even as corporate margins set a record. The gap between the two did not vanish. It went somewhere.
I will come near to you to judgment; and I will be a swift witness against… those who oppress the hireling in his wages… and don't fear me," says Yahweh of Armies.
Malachi 3:5
On September 13, a Fortune analysis of federal data put a number on what workers have felt for years. Labor's share of U.S. economic output has fallen to 52.8%, the lowest since the government began tracking it in 1947. In the early 2000s it sat near 65%. Meanwhile corporate margins hit a record 14.9% of GDP. More is produced, and less of it reaches the people producing it, than ever recorded.
The abstraction has an address. A Government Accountability Office report found that Amazon workers drawing federal aid had nearly tripled since 2020: 12,346 on food stamps, 11,338 on Medicaid. Walmart's counts ran higher. Across those same years Amazon's annual profit rose from $11.6 billion to $77.7 billion. Full-time work, at some of the country's most profitable companies, that still cannot feed a household.
The wage a company declines to pay does not disappear. Someone still pays it. When a paycheck falls short of the grocery bill, the difference is covered by food stamps and Medicaid, which is to say by the public. The profit on one ledger stays clean because the cost moved to another.
The line about a swift witness was written for an arrangement like this. Malachi spoke to people who suspected God had stopped watching the books, and answered with a courtroom. The witness he describes is already in the room, present as the wage falls short of the life it was meant to buy, keeping the account in real time.
The claim underneath is older.
1 Timothy 5:18For the Scripture says, "You shall not muzzle the ox when it treads out the grain." And, "The laborer is worthy of his wages."
Worthy is a weight-bearing word. A day of labor earns a day of bread before any budget decides it can be afforded. When the earning and the bread come apart, the shortfall lands somewhere, and it is seen somewhere.
Nobody in the report chose to be counted. The wage moved. The witness did not.