The super-rich are getting richer every day—and we're paying the price

Over the past year, we’ve seen so many AFSCME members make remarkable progress in round after round of contract negotiations. But those gains haven’t come easy and often we’ve had to mobilize and fight for every dime.  

Roberta Lynch

And we’re not the only ones. Screen actors and writers were out on strike for months in order to secure contracts that enabled them to continue to earn a living in a sector that is increasingly reliant on artificial intelligence. Auto workers spent weeks on the picket lines in their “rolling” strike that compelled the Big Three automakers to share more of the robust profits they’d been reeling in. And hotel workers, health care workers and many others followed suit.

It’s not accidental that more and more workers are insisting on a better standard of living. We’re all tired of watching the super-rich rake in obscene sums without any signs of stopping.

The world’s five richest men are now worth a combined $869 billion—an unimaginable hoard of wealth they’ve more than doubled in the last four years alone.

American billionaires are $1.6 trillion richer today than they were in 2020.

Seven of the globe’s 10 largest corporations—together worth more than $10 trillion—are owned or run by a billionaire.

And the 148 top corporations worldwide made a record-smashing $1.8 trillion in profits in the year from July 2022 to June 2023 alone.

That’s all according to “Inequality Inc.,” a report issued in January by the global charity Oxfam.

And it’s a zero-sum game. Every dollar vacuumed up by corporate greed and into the portfolios of the super-rich is a dollar that comes directly out of the pockets of the rest of us.

How we got here

A time-honored way of squeezing workers is by sending jobs overseas, such as to China or Mexico, where workers make meager wages and few have any organized voice.

More recently, corporations have hidden behind the idea of inflation. But higher prices don’t just happen; they’re the result of conscious decisions by corporate executives who decide what they will charge.

In theory, prices are supposed to reflect the cost of doing business, but in the real world of the last few years, price hikes are actually being driven by corporate profiteering. During the pandemic, “corporations were quick to pass on their rising costs to consumers,” but as costs have dropped since, “they are surprisingly less quick to pass on their savings,” according to a recent report.

Instead of inflation, what we’re experiencing is better called corporate “greedflation.”

Still not satisfied, the world’s two richest men are now trying to weaken the rights of workers by invalidating the landmark law that provides collective bargaining rights to private sector employees. In separate legal proceedings, Tesla CEO Elon Musk (who has a net worth of $180 billion) and Amazon owner Jeff Bezos ($114 billion) are making the same argument: that both the National Labor Relations Act and the National Labor Relations Board (which administers the Act) are unconstitutional.

Fighting back

How can working people fight back? By coming together in our unions and voting together for pro-worker candidates.

More and more people are recognizing that they need union representation. And even those who aren’t yet joining unions recognize the vital role that unions play in tilting the scales away from gargantuan profits for billionaires and toward a better standard of living for working people. Support for unions has been rising for a decade, up to 67% in a recent Gallup poll.

The finding “confirms what we’ve known for a long time: Americans believe in the power of unions to strengthen our economy and improve the lives of working people,” AFSCME International President Lee Saunders said.

President Biden is working to tilt those scales in our favor too. He’s calling out greedflation, spotlighting the sneaky practice in his recent State of the Union address. “Too many corporations raise prices to pad their profits, charging more and more for less and less,” the President said.

He’s also working to bring good jobs back to America. “Manufacturers have poured roughly $220 billion over the last 18 months into manufacturing construction on Biden’s watch,” Politico reported in January. “New factories will eventually make the car parts, computer chips and construction materials that the U.S. has long relied on foreign countries to provide.”

And President Biden is pushing tax and budget changes that would help restore some balance to the economy by requiring the super-rich to do their share. “No billionaire should pay a lower tax rate than a teacher, a sanitation worker, a nurse,” he said in the State of the Union speech.

Corporate greed and billionaire wealth can feel like a runaway train, but we’re making progress. And we can’t stop now. It’s critically important to keep standing together, building our own union stronger, and winning better contracts for ourselves. So is ensuring that we work on every front to elect political leaders who will stand solidly on the side of America’s working families.