https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutocracy
photo: US federal minimum wage if it had kept pace with productivity. Also, the real minimum wage.
What happened in 1971?
this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2025
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I don't know if it's directly related, but that is the year Richard Nixon effectively killed the Bretton Woods system and took the US dollar off the gold standard. That move is sometimes blamed, at least in part, for America's recession and stagflation in the 1970s. If inflation is rising more than the minimum wage, then the "real" minimum wage is dropping.
It was part of it, but it's far more than a change in dollar value. Companies learned they could do things to max their bottom line at the expense of the workers. The link posted has its biases of the time, but the graphs speak louder than the rhetoric.
As one of the memes/copypastas I love and have been seeing a lot lately in various topics goes at the end, "They have played us for absolute fools!"