Poor Mojo Newswire

In talking with workers--be they software engineers or hotel housekeepers, factory workers or freelancers--I often sensed a frustration, even an anger, that unfairness has muscled aside fairness in America in recent decades and especially in recent years, and it goes far beyond stratospheric C.E.O. salaries. Many workers are upset that their families have been sinking economically--median income for working-age households fell $2,375 from 2000 to 2006 (after accounting for inflation). For the typical worker, wages have inched up less than 1 percent since the most recent economic expansion began in November 2001, even as corporate profits have soared and productivity per worker has jumped more than 15 percent. And there's also widespread resentment that while middle-class and low-wage workers have been treading water, average income for the top 1 percent of households, averaging $1.1 million in annual income, has more than tripled over the past quarter century. The top 1 percent of household has more after-tax income than the bottom 40 percent of Americans.

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In Massachusetts, I interviewed Jean Capobianco, a FedEx Ground driver who was fired soon after she contracted ovarian cancer and requested several months' leave to have chemotherapy. FedEx asserted that she was an independent contractor, not an employee, and was thus not protected by the Americans with Disabilities Act. In Jefferson, Wisconsin, 470 meat-packing workers went on strike for 11 months because their employer, Tyson Foods--which was making record profits at the time--insisted on freezing their pensions, quadrupling their out-of-pocket health insurance premiums and cutting the top pay for future workers to $11 an hour from $13.10.

The words of Kathy Saumier, a worker in upstate New York, captured the mood of many workers: "I got tired of being treated like dirt." At the plastic factory where she worked, four of the 190 employees had fingers amputated over a 13-month period.