Who Wins When Workers Fight: The Beneficiaries of Division

There is a simple rule in labor history: when workers are united, they win. When workers are divided, the employer wins. This is not rhetoric. This is mathematics.

From 1970 until today, American workers have been systematically divided. By race. By immigration status. By gender. By sector. By region. Divided by strategies that have been perfected over decades. And as workers became weaker, as their ability to organize and demand fair wages dissolved, something remarkable happened: the wealthy became much, much wealthier.

This is not coincidence. It is causation. The decline in worker power directly enabled the explosion in CEO and corporate wealth. The money that would have gone to workers—to higher wages, better benefits, security—instead flowed to the top. Trillions of dollars. All because workers were divided into fighting each other instead of fighting the system that steals from all of them.

Let's follow the money. Let's see who won when workers lost.

The Great Wealth Transfer: From Workers to the Elite (1970-2025)

In 1970, the CEO-to-worker pay ratio was 20-to-1. A CEO made 20 times what the typical worker made. This was not a model of equality, but it was a model where companies could not extract unlimited value from their workforce.

Today, in 2025, that ratio is 281-to-1. A CEO makes 281 times what a typical worker makes. The wealth that flows upward has become a torrent.

CEO compensation has skyrocketed 1,094 percent since 1978. Meanwhile, worker wages rose only 26 percent. When you account for inflation, real worker wages have essentially stagnated for fifty years. They make the same amount in real terms as their parents did. Meanwhile, the CEO at the top of their company has seen their compensation increase by more than 1,000 percent.

This is not productivity gains. This is not market forces. This is the direct result of workers losing power. When workers are strong and organized, they demand that the value they create be shared with them. When workers are weak and divided, employers capture all the value. The CEO extracts billions. The worker gets nothing.

The numbers are staggering. The average CEO at a Fortune 500 company now makes close to $20 million per year. That is $20 million. In 2024, the top 1 percent and top 0.1 percent saw their earnings increase 158 percent and 341 percent respectively since the 1980s. Meanwhile, typical workers saw their real wages increase less than 12 percent over the same period.

Where did all this money come from? From you. From workers. From people who are struggling to pay rent while their boss's bonus exceeds their annual salary by a factor of 100.

Who Specifically Benefits: The Mechanics of Wealth Concentration

Corporate Shareholders and Investors. When workers lose power, profits increase. Higher profits mean higher stock prices. Higher stock prices mean wealth for whoever owns the stock. The top 1 percent owns approximately 93 percent of all stocks. So when profit extraction increases—when employers can pay workers less because those workers are too divided to demand more—the wealth flows almost entirely to the wealthiest Americans.

A company that operates with weak unions or no unions can extract maximum profit. Every dollar that is not paid to workers is a dollar captured by shareholders. When a company with 10,000 workers suppresses wages by $2 per hour per worker, that is $20,000 per hour in profit extraction. That is $40 million per year per company. Multiply that by thousands of companies across America, and you are talking about hundreds of billions of dollars flowing from workers to shareholders.

Executives and CEOs. CEO pay is not determined by productivity. CEOs are more productive today than they were in 1970? No. The work is different, sometimes easier due to technology. But their pay has increased by 1,094 percent. What changed? Worker power. When workers could strike, could demand, could organize, CEOs had to justify their compensation. When workers lost that power, CEOs could claim any compensation they wanted. There was no one to say no.

In 1938-1970, CEO pay increased 0.1 percent per year while firms grew at 6.1 percent annually. After 1970, CEO pay increased 4.6 percent per year while firm growth slowed to 5.2 percent. The CEO pay explosion was not because CEOs became better. It was because workers became weaker.

Union-Busting Consultants and Anti-Labor Specialists. An entire industry exists to destroy worker power. Union-busting consultants, labor attorneys, anti-union consulting firms. They profit directly from weakening workers. The weaker you are, the more they get paid. They charge employers hundreds of thousands of dollars to prevent unionization, to decertify existing unions, to divide workers along racial or ethnic lines, to threaten workers with job loss if they organize.

Some of the most profitable consulting firms in America have built empires on union-busting. These are not cheap services. Employers pay hundreds of thousands per union campaign. That money flows directly to consultants whose only job is to ensure you have no power.

Politicians and Media Companies. Division is profitable for politicians who benefit from xenophobic and racist narratives. It is profitable for media companies that sell advertising based on engagement, and fear and division generate engagement. When workers are fighting immigrants or people of different races, they are not demanding higher wages or unionization. Politicians who would otherwise be pressured to raise minimum wage or protect unions instead distract by talking about border security or "urban crime." Media profits from the engagement. Politicians profit from the votes. Workers lose.

Competing Employers. When one company suppresses wages by using anti-union tactics or exploiting vulnerable workers, other employers benefit. If Company A can keep wages low by hiring undocumented workers and threatening them with deportation, Company B has to match that wage to stay competitive. The entire labor market is pulled downward. Employers collectively benefit from suppressing wages across the industry.

The Historical Tactics: How the Division Works

Race as a Divide-and-Conquer Tool. Employers have understood for centuries that if they can divide workers by race, unity becomes impossible. Samuel Gompers, head of the AFL, understood this and used it. When Black workers were brought in to break strikes, instead of the union recognizing that it needed to unite across racial lines, it tried to exclude Black workers. This weakened the union and benefited the employer.

The smart employers learned this lesson: hire workers of different races and ethnicities, pay them differently, isolate them from each other, and they cannot organize together. The United Mine Workers and later the UAW learned the opposite lesson. They understood that if they did not actively fight racism within their own unions, employers would use it to defeat them. So they recruited Black workers, gave them leadership roles, and invested in racial unity. This made them stronger.

Modern employers use the same tactic but in updated form. Undocumented workers are isolated and afraid, so they cannot demand fair wages. Native-born workers are told to blame the immigrants. Both groups fight each other while the employer laughs all the way to the bank.

Geographic Isolation. Employers design workplaces to minimize congregation and communication. Workers on different shifts, assigned to different locations, prevented from meeting. When workers cannot talk to each other, they cannot coordinate, cannot identify common interests, cannot organize.

Threats and Intimidation. Employers threaten to close the plant if workers unionize. They hire consultants who specialize in anti-union campaigns. They fire organizers. They legally challenge workers' right to organize. The National Labor Relations Board is supposed to protect workers, but it is underfunded and weak. Employers know they can violate the law and face minimal penalties.

Creating Scarcity of Work. When there are more workers desperate for jobs than there are jobs available, employers have power. The unemployment rate becomes a tool. High unemployment means workers compete with each other for scarce positions, driving wages down. Employers benefit from high unemployment.

This is why the Federal Reserve explicitly targets unemployment at a level high enough to suppress wages. The Fed knows that when unemployment is too low, workers gain bargaining power. They know that inflation control (raising unemployment to reduce wage pressure) is more important than full employment. So they create and maintain unemployment to keep workers desperate and weak.

The Numbers: How Much Has Been Stolen from Workers

Let's put this in concrete terms. How much money has flowed from workers to the wealthy because worker power has collapsed?

The Economic Policy Institute estimates that union decline alone has been responsible for approximately 10-20 percent of the rise in wage inequality since the 1970s. That is not the only factor—globalization, technology, policy choices all play a role. But union decline is a major part.

If we model out what would happen if union membership had remained at 1970 levels instead of collapsing to 10 percent, we can estimate the cost. A 1970s-level unionization rate would have increased wages for non-union workers through the spillover effect (employers raising wages to compete with union shops). It would have given more workers direct union wages. The union wage premium is approximately 10-15 percent higher than non-union wages.

If we apply this modestly to the current workforce: there are approximately 130 million workers in the U.S. If an additional 20-30 million workers had union wages due to maintained unionization (either directly or through spillover), and the union wage premium is 12 percent, that is an additional $600 billion to $1 trillion in annual wages that workers would have earned in recent years.

Over a decade, that is $6-10 trillion that has flowed from workers to employers instead of being earned by workers. That money went to shareholders. That money went to CEO bonuses. That money went to financing stock buybacks that inflate CEO compensation.

And this does not even account for the cost of lost benefits, pension cuts, deteriorating working conditions, increased inequality, and reduced consumer spending. When workers are weak, they lose not just wages but everything else too.

Who Has Power: The Mechanism of Control

The wealthy maintain power through a combination of tactics:

Control of Information. The media narrative is controlled by people who benefit from worker division. Owners of media companies are almost universally wealthy. They have no incentive to show how the system steals from workers. Instead, they promote narratives of individual responsibility. You are poor because you are lazy, not because the system is rigged. Immigration is the problem, not corporate wage suppression. People of color are getting "special treatment," not recovering from centuries of discrimination.

Control of Law. Wealthy people fund political campaigns. Politicians need money to get elected. Once elected, they vote for policies that benefit their donors. Tax cuts for corporations. Weakening of labor laws. Prevent raising minimum wage. Appoint judges who are hostile to unions. The wealthy literally write the laws that govern labor relations.

Control of Employment. If you do not work, you cannot feed yourself. Employers know this. They use it. Threaten to fire organizers. Move plants to locations with lower wages. Bring in replacement workers. You can be replaced, so you better not ask for too much. This threat is constant. It suppresses wages even without explicit action.

Control of the Narrative About Prosperity. The wealthy promote the idea that if you just work hard, you will be successful. That poor people are poor because they did not work hard. This narrative ignores structure. It ignores the fact that some people are born into wealth and some are born into debt. Some can afford to take risks and some cannot. Some have family networks and some do not. The narrative of individual responsibility serves the wealthy because it blames victims instead of systems.

"The system is not designed by accident. It is maintained by design. The wealthy know exactly how to divide workers and how to benefit from that division. The only thing they fear is unified working people. That is why they spend so much money to prevent it."

The Ultimate Beneficiary: The Top 1 Percent

All of these mechanisms ultimately funnel wealth upward to a tiny group at the very top: the top 1 percent, and especially the top 0.1 percent.

Between 1980 and 2025, the top 1 percent increased their share of income from approximately 7 percent to 20 percent. The top 0.1 percent increased from approximately 1 percent to over 5 percent. Meanwhile, the share of income for workers in the middle and at the bottom has steadily declined.

The mechanism is clear: worker power declined, employers captured more profit, profit was distributed to shareholders (mostly wealthy), CEO compensation exploded, tax policy shifted to benefit wealth over wages. The result: the wealthy captured the lion's share of economic growth.

From 1980 to 2020, the U.S. economy grew substantially in real terms. But that growth did not go to workers. It went to the top. Workers got 26 percent wage growth. The top got hundreds of percent. The CEO got 1,094 percent.

This is the definition of a rigged system. The system is not broken—it is working exactly as designed. It is designed to funnel wealth from many to few. From workers to owners. From the vulnerable to the powerful. And it depends on workers fighting each other instead of fighting the system.

The Path to Power: What Would Change If Workers United

The wealthy understand something that many workers do not: when workers unite, the power balance shifts dramatically. When workers can strike, when they can refuse to work, when they stand together across lines of race and gender and immigration status, they can demand a much larger share of the value they create.

This is not theory. This happened in America in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Union membership was at 35 percent. Workers had power. Wages increased. Benefits improved. The middle class was built. CEO-to-worker ratios were 20-to-1 instead of 281-to-1. CEOs still made good money. Companies still made profits. But workers shared in the prosperity.

If workers united today—if white workers stopped blaming immigrants, if they organized with immigrants; if workers in different industries organized together; if private sector workers organized with public sector workers; if workers recognized that their interests aligned far more with other workers than with their boss—the balance of power would shift.

The wealthy fear this more than anything. Not because they fear violence or destruction, but because they fear losing the ability to extract maximum profit. They fear a system where workers have actual power. That is why they work so hard to divide you. That is why xenophobia and racism are constantly promoted. That is why corporate media frames unions as outdated and harmful.

They benefit from your division. They have everything to lose from your unity. That is not accidental. That is intentional. And until you understand this, you will remain weak while they remain wealthy.