The ratio of CEO-to-worker pay in the USA was 21-to-1 in 1965 and 61-to-1 in 1989. 

Today it’s 351-to-1. 

Talk about “inflation.”

 While absolute poverty, narrowly defined, may have been abolished, some 600 million Chinese are struggling to get by on a daily basis on a monthly income of less than Rmb1,000 or about $US155, while the country is now home to more dollar billionaires than the United States.

China has drawn the line for absolute poverty at $2.30 a day adjusted for inflation and claims to have lifted the income of 100 million rural residents above that level since Xi came to office in 2012. The World Bank, however, sets a higher poverty line of $5.50 a day for upper-middle-income countries like China. On this basis, a quarter of China’s population is in poverty.

The focus on rural poverty highlights the gulf between urban and rural areas where some 40 percent of China’s population reside. Figures published in the Australian Financial Review in September show that by 1997, urban household incomes were on average 83 percent higher than those of rural households. This rose to 167 percent in 2009, declining to 132 percent in 2019—still more than double the rural average.

China’s official Gini coefficient has risen sharply since Deng’s “opening up” in 1978 from about 0.31 to 0.4 in 1997 and a high of 0.49 in 2008 before falling slightly to 0.47 in 2020. Any figure over 0.4 is regarded by the United Nations as indicating large inequality, while China’s leaders have themselves declared that level is potentially destabilising.

[The Gini coefficient is a standard measure of social inequality that ranges from 0, which represents absolute equality or all people earning exactly the same income, to 1, which represents absolute inequality or one person having all the income and everyone else had none.]

According to the World Bank, in 1978, the top 10 percent of earners in China and the bottom 50 percent each accounted for about a quarter of the country’s total income. By 2018, the top 10 percent took more than 40 percent of total income, while the bottom half of earners received less than 15 percent.

In terms of wealth rather than income, the wealthiest 1 percent of individuals owned nearly 31 percent of China’s wealth in 2020, up from around 21 percent in 2000. In the US for instance, the share of wealth of the top 1 percent reached 35 percent in 2020. According to the Hurun Global Rich list, the number of dollar billionaires in China hit 1,058 last year, as compared to 696 in the US.

An article earlier this year by Branko Milanovic, a London School of Economic professor, explained that a person on the median urban income in China is in the 70th global percentile—in other words, richer than 70 percent of the world’s population, whereas a person with the median rural income is in the 52nd global percentile.

 “Differently put, the average urban person in China is as rich as the average person in Hungary, whereas the average rural person in China is as poor as the average person in Vietnam,” it stated.

The rural-urban divide is also manifested in the cities and major manufacturing centre where nearly 300 million internal migrant workers from rural China constitute a large proportion of the working class. Not only are they generally on lower wages and conditions and suffer discrimination but the overwhelming majority do not have an urban hukou, an official residency document that provide full access to local public services such as schools and hospitals. It is a system designed to provide cheap, easily exploitable labour to industry and services in the huge manufacturing hubs in the eastern coastal areas of China.

Social inequality is also perpetuated in education where entrance to China’s elite universities and thus well-paid jobs in the government apparatus or private enterprise is determined by college entrance results. According to the article, “Average families in some top-tier cities have spent one-quarter of their take-home pay on tutoring… About 22 percent of students enrolled in China’s prestigious Tsinghua University in 1990 were from rural China, but by 2016, that percentage was 10.2 percent.” Urbanisation may account for some, but certainly not all of this huge change.

Milanovic led a study into the changing social composition of what he termed China’s “elite” – the top 5 percent of the population—over the period 1988 to 2013. 

Whereas in 1988 three quarters of the elite were government-employed, 25 years later half were either capitalists or professionals. Moreover, that social divide was perpetuated within the CCP. When the study examined “rich members” of the CCP, “about half belonged to the private-sector-oriented classes.”

Behind Chinese President Xi’s populism, mounting social inequality – World Socialist Web Site (wsws.org)

A new report shows that higher unionization rates are also associated with improved conditions outside of the workplace, including better access to healthcare, paid leave, and the ballot box.

“Unions promote economic equality and build worker power, helping workers to win increases in pay, better benefits, and safer working conditions,” said Asha Banerjee, economic analyst at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) and co-author of the report. “But the benefits of unions extend far beyond the workplace. The data suggest that unions also give workers a voice in shaping their communities and political representation.”

To document the correlation between organized labor and various indicators of economic, personal, and democratic well-being, researchers at EPI compared Census Bureau data on minimum wages, median annual incomes, access to unemployment insurance, lack of health insurance, Medicaid expansion, paid sick and family leave laws, and voter suppression laws in states with “high” (13.5% to 24.7%), “medium” (8.3% to 13/3%), and “low” (3.2% to 7.7%) levels of union density. All 50 U.S. states plus the District of Columbia were sorted into three equally sized categories based on their average level of union density—defined as the percentage of workers in a state who are members of a union or covered by a collective bargaining agreement—from 2015 to 2019. 

“The 17 U.S. states with the highest union densities have state minimum wages that are on average 19% higher than the national average and 40% higher than those in low-union-density states,” says the report.

“Unions,” the authors emphasize, “have played a central role in organizing and mobilizing campaigns to increase state and local minimum wages.” The Service Employees International Union, for instance, “has had a crucial role in the successful national Fight for $15 campaign,” helping to win raises for millions of workers nationwide.

Researchers noted that “Black, Hispanic, and Asian American/Pacific Islander women—along with Black and brown workers as a whole, who have long been overrepresented in low-wage service sectors—have benefited disproportionately from these efforts.”

EPI also found that “high-union-density states had an average median income about $6,000 higher than the national average,” while “the low-union-density states had an average median income about $6,500 lower than the national average”—resulting in a gap of more than $12,000 between the two groups of states.

Moreover, “unemployed workers are twice as likely to receive unemployment benefits if they live in high-union-density states than if they live in low-union-density states,” according to EPI.

The report finds that residents of high-union-density states are more likely to have health insurance, with an average uninsured rate of 6.8%, compared with 11.3% in low-union-density states.

All 17 high-union-density states elected to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. By contrast, just five low-union-density states did so.

EPI tells a similar story with respect to paid sick and family leave policies.

“Building union density is not just a worker or workplace issue, but it is also a mechanism to uplift families and communities,” researchers added. 

Unions Make Life Better at Work and Beyond, New Report Shows (commondreams.org)

 A third of people in the 420-million-strong Arab world do not have enough food to eat, according to the United Nations.

In a report published on Thursday, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) also said that between 2019 and 2020, the number of malnourished in the Arab world rose by 4.8 million people to 69 million, nearly 16 percent of the population.

The situation was “triggered by protracted crises, social unrests and exposure to multiple shocks and stresses such as conflicts, poverty, inequality, climate change, scarce natural resources and the economic repercussions associated with the recent COVID-19 pandemic”, the report said.

“The increase in the levels of undernourishment has occurred across all income levels, in conflict-affected as well as non-conflict countries,” the FAO said. “In addition, nearly 141 million people did not have access to adequate food in 2020 – an increase of more than 10 million people since 2019.”

“There may be no visible improvement in the situation this year since hunger’s primary drivers will continue to drag the situation further down the road,” Abdulhakim Elwaer, FAO’s assistant director-general and regional representative for the Near East and North Africa, added.

The FAO said hunger has increased by 91.1 percent in the Arab world over the past 20 years.

One-third of Arab world’s population suffers from hunger: UN | United Nations News | Al Jazeera

 City allotments have the ability to rival the productivity of conventional farms, according to a two-year pilot study by the University of Sussex. 

Growers in Brighton and Hove were able to harvest 1kg of insect-pollinated fruit and vegetables per sq metre in a season – which researchers said put their yields within the range of conventional farms.

Dr Beth Nicholls, who led the study is due to present her findings at Ecology Across Borders conference on Wednesday.

She said: “The growing was surprisingly productive. And some people were harvesting a lot more than that – up to 10kg per sq metre. And this is just in insect-pollinated crops, so it’s an underestimation really.” She said the study demonstrated the value of urban food production and how it could be used to reduce food deserts by growing food “closer to where people are” while also reducing food miles and transportation costs.

“The UK imports approximately £8bn of fruit and vegetables each year, but our results show that green spaces in cities, such as allotments and community gardens, could play an important role in meeting that demand at a local scale.” She explained “In a world of increasing urbanisation in both the developing and developed worlds, producing food in and around cities has the potential to improve both nutritional and health outcomes, alleviate poverty and simultaneously provide habitat for wildlife and create sustainable cities.”

There are 10,435 allotments in the UK, spanning 7,920 hectares.

City allotments could be as productive as conventional farms, research finds | Farming | The Guardian

 San Jose in California has officially apologised to Chinese immigrants and their descendants for the role the city played in “systemic and institutional racism, xenophobia, and discrimination”.

In May 1887 Chinatown with its dozens of stores and restaurants was burned to the ground, displacing about 1,400 residents, after the city council had declared the neighborhood a public nuisance.

In May, the town of Antioch, California became the first to apologise for its treatment of early Chinese immigrants, who dug secret tunnels to commute home from work because they were barred from walking city streets after sunset.

Chinese immigrants first arrived in the US in large numbers during the California Gold Rush in the mid-1800s. After many also to work on building the railroad or to take up other difficult industrial and agricultural jobs for low wages.

 Three new talks have been added to the audio section, as follows –

Reading Capital as Crisis Theory – Mike Schauerte, 28th November, 2021

Socialists and the Unions – Adam Buick, 3rd December 2021

Alienation – Mike Foster, 10th December 2021

NatWest has been fined £265m after admitting it failed to prevent money-laundering of nearly £400m by one firm.

 It doesn’t take a genius to become a rocket scientist or a brain surgeon according to a recent study.

The fastest-growing group in surveys asking Americans about their religious identity. They describe themselves as atheists, agnostics or “nothing in particular.”

According to a survey released by the Pew Research Center, this group — commonly known as the “nones” — now constitutes 29% of American adults. That’s up from 23% in 2016 and 19% in 2011.

“If the unaffiliated were a religion, they’d be the largest religious group in the United States,” said Elizabeth Drescher, an adjunct professor at Santa Clara University.

What’s your religion? In US, a common reply now is “None” | AP News