The official rate of unemployment in America has plunged to a remarkably low 3.8% and the Federal Reserve forecasts that the Unemployment Rate will reach 3.5% by the end of the year.

But the official rate hides more troubling realities: legions of college grads overqualified for their jobs, a growing number of contract Workers with no job security, and an army of part-time Workers desperate for full-time jobs.

Almost 80% of Americans say they live from paycheck to paycheck, many not knowing how big their next one will be.

Blanketing all of this are stagnant wages and vanishing job benefits.

The typical American Worker now earns around $44,500 a year, not much more than what the typical Worker earned in 40 years ago, adjusted for inflation.

Although the U.S. economy continues to grow, most of the gains have been going to a relatively few top executives of large companies, financiers, and inventors and owners of digital devices.

America doesn’t have a jobs crisis - it has a good jobs crisis.

When Republicans delivered their $1.5 trillion tax cut last December, they predicted a big wage boost for American Workers.

Forget it.

Wages actually dropped in the second quarter of this year.

Not even the current low rate of unemployment is forcing employers to raise wages.

Contrast this with the late 1990s, the last time unemployment dipped close to where it is today, when the portion of national income going into wages was 3% points higher than it is today.

What’s going on?

Simply put, the vast majority of American Workers have lost just about all their bargaining power.

The erosion of that bargaining power is one of the biggest economic stories of the past four decades, yet it’s less about supply and demand than about institutions and politics.

Starting in the 1980s and with increasing ferocity since then, private-sector employers have fought against Unions.

Two fundamental forces have changed the structure of the U.S. economy, directly altering the balance of power between business and Labor.

The first is the increasing difficulty for Workers of joining together in Trade Unions.

The second is the growing ease by which corporations can join together in oligopolies or to form monopolies.

By the mid-1950s more than a third of all Private Sector Workers in the United States were Unionized.

In subsequent decades, Public Employees became organized too.

Employers were required by law not just to permit Unions, but to negotiate in good faith with them.

This gave Workers significant power to demand better wages, hours, benefits and working conditions (Agreements in Unionized industries set the benchmarks for the Non-Unionized).

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