Družboslovne Razprave (Sep 2021)
“To each according to his contribution?”: Rethinking the wage–productivity decoupling thesis
Abstract
Despite since the 1970s many economists having emphasised a concerning economic trend known as the decoupling of workers’ wages from overall economic productivity, there is still no agreement on the causes of this phenomenon. The aim of this article is thus to systematically present two supposedly alternative accounts of such decoupling: the theory of ever greater imbalance in the shares held by capital and labour in the national income and the theory of the growing wage disparity between differently qualified groups of workers. The main finding is that these two accounts in fact do not provide alternative explanations of the decoupling of wages from productivity and instead explain two different processes altogether. The political division between the proponents of each theory is therefore unproductive and might at least partly be overcome upon consideration of this finding.
