Abstract

Lords of the Global Economy

In the noise and nastiness of the election just past, it was not widely noted that the world's 358 billionaires have a combined net worth of $760 billion, equal to that of the bottom 45 percent of the world population or that the avenge CEO in the U.S. now brings home about 149 times the average factory worker's pay or that in recent years an estimated 18 percent of American workers with full-time jobs ear poverty-level wages. Because of the growth of corporate power, tile accountability of private enterprises to workers, managers and the communities where they operate has declined markedly in the past twenty years. The global job crisis of the 1990s results from the interactions of the dramatic advances in labor-saving technologies and the equally remarkable expansion of the international labor market.