In the last 3 years the profits distributed to shareholders from Italian listed companies with the highest capitalization increased, while the pay slips of private sector employees, taking inflation into account, have lightened.
Looking at the rest of the world, in the same years around the pandemic 31 countries dividends, adjusted for inflation, rose by 45% (+195 billion dollars), while real wages grew on average only slightly more than 3%. And, if we exclude China, on average wages have left 3% of their real value on the ground. “This means that millions of workers are unable to escape the vicious circle of poverty and to ensure a dignified level of existence for themselves and their families”, he comments Misha Maslennikov, policy advisor on economic justice for Oxfam Italia. “A clear injustice, symptomatic of an economic system that rewards more wealth than work.”
Broadening the time horizon, in Italy nominal wages rose by 107.5% between 1991 and 2022 but in real terms they remained almost unchanged, showing a growth of just 1%. A setback which in 2022 placed Italy in 22nd position among OECD countries for the level of real average annual wages: 13 positions less than in 1992. “Wage moderation is a macroscopic problem of the Italian labor market”, he comments Maslennikov. “Other structural problems concern employment lags compared to other advanced economies, the low quality of work of young people and womenthe widespread use of forms of atypical work which determines marked inequalities wages and expands the ranks of the working poor. Unfortunately, the government does not seem willing to address the many unresolved issues. With its mantra of ‘the more you hire, the less you pay’ it does not give industrial policies the priority role for the development of good employment, but leaves it to the economic and fiscal convenience of companies. The choice of further liberalize fixed-term contracts and casual work also risks reinforcing the traps of precariousness. The heated opposition to legal minimum wage it then denotes a lack of interest in protecting less protected workers”.
The research also comes to the conclusion that thetop 1%. of the global population, which has the 43% of financial assetsi, he put an average figure of in his pocket in 2023 9 thousand dollarsequal to 8 months salary of an average worker (International Labor Organization data). The strong one concentration of capital income in many countries it leads among other things that the growth of dividends expands the inequality internal income. The data, according to Oxfam, confirm the alarm launched by the International Labor Organization on the growing spread of working poverty on a global scale: almost 1 in 5 workers earns a wage below the poverty threshold of $3.65 per day (at purchasing power parity) and the wages of 66% of workers in low-income countries do not exceed this threshold.
Data on distributed profits are taken from Janus Henderson Global Dividend Indexwhich monitors the dividends paid to shareholders by the 1,200 largest companies in the world by market capitalization (equal to 90% of the global dividend total).
