...in a story late last month titled 'Real Wages Fail to Match a Rise in Productivity,' the Times complained that the American economy, which used to allot 50 percent of its output to wages, now only allots 45 percent. My quick rebuttal to this complaint is that it's not that people are making less money, it's that the economy is growing faster than their paychecks. But what about the Times itself? How much of its revenue goes to wages?
Answer: 38 percent, well below the national average. But it's even worse than that — the Times number counts benefits while the national statistic does not.
Is it fair to attack a mature company in a struggling industry for giving only about a third of its output to workers? Not normally, but it is when a particular business attacks everybody else for giving a little less than half.
