At one time it was an economic tenet for America's worker: Work smarter, better, faster and harder and you’ll reap the rewards. That’s exactly what America's workers have done for the past four decades plus. But while worker productivity has soared, workers’ wages have been tightly tethered to the ground. So much that economist Dean Baker writes:

If the minimum wage had risen in step with productivity growth [since 1968], it would be over $16.50 an hour today. That is higher than the hourly wages earned by 40 percent of men and half of women. 

This is a cross-post from Regs Talk, the National Employment Law Project (NELP) blog. Catherine Ruckelshaus is the legal co-director of NELP. 

Big drug companies’ salespeople don’t usually inspire much sympathy for being overworked or exploited. But last week’s Supreme Court decision in Christopher v. GlaxoSmithKline was a reminder that even pharmaceutical sales representatives, who brought a case for working 60-odd hours a week without being paid overtime, can face unfair working conditions that need to be checked.

This week marks the 74th anniversary of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), which established a minimum wage floor, outlawed some forms of child labor and discouraged overly long workweeks by requiring premium pay for any hours worked over 40 in a week. By paying time-and-a-half of one’s regular hourly wage for overtime, the policy is intended not only to compensate workers for long hours but also to promote work sharing or spreading by employers, who can hire additional workers for the extra hours needed. Especially in tough economic times, it’s a practice that is not only fair but makes good economic sense.

Over the past decade, as 5.7 million manufacturing jobs were vanishing, many prominent economists and policymakers said the job loss was inevitable. They reason, they said, wasn’t a lack of national manufacturing policy, growing incentives for U.S. firms to move jobs offshore or flawed trade policies. They pointed to increased productivity as the main culprit. A new report debunks that claim.

Two alarming reports recently out point to long-term trends in the U.S. economy that don’t bode well for maintaining a strong middle class in this nation.

Opponents of working families and their unions have tried to pit public workers against those in the private sector, by fomenting an internal class warfare centered on disparate wages and benefits.