A  new report  from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) shows that wages for the vast majority of America’s working families have stagnated or declined over the past decade and that raising wages is the key challenge facing the country in terms of growing the economy and recovering from the Great Recession.

In A Decade of Flat Wages: The Key Barrier to Shared Prosperity and a Rising Middle Class, authors Lawrence Mishel and Heidi Shierholz find that between 2000 and 2012 wages were flat or declined for 60% of all wage earners, even though productivity grew by nearly 25% during this period.

In the aftermath of the Great Recession, corporate profits are at historic highs and income growth is being captured by the top 1%, especially executives in the finance sector, but prosperity is not being share with workers. From 2007 to 2012, wages fell for 70% of all wage earners, despite productivity growth of nearly 8%.

Mishel and Shierholz warn that these trends spell trouble for the economy. They mean the U.S. economy will not be able to provide sustainable growth without a dangerous reliance on escalating household debt and “asset bubbles,” such as the housing bubble. “The collapse of the housing bubble and the ensuing Great Recession have laid bare the consequences of this model of unbalanced growth.”

The authors conclude that wage stagnation is the consequence of deliberate policy decisions that can be changed:

The weak wage growth since 1979 for all but those with the highest wages is the result of intentional policy decisions—including globalization, deregulation, weaker unions and lower labor standards such as a weaker minimum wage—that have undercut job quality for low- and middle-wage workers.

Mishel and Shierholz recommend a number of solutions to generate wage growth:

• Lowering unemployment through expansionary fiscal policy.
• Increasing large-scale ongoing public investments.
• Re-establishing state and local public services cut since the beginning of the Great Recession.
• Prioritizing job creation over deficit reduction.
• Restoring the bargaining power of low- and middle-wage workers.
• Aggressively increasing the minimum wage.
• Re-establishing the right to collective bargaining for higher wages.
• Ensuring that guest workers have full rights to the same labor market protections as resident workers.
• Establishing citizenship for undocumented immigrants.
• Taking executive action to ensure that federal dollars are not spent employing people in poverty-level wages.

Read the entire report here .