“Even before the crash of 2008, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics at the University of Michigan found that over any given two-year stretch, about half of all families experienced some decline in income. And those downturns were becoming progressively larger. In the 1970s, the typical drop was about 25 percent. By the late 1990s, it was 40 percent. By the mid-2000s, family incomes rose and fell twice as much as they did in the mid-1970s, on average. Workers who are economically insecure are not in a position to demand higher wages. They are driven more by fear than by opportunity. This is another central reality of American capitalism as organized by those with the political power to make it so.”