This is a very "communist" answer, because it pretends as though wealth and value are static, inherent things, rather than dynamic products of human activity. A parody of communist thought would be to say that they believe that wealth comes out of a factory (the "means of production"), and it's just a matter of manning the stations and throwing the "on" switch to get wealth coming out, from there it's mostly a matter of who gets what. This is a fantasy, and a dangerous one at that. Because of this stilted viewpoint, "communists" tend to imagine that the only way for the wealth of a "worker" to increase is to take that wealth from elsewhere. The reality is that wealth creation is an incredibly complex and dynamic dance between many disparate individuals and systems, and it is not fixed.
There's tons more I could say on that subject but let me skip ahead to what I think the problem is in the US today in regards to worker wages. I don't think it's a problem of some inherent evil in the free market. Rather I think it's a symptom of excess regulation and taxation (and other costs) and a poor educational system, among other factors. The cost and complexity of living these days is much higher than it used to be. There are so many bills, so many taxes, and so on. The bar for a "reasonable" living is much higher these days, and much harder to obtain, with more pressures from every direction on savings and discretionary income. More so, the increasing costs combined with increasing necessity of higher education has put a lot of young workers in a financial pinch, as did the latest housing crisis. People aren't getting the skills they need to build strong careers and to have greater negotiating power. People are being discouraged away from trade schools and funneled into liberal arts colleges. People are being saddled with huge debts in exchange for skills that don't go far in the marketplace, they're discouraged or prevented from saving, they're discouraged from creating their own work (unless they're in software, which is the rare exception) by starting their own companies. All of those things were on the table for previous generations. Without them we've ended up with a generation of workers who are desperate to find and keep a job, who must rely on working for a big corporation because they need that surety of a paycheck to pay their high costs of living and their debts. We like to imagine that all these regulations and taxes have no negative consequences because they were created with the best of intentions, though that's not the case.
But every element there is amenable to improvement, without resorting to marxist wealth redistribtion. I would posit that the consolidation of wealth we have been seeing is not the cause of the problem but rather the symptom of a larger underlying problem.
There's tons more I could say on that subject but let me skip ahead to what I think the problem is in the US today in regards to worker wages. I don't think it's a problem of some inherent evil in the free market. Rather I think it's a symptom of excess regulation and taxation (and other costs) and a poor educational system, among other factors. The cost and complexity of living these days is much higher than it used to be. There are so many bills, so many taxes, and so on. The bar for a "reasonable" living is much higher these days, and much harder to obtain, with more pressures from every direction on savings and discretionary income. More so, the increasing costs combined with increasing necessity of higher education has put a lot of young workers in a financial pinch, as did the latest housing crisis. People aren't getting the skills they need to build strong careers and to have greater negotiating power. People are being discouraged away from trade schools and funneled into liberal arts colleges. People are being saddled with huge debts in exchange for skills that don't go far in the marketplace, they're discouraged or prevented from saving, they're discouraged from creating their own work (unless they're in software, which is the rare exception) by starting their own companies. All of those things were on the table for previous generations. Without them we've ended up with a generation of workers who are desperate to find and keep a job, who must rely on working for a big corporation because they need that surety of a paycheck to pay their high costs of living and their debts. We like to imagine that all these regulations and taxes have no negative consequences because they were created with the best of intentions, though that's not the case.
But every element there is amenable to improvement, without resorting to marxist wealth redistribtion. I would posit that the consolidation of wealth we have been seeing is not the cause of the problem but rather the symptom of a larger underlying problem.