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“The economy” is an abstraction of a reality that is so massive it can best be expressed in numbers. The gross domestic product (GDP), for example, reflects the market value of all goods and services produced in a country in a given year.

Some of these country by country numbers are huge — so large that they obfuscate who gets which piece of the pie. And that works just fine for the very small number of Americans who get most of it.

Let’s take the GDP of the United States, which will top $30,000,000,000,000 this year. That’s $30 trillion. Most people can’t even fathom how much that is, so let’s break it down into more manageable numbers.

There are about 340 million Americans. A few million of them are living abroad, so we’ll have to subtract that number but then also add the roughly 50 million legal and undocumented immigrants in the country. The total is probably somewhere close to 380 million people who reside in the United States.

That means the GDP per person living in the US comes out close to $80,000. Of course, many of those 380 million are kids, retired, or do not work for some reason, so let’s just look at the GDP per worker, which is about $175,000.

So, the “mean” worker produces $175,000 worth of stuff per year. However, their annual income is only about one-third of that (and significantly less if they are female).

In this case, “mean” refers to the average income and doesn’t imply that the average worker is angry… although, as we are about to show, maybe they ought to be.

Of course, income isn’t wealth, so let’s look at that.

The average adult in the US has amassed a wealth of over $600,000, which is number two in the world.

That’s awesome! Go USA.

However, the problem with averages is that a few outliers can really skew the numbers — and there are plenty of outliers in the US.

Take Elon Musk, who is the biggest of them all.

As of today, he is worth $378 billion. Let’s say that he moved to Vermont, and that every other person in the state was destitute. If we were then to add their cumulative wealth of $0 to his, we would find out that the “average” Vermonter owned a bit more than $600,000 each.

Therefore, it makes more sense to determine the wealth of a country’s population by looking at what statisticians call the median, which means that you count all of the people in a dataset (in this case the adult population of the United States), and then check how much the individual in the middle owns.

Not surprisingly that number is significantly lower. The median wealth in the US is $124,000, which only ranks 15th in the world and indicates how large the discrepancy between rich and poor in the United States of America is.

That makes sense when you consider that the federal minimum hourly wage is $7.45 and hasn’t been increased since 2009, even though prices have increased by 50 percent since then.

Going back to the median wealth, if someone worked a minimum wage job and had no expenses, they would have to work more than seven years to make $124,000. And to match Musk’s wealth, they would have to work 21 million years.  

Obviously, wealth doesn’t tell the whole story. If you live in a country with a great social safety net, you don’t need to have as much money squirreled away for a rainy day.

Sadly for Americans, their safety net is full of holes… and it’s getting holier all the time.

The United States is the only developed country in the world that does not offer universal health care. As a result, millions of American citizens are uninsured (a number that will grow soon when millions more get kicked off Medicaid as a result of the GOP’s mega bill that Donald Trump signed into law in July), and hundreds of thousands are forced into bankruptcy annually because they cannot pay their medical bills.

Ask any European about medical bankruptcy, and they will look at you in disbelief.

As opposed to its peer nations, the US also has no federal paid sick-leave mandate and no guaranteed paid maternity leave.

We could go on and on and on.

These are real problems affecting real people. Just consider that more than half of all Americans do not have a financial reserve for emergencies that would allow them to cover their expenses for three months if they had to.

The underlying point is that, while the US is the wealthiest country in the world and a great place to live for really rich people, many average Americans are struggling to pay their bills, afford even modest luxuries, get a college degree without amassing tens of thousands of dollars in debt, etc.

In fact, most Americans fail to meet the standard of the “Minimal Quality of Life Index,” which not only takes into account necessities like food and shelter but also a “basket of American Dream essentials” that allows upward mobility in society.

In other words, tens of millions of hard-working Americans are getting left behind while a few wealthy individuals are amassing wealth at an unprecedented rate.

The top 0.1 percent of Americans are more than five times richer than the bottom 50 percent of Americans combined.

It’s actually even worse than that, because just the country’s 900 billionaires have amassed more wealth than the bottom half of Americans.

That’s 900 individuals who have accumulated more money than roughly 200 million of their fellow Americans.

So, why are we telling you all of this? Do we want to ruin your day off?

Hardly.

We are telling you* this because Labor Day is the perfect day to keep in mind that you can help change an unjust economic system that is spiraling out of control.

But you are running out of time.

For now, the numbers are still on your side.

Yes, those 900 billionaires, or the top 0.1 percent of Americans, may be richer, but they need human labor to keep making stuff, to pave roads, teach kids, serve food, fly planes, fight fires, or do any of the thousands of other jobs that keep the country running. (What we learned to call “essential workers” during the worst of the COVID crisis.) In other words, those billionaires  need you to keep doing what you do or the system collapses.

That gives you power. Perhaps not individually, but when you band together with others, then you have leverage. That’s what today is about.

The people with a disproportionate chunk of the nation’s wealth will not surrender their advantages easily. But by fighting for a fair slice of the pie since the late 19th century, the labor movement in the US helped bring about things like the eight-hour workday, getting weekends off, and safer workplace conditions. Organized labor also played a major role in the Civil Rights Movement and the passage of the laws that created Medicare and strengthened Social Security.

Therefore, it is hardly surprising that Republicans have been (successfully) targeting unions for many decades to reduce their influence and, to put it bluntly, make it easier for companies to treat their workers more poorly.

It’s also the reason why multibillion-dollar businesses are fighting so hard to keep their employees from organizing.

They could pay them more, offer better benefits, and provide that “minimal quality of life.” But they would rather use their massive profits for stock buybacks, CEO bonuses, and dividends.

And, in the foreseeable future, with the emergence of artificial intelligence and improvements in robot technology, human labor will have even less value.

That is why the time to organize and use your strength in numbers is now.

We are not telling you to join a union, although you may want to look into it. We are urging you to realize that your labor has value, and that you can create leverage if you work with others.

Yes, a billionaire has vastly more power than you, an isolated individual, and so does your boss.

But they don’t have more power than millions of Americans who come together and say: “You will treat us better, and you will pay us our fair share.” Nor does the owner of a small company have more power than the entire staff of that company who walk out in unison to demand higher wages, sick pay, more paid holidays (you don’t even want to know how many paid days off people in other wealthy countries get).

So, please enjoy your Labor Day, but don’t forget that by not using your power to fight against an unfair system, you’re playing right into the hands of a select few who would much rather exploit you than pay you what you are worth.

*We are assuming that you are not in the 0.1 percent that owns all the stuff. If you are, please keep in mind that WhoWhatWhy is a reader-funded news organization, and that you can make a donation to help build a better USA here.