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Investment income — especially pension income — is not just for the rich. In fact, the share of investment income going to those in the bottom two-thirds of the income distribution is greater than their share of labour income. It’s by no means obvious that redistributing investment income toward wages will make these people better off.

Then there are demographic pressures. It has often been remarked that labour’s share of total income has been falling (although this trend is more pronounced in the U.S. than it is in Canada) and that this decline is a problem that needs solving. But in an aging population, the percentage of people relying on retirement incomes increases as the working-age share of the population falls. If income shares stayed constant, an increasing share of retirees would be forced to live on a fixed share of income. We’d expect (and hope) that population aging would be accompanied by a shift of income toward retirees who are living on their pensions, and away from workers. But this redistribution is the exact opposite of the traditional agenda of labour unions.

Nor does the traditional agenda have much to say about the concentration of income among an elite group of high earners: the “one per cent.” This trend has been most pronounced in the United States and Canada. In both countries, the driving force behind top-end income concentration has been a surge in the salaries of high earners, not their asset holdings. These people are working for their high incomes: reducing profits to increase wages won’t make the one per cent worse off.