The Arithmetic of the Take — A Labor Broadsheet

On August 4, 2025, thirty-two hundred machinists laid down their tools at Boeing Defense in St. Louis. They assemble the F-15 fighter jets and F/A-18 Super Hornets — the military aircraft that keep the U.S. air force flying. The company had offered them a contract. They refused it. Then the company offered another. They refused that too. Then a third offer. A fourth. A fifth. For fifteen weeks, from the heat of August into the cold of November, these men and women stood on the line in Missouri and Illinois, and the company's defense production ground to a halt.

Boeing said they were being unreasonable. The company said the contract offers were generous — the best ever made to IAM District 837. The machinists knew better. They had done the arithmetic themselves. And when they finally won — a contract with 24% wage increases and a $6,000 signing bonus, which would raise their average base pay from $75,000 to $109,000 over the contract — the gentlemen in the tall buildings learned something they should have already known: the people who make things know what their labor is worth.

That strike was not an anomaly. It was the arithmetic finally, after forty years, being done out loud. The rest of this is why the men who run things have been counting on no one doing it.

I.What The Work Is Worth, And What The Worker Is Paid

Once upon a time these two things rose together. When the country produced more per hour, the people doing the producing took home more per hour. It was not charity. It was not socialism. It was simply understood, the way it is understood that a man who hauls a heavier load should not be paid less for it.

That understanding has been quietly repealed. Since the late 1970s, the productivity of the American worker has climbed by better than eighty percent. The pay of the typical worker over those same decades has crawled up by about twenty-six. Productivity grew more than three times as fast as the paycheck.

Where did it go? It did not evaporate. Money never evaporates; it only moves to a better address. Look at the corner office. The pay of the chief executives of America's largest firms has risen, since 1978, by more than a thousand percent. In 1965 the boss made about twenty times the worker. The boss now makes two hundred eighty-one times the worker.

Meanwhile the machinists of St. Louis knew this in their bones. They build the F-15 fighter jets and F/A-18 Super Hornets — precision work, skilled labor, the kind of work the country says it needs. Boeing told them the company's offers were generous — the best ever made to IAM District 837. The machinists looked at the numbers and said no. Not once. They said no five times. For fifteen weeks they stood on the line while Boeing brought in replacement workers, while the company cut their health benefits, while the price of holding firm got higher. What finally settled the strike in November was a contract with 24% wage increases and a $6,000 signing bonus — which would lift their average base pay from $75,000 to $109,000 over the life of the contract. It is what the work was worth. The fact that it took fifteen weeks of lost wages to force the company to say it is the whole lesson.

I-B.The Hollowing — Why The Tools Were Put Down

To understand why the machinists of St. Louis had to fight so hard for 24%, you need to understand what happened to the 35% of workers who stood together in the 1950s. In 1957, when union membership peaked at thirty-seven percent, income inequality was low and the broad middle existed not by luck but by power — the power of organized labor. A single income could support a family. Health insurance was paid for. Pensions were guaranteed. It was not socialism. It was capitalism with guardrails.

Then, systematically, those guardrails were removed. Employers attacked unions in the workplace. Courts ruled against them. Governments passed laws to weaken them. The decline was steady and relentless. By 1983, union membership had fallen to twenty percent. By 2025, only ten percent of American workers are unionized — and in the private sector, just 5.9 percent. The spillover effect that once benefited even non-union workers — where unionized shops set the standard and competitors had to match it to keep workers — evaporated. When 37% of the workforce was organized, roughly 40% of non-union workers still enjoyed union conditions. By 2025, with ten percent unionized, that protection is gone.

The correlation is direct and devastating: as unions fell, inequality rose. Declining unionization accounted for about one-third of the increase in income inequality during the 1980s and 1990s. The top 10% income share, which remained around 35% from 1950 to 1980, began climbing in the 1980s and has not stopped. The middle class, which held 62% of aggregate income in 1970, fell to 43% by 2018. This is not accidental. It is not the inevitable result of technology or global competition. It is what happens when workers lose the power to bargain collectively.

Meanwhile the floor has rusted through. The federal minimum wage has sat at seven dollars and twenty-five cents since 2009 — long enough for a child born that year to be most of the way through grade school. And up on Wall Street, the average bonus — the little something extra — came to nearly a quarter of a million dollars. They handed it out as a tip.

II.The Pile At The Top

Stand back far enough and you can see the pile. The wealthiest one percent of American households now own about thirty-two percent of everything there is to own — the highest share since the Federal Reserve began keeping track in 1989. Their holdings come to roughly fifty-five trillion dollars. That is, near enough, the entire wealth of the bottom ninety percent of the country combined.

It is still moving. In a single recent year, the ten richest men in the country grew richer by some six hundred ninety-eight billion dollars. Since 2020 their fortunes, even after you account for the shrinking dollar, have ballooned more than five hundred percent. The machinists of St. Louis did not see their pay multiply by five. They saw the company try to break them.

But they did not break. And that is the point. Thirty-two hundred skilled workers, standing firm for fifteen weeks, shut down the production of the F-15 fighter and the F/A-18 Super Hornet — aircraft the country says it needs. Boeing tried to replace them. Boeing tried to wait them out. Boeing offered five contracts before the one that finally settled. The machinists said no, no, no, no, no, and yes. They knew their labor was worth more. And in the end, the market — the only argument the rich ever listen to — was forced to agree. The 24% wage increase, the $6,000 signing bonus, the rise from $75,000 to $109,000 base pay — that was not generosity. That was the cost of holding the line. That is what happens when workers refuse to accept the lie that they should be grateful to be employed at all.

III.The House That Money Bought

Now, you might say — and the comfortable always do say — that this is just how the market shakes out. Winners win. But the market did not write the tax code. The market did not gut the union hall. People decided that. People in a building with a dome on it. And here is the part they would rather you not dwell on: those people are listening to someone, and it is not the woman at the register.

A pair of scholars at Princeton — Gilens and Page — went through nearly eighteen hundred actual federal policy decisions and measured what the average citizen wanted against what the moneyed interests wanted. Their finding ought to be carved over the door of the Capitol: the preference of the average citizen has, statistically speaking, near zero effect on whether a policy passes. The preference of the economic elite predicts it. One dollar, one vote — and most of us are broke.

The people are not fooled. More than eight in ten Americans told the pollsters that big donors hold too much sway. They know. You cannot live in this country and not know. They feel it the way you feel a draft — you cannot see the crack in the wall, but you know the cold is getting in from somewhere.

IV.The Hollow Middle

There used to be a broad middle to this country, and it was the country's pride. In 1971, sixty-one of every hundred adults lived in a middle-income household. By 2019 that was down to fifty-one and still slipping. The middle is not a number on a chart. It is the thing a country leans on.

A hollow middle is dangerous three ways over:

It is bad for the economy. A dollar in a working family's pocket gets spent — on shoes, on groceries, on a roof. A dollar in a billionaire's account gets parked. When the top tenth of earners accounts for nearly half of all consumer spending — 49.2 percent of it — you have built an economy balanced on the moods of the few. The International Monetary Fund, no gathering of radicals, warns that gross inequality drags growth down. A rich man can only eat so many dinners. An economy runs on the many, or it does not run.

It is bad for democracy. A broad middle class is the ballast of a free country. People with something to lose and something to hope for do not sell their votes cheap and do not reach for the strongman. Hollow that middle and you have prepared the ground for every demagogue who ever promised to fix by force what was broken by greed.

It is bad for the soul of the place. A country where the woman at the register can see, every day, on the little screen in her pocket, exactly how the other tenth lives — and knows in her bones that no amount of standing on her feet will close that distance — is a country breeding a quiet, grinding unhappiness. Not envy. Something worse: the slow death of the belief that the deal is fair. And once a working people stops believing the deal is fair, you have lost something no quarterly report can put back.

V.A Rising Tide

It does not have to be this way. It was not always this way, and the men who built the broad middle of the last century did it on purpose — with their hands and their votes and, when it came to it, their willingness to lay down their tools.

The remedy is not mysterious. It has only been made to seem so. Tax the money that comes from owning at least as hard as the money that comes from working — for there is no law of nature that says a dividend deserves a lighter touch than a day's wage, only a law of Congress, and laws of Congress can be changed. Then use what is raised the way a sensible household uses its income: on the things that lift everyone at once and that no family can buy alone. Schools that do not depend on the accident of your zip code. A doctor you can see without choosing between the visit and the rent. Roads, transit, clean water, a wage you can live on, a retirement you will reach. These are not handouts. They are the floor a decent country builds under its people so the climbing is fair.

They told us, for forty years, that if we let the top fill its cup to overflowing, the spillover would reach the rest of us. We waited under the table with our hands cupped. The cup, it turns out, has no bottom.

Envoi

I do not write this from a comfortable height. I write it from the floor, where the work is done — which is the only honest place to write about labor from, and the place a journalist named Mike Quin wrote from a long lifetime ago, when the docks of San Francisco rose up and stopped the city cold rather than starve quietly. He wrote of the laboring population laying down its tools while an uncanny quiet settled over acres of buildings — and that in the quiet, for once, the men who did the lifting were heard.

That quiet came again in the summer of 2025. Thirty-two hundred machinists laid down their tools at Boeing Defense in Missouri and Illinois. They assembled the F-15 and F/A-18 — the aircraft the country said it needed. They said no to the first offer. No to the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth. For fifteen weeks they stood. Boeing brought in replacement workers. Boeing cut their health care. Boeing waited. And the machinists stood. And when it finally settled in November, it was not because the company suddenly saw reason. It was because the workers understood something the company counted on them not knowing: they held the power. The work stopped when they stopped. The production ceased. The business could not proceed without them. They did the arithmetic, did it out loud, and lived it into being.

We are due more of that arithmetic. Not of violence — of power. The simple, dangerous act of working people knowing what they are worth, saying it plainly, and not settling for less. The gentlemen on the fourteenth floor have spent fourteen billion dollars trying to keep that question from being asked. But the machinists asked it anyway. And they got their answer.

The woman at the register knows. The machinists of St. Louis proved it. It is the oldest knowledge there is, and the most inconvenient: the tools are still in our hands. That has always been the part they cannot buy.