I think this is really interesting, especially as how it has played out in recent years - right up to the last few months - in the UK.
I used to know a guy who worked for a trade union who was bemoaning its demise. In 1997 when Labour came to power in the UK for the first time in nearly 20 years, they strengthened employment laws so well, the need for trade union was perceived as lesser by much of the membership. This meant the trade union struggled to survive.
It's interesting to me that the campaigns they fought on and won around employment rights, was perhaps at the detriment at overall income inequality.
We now have zero-hour contracts (utterly horrific for those at the lower end of the skills spectrum), and CEOs earning many hundreds of times the lowest paid in their workforces.
Brexit was caused by income inequality for the most part. The perception by many is that immigration was causing a drag down on wages, but all the data suggests in fact immigration is net benefit to a population, and its the top rising away faster at the top and under-investment in public services that's actually the cause of the country's ills. Fixing this is a big thing, and whoever does it is likely to be long remembered.
In recent weeks, the leader of the Labour Party who is being roundly criticised for ineffectiveness (amongst other things) by those both inside and outside the party had his first bit of good press in some time: he suggested a wage cap inside companies linked to the lowest paid member of staff.
If you set this to say 50x gearing a company that is only paying its cleaners £10,000/year can only pay it's CEO £500,000. If the CEO feels he deserves £4m/year, he'd have to raise cleaners' salaries to £80,000/year - about 4 times the national average wage.
The hope is this will push down CEO wages reducing the race at the top of the pile, but also raise the lower wages a little, thereby improving quality of life for lower-skilled workers. Cleaners get £15,000, CEO gets £750,000. And so on. Net result: income inequality is reduced.
But how do you do that in a free market economy? His answer is surprisingly simple: government contracts that go out to tender should have this as a stipulation in order for the contract to be awarded.
If you are a train operator, eduction or health care provider, etc. and you're only paying your staff minimum wage (£6.70/hour for those aged 25 and over), you don't get the contract if your Chief Exec is earning more than the equivalent of £335/hour (a little shy of £700k/year).
There are a lot of firms who do nothing but government contracts whose CEOs are paid a considerable amount more than this.
Some will argue that this will lead to a situation where these firms can't hire "the best", or that they'll game it by making remuneration more geared to shares/dividends instead of salary/bonuses, but I think that's unlikely to bear out in reality: there is a steady queue of capable people more than willing to work for £335/hour running service companies.
Brilliantly, it even defeats one of the big scares going on at the moment around Brexit reactions and the touted UK/US trade deal being discussed: there is worry that US healthcare companies might start bidding and getting contracts for parts of the NHS.
Critics are worried that these companies are outright profiteering enterprises, evidenced, they say, by the state of US healthcare. This would either stall them from bidding/winning, or promote this policy across the Atlantic into those companies.
And if the remuneration balance does move to shares and dividends, I think that the Left will have won a major goal: they can promise low income taxes and raise taxes on dividends, knowing that this will be popular with very, very large parts of the population. Meanwhile, it'll redistribute wealth and normalise income distribution, all without having to scare the middle classes who mostly end up net winners.
Will it ever happen? Probably not with Mr Corbyn at the helm (his poll ratings are very poor and stagnating even long after last Summer's dramas), however he had party support from all factions, and across the benches. I can see it gaining traction before the next General Election.
Will it happen in the US? Well, if you elect a billionaire who appoints billionaires to his cabinet to perpetuate a system that made them billionaires, it's unlikely they'll nix it. But who knows - it could work.