The struggle of Knowledge Workers vs. Manual Workers
joshuakennon.com
joshuakennon.com
"[Engineers] have wages that are increasing on an inflation-adjusted basis if – and this is the key – they are any good at their job." This is technically true, but it's not the driving force behind what #OWS is protesting. The magnitude of that inflation-adjusted increase in wages is very small compared to the increase in wages and investment income of those who rely on ownership or proximity to capital instead of labor for their wealth.
The actual driver of increasing inequality isn't the growth in wages of "knowledge workers." It's the financialization of the American economy. Investment bankers and financiers aren't knowledge workers. Calling them that is misleading, because it's easy to distinguish between them and (doctors and engineers), and clumping them all together gives a misleading view of how society has changed in the past several decades.
The idea that industrial workers' skills would become obsolete is not only wrong, it's also an idea that far predates Drucker. The skills aren't obsolete as much as they are under competition from previously unreachable pools of labor in other parts of the world.
As the comment above notes, a real problem with income distribution in American society comes more from a tax code that allows/favors corporations over small businesses and passive income over income derived from labor of any sort. This is not just about money - it is about personal control.
It isn't even enough to compare wages; the picture is much worse when one considers personal debt load in relation to earnings. What emerges then is really two parallel countries - rapidly drifting apart. On one hand you have the wealthy and super-wealthy insulated from economic shock and personal debt. On the other hand you have a class of people who seem 'middle-class' but who are in hock for housing and education and stand a small distance away - a job loss, a serious illness - from disaster. Earnings supported the birth of the middle-class in post-war America but, sadly, it is only debt that has sustained it.
That kind of state-within-a-state is not unique to post-industrial economies at all - which makes the author's closing opinion rubbish. That situation - whether in Russia or Brazil or Colombia or even Israel - is much more a result of social and economic policies and the OWS group is instinctively correct in feeling like such policies are not in their favor.