bargaining relationship. we have to attack a corporate monopolies. those monopolies are dominating this economy and not only are they charging consumers more, but they are keeping wages down for a lot of hourly workers. we also have got to make sure the economy is moving as rapidly as it can, and that s what it s all about. it they are all part of that same structural change we need. sarah nelson and robert, that was great thank you for joining me tonight. thank you. remember how for four years we had in the administration would come out and tell you things that were obviously untrue to anyone with eyeballs? why is the new government out with a report about the tear gassing of protesters in lafayette square last year, in trump s photo op which we all saw with our own eyes, that defies all obvious logical common sense? that s next.
80% organize have a union and they were able to get the best covid relief package in the industry, what we got was relieved to the workers. and we put a cap on compensation and a band on what we did with the power of our unions and because we had that union voice and were able to put those demands out front even in the words of political scenarios, is that we were able to craft a workers up relief package and that kept us in our jobs and kept things very stable. that did not happen across the economy. across the economy we had to have safety nets to catch people, who were being pushed into poverty by the million. if the government didn t step in and stand up. because we have this problem before we even came into covid but the american worker was working more to make more, not making more to have a better life. all of that productively was going into the pocket of ceos,
and get everyone working again some businesses can produce goods and services. right now, it s a hitch and it s bad for everyone that we can t find that. i would say that s total baloney. the reason it is baloney, chris, is because number one, raising wages is a good thing. one of the big problems in the american economy is that the past 40 years wages of the media markers, right in the middle, have hardly grown up well. adjusted for inflation, for 40 years even though the economy is twice as large as it was. where did the benefits go? they want to ceos but they ve also gone to top executives and major investors. the shareholder class. the investor class, the executive class. they have done extraordinarily well. the workers happened. that s a problem for the economy. if you paid people more at the bottom they have more money to spend.
as we talked previously on the show, a lot of that seems to be transitory with the strangeness of this economy coming back to life, after more than a year of a pandemic. back in may of 2020, for instance, a lot of things like airfare, car rentals, were really cheap because there was zero demand for them. as we get back to normal, demand and prices are back up. in many cases we have a mitch match between the demand and the available supply. how many cars there on the market, for instance. there is a good reason to think that a lot of that mismatch is going to go away, that is the bet that the biden administration and the federal reserve were making. the deeper issue here that is really animating the republican party is the fact that labor is scarce right now. it is hard to find people to higher. the unemployment rate dropping to 5.8%. companies still say they are desperate to find workers. the chambers out with a new