Donald Trump · U.S. · Fortune Technology
U.S workers just took home their smallest share of capital since at least 1947—and the lowest ever recorded
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As corporate earnings soar and U.S. GDP balloons, the American workforce isn’t feeling the same boom.
Key facts
- That’s despite corporate earnings skyrocketing, with profits for Fortune 500 companies hitting a record $2.1 trillion in 2025
- Automation is expected to be a boon to corporate profits and GDP, projected to boost GDP by 1.5% by 2035, according to a Wharton brief published in September 2025
- Unemployment ticked up to 4.2% in September, and employers added 584,000 jobs in 2025 compared to 2 million added in 2024
- The labor participation rate for foreign-born workers fell from 66.3% to 66% from September 2025 to September 2026, and labor participation for native-born workers has similarly fallen from 61.6%
Summary
As corporate earnings soar and U.S. Labor share, or the portion of the U.S.’s economic output that workers receive through salary and wages, decreased to 52.8% in the second quarter of 2026, its lowest level since the BLS started recording this data in 1947, according to its labor productivity and costs report. That’s despite corporate earnings skyrocketing, with profits for Fortune 500 companies hitting a record $2.1 trillion in 2025. That growth has not only come at the expense of how much of the pie of wealth workers are taking home, but also how many Americans are in the workforce, economists warn. “That decline in the share of labor has got to be either falling earnings or falling numbers of people,” Raymond Robertson, a labor economist at Texas A&M’s Bush School of Government, told Fortune.