“The future of labor is the future of America,” labor leader John Lewis said, during the Great Depression.

And for a long time, you had to squint to see that future because it’s so bright. America capitalized on its enormous advantages after World War II with unprecedented growth that was — thanks to the labor movement — widely shared.

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Some have argued that this is a mystic inevitability that is in no way connected to corporate America focusing its enormous power and wealth on an agenda of cutting taxes for the rich and deregulating industry. It’s just a coincidence that the massive divergence of wealth to the richest as we had a “40-year slump for workers” just happened to trace the systemic effort to undermine America’s labor unions.

Well, a new study shows that that about half the increase in global inequality looks to be a direct result of the war on labor.

A new study from the International Monetary Fund’s Florence Jaumotte and Carolina Osorio Buitron finds “strong evidence that lower unionization is associated with an increase in top income shares in advanced economies during the period 1980–2010.”

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