U.S workers just took home their smallest share of capital since at least 1947—and the lowest ever recorded

As corporate earnings soar and U.S. GDP balloons, the American workforce isn’t feeling the same boom. American workers are taking home less of the country’s overall income, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows, and employment in the U.S. is set to continue to slow.

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. In the previous quarter, labor share was at 53.6%. This decade, the labor share average was about 55.6%.

That’s despite corporate earnings skyrocketing, with profits for Fortune 500 companies hitting a record $2.1 trillion in 2025. The U.S. GDP grew 3.4% in the third quarter last year, exceeding economists’ predictions. 

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. “The falling share of income is having to do with the shift towards capital.”

Indeed, there are growing signs that as national income balloons, the U.S. workforce is deflating. Unemployment ticked up to 4.2% in September, and employers added just 584,000 jobs in 2025 compared to 2 million added in 2024. The U.S. added 29,000 jobs in September, about one-third of economists’ projections.

The bifurcation of corporate victories and weak labor data raises concerns among economists of jobless growth jeopardizing the U.S. workforce, as well as a K-shaped economy, where the rich get richer while the poor get poorer, becoming more exaggerated.

“Data right now is very mixed,” Robertson said. “But I think it also all consistently points to this idea that things are getting worse for workers and much better for billionaires.”

What is causing jobless growth?

Robertson attributes weakening labor share averages to the rise in automation, which he noted is displacing workers, with productivity—a metric essentially measuring........

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