For the past 40 years or so, frontline workers in America have been getting a smaller and smaller slice of the economic pie. As corporate profits and executive compensation packages have soared, employees at many of the country’s biggest companies wound up taking an effective pay cut, year after year.

Income growth for the bottom 90 percent of American households has trailed gross domestic product growth for the past four decades, meaning that even as the country has gotten richer overall, most people have received a shrinking share of that wealth. Things are worst of all for those at the bottom. If the minimum wage had kept up with inflation it would be more than $25 an hour. Instead, it is stuck at $7.25.

In my new book, The Man Who Broke Capitalism, I trace this dramatic shift in our collective fortunes back to the reign of Jack Welch, who took over as the CEO of General Electric in 1981. Over the next 20 years, Welch reshaped the company and the economy, unleashing a series of mass layoffs and factory closures that destabilized the American working class, becoming the first CEO to use downsizing as a tool to improve corporate profitability, and emb…