Across generations, the ancient compact between labor and prosperity is quietly unraveling — workers in America are claiming a shrinking portion of the wealth their efforts help create, and the pace of that retreat is quickening. The numbers themselves are not contested; what remains deeply uncertain is the constellation of forces driving this shift, whether machines, markets, policy failures, or the gravitational pull of concentrated corporate power. The stakes extend beyond economics into the very architecture of social stability, for how a society divides what it produces shapes not only in