AMERICAN workers may be on the cusp of grabbing a bigger bite of the economic pie after decades of getting fewer and fewer crumbs.

    A significant slowdown in labor-force growth in the United States, China and elsewhere will put a premium on finding workers in the years ahead. Companies will have to pay up to get the people they want with the skills they need to keep expanding their businesses.

    “We’re going from a world of generally too much labor to a world of labor shortages,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics Inc. in West Chester, Pennsylvania. “When we look back 10 years from now, the labor share of income will have hit bottom now.”

    Workers’ gain will be employers’ pain, as company profits are pinched by rising salaries. Stock-market investors also may lose out as they’re forced to adjust to a weaker earnings outlook, said Gad Levanon, a managing director at the Conference Board in New York. Income inequality might even be curbed, as the rich reap less in the way of capital gains while employees earn more in wages, he added.

    That vision stands in sharp contrast to the scenario sketched out by technophobes and technophiles alike — and popularized by such magazines as The Atlantic — that sees increasingly sophisticated robots pushing workers out. “Technology will soon erase millions of jobs,” reads the cover of The Atlantic’s July-August issue, promoting an article inside headlined: “A World Without Work.”

    In the world of the future as seen by Zandi, demographics rather than technology will be the driving force, and man, not machine, will come out on top.

    In perhaps an early sign of workers’ resurgence, labor’s share of income of U.S. non-farm businesses — paid out in salaries and other employee compensation — rose to 56.7 percent last year from a post-World War II low of 56.4 percent in 2013, based on data from the Labor Department in Washington.

    It’s not only those in glamorous Silicon Valley fields who are making out. Other, more nitty-gritty industries are experiencing shortages.

    Since 2000, that measure shows workers have seen their slice of the economic pie shrink by more than 6 percentage points as they found themselves increasingly competing with lower-cost labor from China and other poorer countries.

    That looks like it’s about to change — and the reason is simple demographics. Thanks to declining birth rates in much of the world, the global pool of young workers aged 15 to 24 is contracting by about 4 million per year, according to the Geneva-based International Labor Organization.

    “We will see a massive slowdown in labor supply in the coming years,” said Ekkehard Ernst, senior economist at the ILO. “Wage growth will have to accelerate, especially in those high-skill occupations where there is high demand.”

    (SD-Agencies)