Wages, Unions, Demographics, AI
What people earn, how they organise, whether they even count as "employed", the demographic cliff coming for aging societies, and whether AI is coming for their jobs. Live World Bank labour indicators joined with curated ILO wages, OECD union density, UN DESA WPP and OECD AI-exposure snapshots.
What People Earn
Ticker of top median hourly wages (USD-PPP). Wage gaps between rich and emerging economies are 5-10x even after adjusting for purchasing-power differences.
Wages 2023
Median hourly wage in USD-PPP terms. Bar colour marks whether real wages grew (green) or shrank (red) between 2019-2023. High inflation between 2021-2023 wiped out cash growth across most of Europe.
Unions & Collective Bargaining
Density = share of workers who are union members. Coverage = share of workers whose pay is set by collective agreement. In France the two diverge wildly because sectoral agreements extend to non-members.
Informal Employment
No contract, no social insurance, often no minimum wage. Dominant in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Any wage or productivity comparison that ignores it will overstate reality by a huge margin.
The Demographic Cliff
UN DESA WPP 2024 working-age population 2000-2050. China peaked in 2015 and is set to lose 260M workers by 2050. Nigeria overtakes both the US and EU by mid-century.
AI Displacement Risk
OECD 2024 employment shares in occupations with high generative-AI exposure. High-exposure ≠ certain displacement — the complementarity column shows how likely AI is to augment rather than replace those workers.