The billionaire once Warren Buffet famously said, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” New analysis released by Oxfam this week for International Workers’ Day shows concretely that since 2020, the rich class, as Buffet calls them, are winning big.

Global dividend payments to rich shareholders grew on average fourteen times faster than worker pay in thirty-one countries, which together account for 81 percent of global GDP, between 2020 and 2023. Global corporate dividends are on course to beat an all-time high of $1.66 trillion reached last year. Payouts to rich shareholders jumped by 45 percent in real terms between 2020 and 2023, while workers’ wages rose by just 3 percent. The richest 1 percent, simply by owning stock, pocketed on average $9,000 in dividends in 2023 — it would take the average worker eight months to earn this much in wages.

This matters because as long as returns to capital increase faster than returns to work, the inequality crisis will grow. At the heart of our economy is a constant struggle between the owners — or capital, as it is known in economics — and the workers, or labor. The measure of progress, or the lack of it, is the extent to which the benefits of all those billions of hours of labor worked each day are accruing to workers and their families, driving greater equality, or the extent to which benefits are accruing to the owners of capital, driving greater inequality.