We Are The 99% is a political slogan widely used and coined during the 2011 Occupy Movement. The phrase directly refers to the income and wealth inequality in the United States, (and indeed the UK) with a concentration of wealth among the top-earning 1%. It reflects the understanding that “the 99%” are paying the price for the mistakes of a tiny minority within the very rich. According to the Economic Policy Institute, as of 2019, the average wage of the top 1% was $758,434. However, the 1% is not necessarily a reference to top 1% of wage earners, but a reference to the top 1% of individuals by net worth, whose earned wages are only a fraction of their total sources of wealth.
Mainstream media sources trace the origin of the phrase to economist Joseph Stiglitz’s May 2011 article “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%” in Vanity Fair, in which he was criticizing the economic inequality present in the United States. In the article Stiglitz spoke of the damaging impact of economic inequality involving 1% of the U.S. population owning a large portion of economic wealth in the country, while 99% of the population hold much less economic wealth than the richest 1%: In our democracy, 1% of the people take nearly a quarter of the nation’s income … In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1% control 40% … [as a result] the top 1% have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn’t seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99% live. Throughout history, this is something that the top 1% eventually do learn. Too late.
Rhetorically, “It was really clever,” said David S. Meyer, a University of California, Irvine, professor who studies social movements. “Deciding whom to blame is a key task of all politics,” he wrote in his blog about the phrase. “It’s something that kind of puts your opponents on the defensive.” Xeni Jardin, the editor of the influential blog Boing Boing, which has featured the protests every day since they began, praised the slogan for capturing “a mounting sense of unfairness in America and distilling it into something very brief.”
Professor Meyer said the catchphrase was useful in that it gave continuity and coherence to a movement that is losing some of its camps in major cities across the country. “ ‘Occupy’ takes its name from the occupation,” he said. “If Occupy continues without occupations, what provides continuity with those people in Zuccotti Park? The slogan.” The slogan was chanted again early on Wednesday morning in Los Angeles and Philadelphia as police there cleared out the Occupy camp sites in each city. As they lost physical ground for their local movements, protesters told each other online, “You can’t evict an idea.”
