Critics have argued that neoliberal policies have increased economic inequality and exacerbated global poverty. The Center for Economic and Policy Research's (CEPR) Dean Baker argued in 2006 that the driving force behind rising inequality in the United States has been a series of deliberate neoliberal policy choices, including anti-inflationary bias, anti-unionism and profiteering in the healthcare industry. The economists David Howell and Mamadou Diallo contend that neoliberal policies have contributed to a United States economy in which 30% of workers earn low wages (less than two-thirds the median wage for full-time workers) and 35% of the labor force is underemployed while only 40% of the working-age population in the country is adequately employed. The globalization of neoliberalism has been blamed for the emergence of a "precariat", a new social class facing acute socio-economic insecurity and alienation. In the United States, the "neoliberal transformation" of industrial relations, which considerably diminished the power of unions and increased the power of employers, has been blamed by many for increasing precarity, which could be responsible for as many as 120,000 excess deaths per year. In Venezuela, prior to the Venezuelan crisis, deregulation of the labor market resulted in greater informal employment and a considerable increase in industrial accidents and occupational diseases. Even in Sweden, in which only 6% of workers are beset with wages the OECD considers low, some scholars argue that the adoption of neoliberal reforms—in particular the privatization of public services and the reduction of state benefits—is the reason it has become the nation with the fastest growing income inequality in the OECD.