Fourth, the labor market is not as tight as it looks. There is a still a large “reserve army” of workers, serving to hold wages down. This may not be what the headline unemployment rate – now down to 4% – is telling us. But the headline rate tells us less than in the past, because millions of workers have dropped out altogether, and so are not counted in the unemployment statistics. The chances of a “prime age” man being in paid work has dropped by eight percentage points in the postwar decades. For most of this period, women’s employment rates were increasing – but, in the US at least, that rise stopped abruptly around the turn of the century, and has actually edged down slightly. Black, Hispanic and less-educated adults have all seen the sharpest drops in participation.
This powerlessness of workers in specific companies has fueled calls for higher minimum wages. At a federal level, the value of the wage floor has dropped by 46% since 1968. Seminal scholarship from David Card and the late, great, Alan Krueger helped to allay fears about negative economic consequences of a higher minimum wage. But a big challenge here is that the gap between richer and poorer places has also grown. A $15 minimum wage may make perfect sense in Boston (median wage = $24.16 an hour). But perhaps not in Brownsville, Texas (median wage = $11.59). Half of US workers earn less than $18.58 per hour.
A worker without power is one with a lighter paycheck. They may also suffer greater indignities or disrespect in the course of daily working life. James Bloodworth’s Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain describes the loss of dignity faced by Amazon warehouse employees and Uber drivers. Horror stories abound of workers under constant surveillance, unable to take bathroom breaks and so resorting to adult diapers, or bullied or harassed by bosses or other workers. In 2011, the Morning Call of Allentown, Pennsylvania, reported that managers at the local Amazon warehouse refused to open the doors for ventilation despite soaring temperatures. They put ambulances outside instead, for the workers who collapsed.
Vivid stuff, and no doubt true in the particular. But it is important to note that it is not the general experience of most workers. The proportion of Americans reporting that they were “treated with respect at work” has held steady at around 92% since 2002, according to the General Social Survey.
For some critics of capitalism, workers lost the power struggle right at the outset. As Marx (Groucho, this time, not Karl) once put it, “What makes wage slaves? Wages!”
Whatever material gains workers managed to achieve came at the price of a profound loss of sovereignty. In her book Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about It), philosopher Elizabeth Anderson argues that CEOs are the new totalitarians, who “think of themselves as libertarian individualists”, while acting in practice as “dictators of little communist governments”. We imagine ourselves free but effectively barter our freedom away in exchange for pay, effectively handing over our passports as we punch in.
What most people want is a job that pays a decent wage and offers both some satisfaction and security. The harsher critics of the system, like Anderson, believe that these goals are incompatible at a deep level with capitalist dynamics. But at least for some, especially for white men, market capitalism delivered pretty well for at least a generation. This is why it was so important to fight to crowbar the doors open for women and people of color. The progressive goal was not to curtail the market, but to open it.
In very recent historical time, the general direction of history seemed to be towards capitalism of one kind or another. In the sliver of time between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of Lehman Brothers, it seemed like markets embedded in liberal democracies were the preordained future. Fukuyama declared the End of History.
Scholars adopted the term “late capitalism” to describe the trends towards service-led economies and increasingly flexible working arrangements (flexible, that is, for the employer). But with the dislocation, insecurity and inequality witnessed over the last decade, it is hard to disagree with the narrator of Adam Thirlwell’s novel Lurid and Cute, who exclaims of capitalism: “‘Late? It had only just got started!”
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