<\/p>\n
Graph: the problem of stagnant wages isn\u2019t concentrated amongst workers at the very bottom the income distribution. In the aggregate, 90% of the population hasn\u2019t gotten a raise in four decades. Contrast this with pay raises at the top, and the problem isn\u2019t a shrinking pie. It is a growing pie where all of the growth accrues to a tiny group of oligarchs. Raising the pay of the lowest paid workers\u2014 as raising the minimum wage would do, is a small but necessary step toward righting this maldistribution. Source: inequality.org.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
The \u2018politics of resentment\u2019 that motivate the political right in the U.S. are tied to welfare state policies intended to both serve capitalism and ameliorate its failures. The culture-war sentiment that social expenditures are a gift to favored groups at the expense of others is the ugly twin of liberal \u2018culture of poverty\u2019 theories that blame culture, rather than dysfunctional political economy, for systemic economic failures. Even if an economic recovery from the Great Recession had been successfully engineered, it isn\u2019t clear that jobs that provide steady employment at living wages would have been the result.<\/p>\n
When NAFTA was being debated in the early 1990s, economic redistribution from its \u2018winners\u2019 to its \u2018losers\u2019 was central to the argument that there was a national interest in the policy. Otherwise, getting working people on board with making the 1% richer at their expense was too conspicuously anti-democratic to be politically viable. Economist Paul Krugman\u2014 the liberal voice selling trade policies, has written at length about how necessary re-distribution of the gains from trade was to rendering NAFTA socially and economically legitimate. This redistribution never took place.<\/p>\n
The point here is twofold. The labor market that emerged after NAFTA was passed had an embedded bias toward the interests of capital and away from the interests of labor. In market terms, it was a rigged market. Secondly, as economist Dean Baker has detailed, some jobs, professions and industries remain protected while workers in others were left to \u2018compete\u2019 with low-wage labor internationally. This impacted both the level of wages and the employment mix. Workers in protected industries benefited relative to those cast aside. The premise that markets determine wages begs the question of what determines markets?<\/p>\n
The question is ultimately what wages are politically sustainable? A bus driver is paid to be a bus driver regardless of whether or not they have a Ph.D. in particle physics. If there are no jobs for particle physicists, the \u2018human capital\u2019 simply isn\u2019t compensated. Given this type of mismatch, which is quite common, the claim that wages provide a defensible equivalence relative to what workers bring to the wage relation isn\u2019t prima facie evident. The \u2018deskilling\u2019 of the 1990s and 2000s was to cut wages for workers in jobs for which anyone who could fog a mirror was overqualified. That was the point.<\/p>\n
This represents such a grim view of both work and the human condition that it requires comment. Wages are but an aspect\u2014 an important aspect, of working life. Through the class antagonism embedded in the wage relation, the debasement of work is a tactic to so narrowly define the labor for which compensation is being offered that it is considered separable from the human being who provides it. In this sense, deskilling it conceptually related to all work that fails to provide a living, e.g., gig work. Additionally, it illustrates the point that power lies in the ability of employers to define the labor relationship.<\/p>\n
Right-wing perceptions of unfair advantage by the recipients of social welfare are tied to the same capitalist delusion of self-reliance that motivates the rich to avoid paying taxes. Ironically, the PMC (managerial class) conceit of merit presumes a similar self-reliance. If people are singularly responsible for their own economic circumstances, then those in lesser circumstances are similarly responsible for them. Within this frame, social welfare is to take from those who earned it to give to those that didn\u2019t. This is implied through the PMC\u2019s conception of \u2018merit\u2019 as just distribution through markets.<\/p>\n
However, the use of government policies to favor some classes, sectors and industries while tossing others to the wolves means that wages levels are by degree determined by government policies, not by markets. The punchline is that markets are always determined by social relations, not determinants of them. The Federal decision following WWII to maintain military production to support \u2018the economy\u2019 drew workers from other sectors who were paid wages that wouldn\u2019t have existed without the programs. In retrospect, the world would be a better place if these workers had been paid to grow vegetables in their yards.<\/p>\n
The premise that what was produced\u2014 materiel and instruments of destruction, represent \u2018a contribution to society\u2019 because they were compensated ties to the oligarch \/ right-wing \/ PMC \/ neoclassical economist conflation of price with value. But again, the world would be a better placed if the materiel and instruments of destruction hadn\u2019t been produced. How is this military production not a debasement of the very idea of work in the same sense that deskilling is? This isn\u2019t to begrudge anyone a paycheck. It is to call into question the nature of capitalist employment. That is a question that raising the minimum wage won\u2019t answer.<\/p>\n
Largely forgotten in the back-and-forth is that implementing the wage relation\u2014 never mind a minimum wage, was hard fought and remains politically fraught. Wage labor breaks potentially cooperative economic relations into the class antagonism of employers who benefit from low wages versus workers who benefit from high wages. Even still, the history is of employers devising ways to coerce labor through slavery, stolen wages, and through creation of untenable circumstances<\/a> unless labor is supplied. Raising the minimum wage is critical because it would raise the living standards of the working poor. And it would modestly empower them. But it should be a starting move toward economic democracy, not the end of it.<\/p>\n\nThis post was originally published on Radio Free<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair The last time that the pay of the rich\u2014 corporate profits and gains on speculative wealth, failed to rise for a few months\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":532,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113773"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/532"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113773"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113773\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":113774,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113773\/revisions\/113774"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113773"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113773"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113773"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}