© Charles D. Hayes
Many
full-time employees of some of America's largest employers need government
assistance, including food stamps. Guess who picks up the tab? Right: we do, the
taxpayers. I say it’s long past time for the repatriation of work, and it’s time
to impose an exploitation tax on those whose compensation strategy ensures that
their employees will experience long-term poverty. Job creators should not be poverty enablers.
Young people find it hard to believe when I tell them about growing up in the 1940s and ’50s, when an entry-level job, even at a gas station, made it possible to earn a decent living. It was a time when working man was synonymous with virtue. Not so anymore. Working men and women today are considered chumps by those who preach the high-finance version of success. That people don't earn enough to support a family is considered a character flaw instead of what it is: contrived inequality.
This is an economic perversion, undermining
the truth of what one of our Republican presidents once made clear in this
statement: “Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only
the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first
existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”
So said Abraham Lincoln.
But today, instead of having a much higher
consideration for labor, we give it little or none. Right-to-work laws are a
euphemism for the right to lower wages and to stifle dissent.
From the early 1900s until 1970, wages for working people kept rising. We were one of the most equal opportunity countries in the world (unless one was a minority, but that’s another article). When I was in grade school, corporate taxes amounted to about $1.50 for every dollar from individuals. Today corporations pay about 25 cents in taxes for every dollar paid by individuals. The tax burden has shifted dramatically because of lobbied influence. Wages for working people have suffered stagnation since the 1970s while CEO compensation has increased more than 725 percent. The result is that about a third of our citizens are now poor.
I grew up with a generation that paid
great heed to the parable of the ant and the grasshopper. The ant worked hard
storing up for the coming winter, while the grasshopper played. When winter
came, the grasshopper asked the ant for food and shelter but was turned away.
Lesson learned.
If one were to rewrite that fairy tale
today, however, it would be wise to include buzzards appearing and raiding the ant’s
storehouse. The financial sector operates under the
guise of being a crucial component of the economy, but its increasing
propensity to gamble recklessly with other people's money amounts to scavenging
off of the labor of the men and women who keep our economy in gear.
This is why generations of children grow
up lacking the resources that enable them to function economically and
emotionally. This is why we spend more to keep people in prison than in school.
And this is why we are so easily distracted by the disingenuous rhetoric of buzzards
when they try to scare us with tales about ravenous grasshoppers. Taleb reminds
us that never before in history have so many people with so little downside
exposure exerted so much control over our economy. People with no skin in the game, as he puts it. I
prefer to call them buzzards.
The real chumps today are those of us
who have watched the greatest transfer of wealth in history, from the bottom up
to the top two percent, and have remained silent. Taleb provides us with an
aphorism that should become the primary functional app for navigating the
twenty-first century: "If you see fraud and you do not say fraud, you are
a fraud."
Taleb offers us another great word: optionality. Options, indeed, are what’s
missing at the bottom rungs of society in order to make it anti-fragile. This
subject warrants aggressive exploration. An option is what happens on a
trampoline with each bounce.
Any company whose full-time workers
qualify for food stamps or public assistance would pay an exploitation tax. And
so would the companies who arrange their work schedules in a way that categorizes
their employees as part-time to avoid paying additional benefits. The amount
would be determined by that expression that grates on my nerves but is
appropriate in this case: it is what it
is. In other words, the tax would cover the cost of the taxpayer subsidy
with enough additional penalty to inspire just compensation to begin with.
We Americans are the chumps for ever
having let inequality get so egregiously out of control, and we will be chumps as
long as these people laugh all the way to the bank while letting taxpayers subsidize
their employees. The executives who run businesses that can't pay a living wage
and stay in business need to close shop. Fiefdoms demanding that workers be paid wages commensurate with
indentured servitude belong in history books. Such work is better left undone.
Moreover, if executives and
entrepreneurs can donate hundreds of millions of dollars to political
candidates, then, as Alaska writer Shannyn Moore points out, they can easily pay
higher taxes. Better yet, let them pay their workers a living wage directly,
thus regaining their own self-respect and effecting the repatriation of
work in the process.
In 1914 Henry Ford shocked the nation
when he more than doubled worker wages to a record five dollars a day. But he
didn't do it for benevolent reasons. Paying a living wage solved his high
turnover problem, improved production quality, and inspired company loyalty.
His workers gained the respect of their community, and they were able to purchase the products they produced,
which increased demand. Treating workers with respect and paying them well was good business a
century ago and it still is today.
The notion that raising wages costs jobs is a myth sustained by unrelenting mantras, but it's still a myth. If business owners want to avoid taxes, let them do right by their employees and avoid an exploitation tax. It's long past time for American citizens to rescind the right to exploit without penalty.
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