©
Charles D. Hayes
Nineteenth-century reformer Henry George once
pointed out that we never see a herd of buffalo or a flock of birds where only
a few are fat, and most are lean or starving. In our society, however, there’s
an assumption that less than living wages are somehow admissible. Egregious
inequality is accepted as a just comeuppance for not measuring up to cultural
expectations. As I see it, several psychological influences are at work that
allow this to happen.
One is an unwillingness to assume
responsibility for oneself and one’s family. Another is the human angst and
fear that fester in the existential divide between in-groups and out-groups.
The angst fits hand in glove with a paternalistic and authoritative ethos of
expectations and cultural mores that can be used as evidence that one is
behaving improperly, not doing what one is supposed to do, or not believing what one should believe.
Those who do not meet the expectations of cultural norms will be deemed
unworthy, and if their differences are too prominent, they may qualify as being
nonhuman.
The assumption that less than living wages
are justified for full- or part-time work is ardently contrived. A full-time job
that can’t command the compensation of a living wage, in my view, is a task
better left undone. The only condition in which less than living wages are
justified is when the employees are robots. A residue of contempt and imagined
cultural superiority causes people to assume that some individuals are of lesser value than themselves and do not deserve the human dignity
traditionally ascribed to work. It is time this outdated nonsense be stamped
out altogether. Until we start employing the dead, working people deserve
enough compensation to live.
The value of labor, or work of any kind,
is only partly attributed to its difficulty, while most of its value derives
from the power of those who enact legislation and make rules and regulations.
Their actions dissolve into the background and become invisible, leaving no
suggestion of having negatively affected the worth of labor. What’s left gives the appearance of
reality, and we accept this reality
in the same way that fish do not ponder the legitimacy of water.
Over the past half-century, we have
mangled the ethos of work and reward in this country by letting those with an
economic advantage legislate their advantage into law without visible traces of
having done so. We have allowed capital to trump the value of labor, a
situation that Abraham Lincoln continuously warned against. That human labor does not have any advantage
over capital is anathema to civilization. In a country that prizes
self-reliance, it is practically subversive.
In his book The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our
Future, Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz put it this way, “For years there
was a deal between the top and the rest of society that went something like
this: we will provide you jobs and prosperity, and you will let us walk away
with the bonuses. You will get a share, even if we get a bigger share. But now
that tacit agreement between the rich and the rest, which was always fragile,
has come apart.” Yes, indeed. I would say it has come apart at the seams and
there is little on the horizon, save voting en
masse and marching in the streets, that will help us regain what has been
lost. As Stiglitz points out, “American inequality didn’t just happen. It was
created.”
Poverty-level wages have resulted less from
free-market forces than from the legislated advantage of those who have
attained the power to loot public corporations in the open while shouting platitudes about skill and
success. The clichéd ladder of upward mobility is missing so many rungs that
the sing-song mantra of those who use carrot-and-stick analogies as employment
incentives rings hollow. Less than half of the available jobs in America pay
more than $35k per year. We are rapidly approaching a level of inequality that
resembles the feudalism of centuries past.
The fact that we have a viable digital
technological society that increasingly does more with less speaks to the
historical contribution of working men and women across all disciplines who
have made such a technological society possible, not to mention those who have
given up their lives on the battlefield on our behalf. Still, every year, because of digital
technology, the number of jobs that
pay less than a living wage grows larger, and there is no end in sight. If
these conditions continue, the foundation that the middle-class rests on is
untenable.
That this is occurring at a time of a
soaring stock market and record corporate profits is not an aberration—it’s by
design. Corporations used to pay a third of our tax burden; now it’s less than
ten percent, and one in four corporations pays no taxes at all. We need to stop
putting up with the hyper-contemptuous free-market rhetoric that there is divine
justice in poverty wages. We must demand living wages, not anemic increases in
the minimum wage. And I’ll answer in advance the inevitable question from
right-wingers: It won’t take a rocket
scientist to arrive at a figure.
Egregious inequality resonates with a
strain of existential contempt at the core of the human condition. It’s
connected to the deep-seated psychological insecurity that associates uncertainty,
change, and otherness with mortality salience, allowing suspicion of all things
unfamiliar to fester. And it plays out with people using their false sense of
superiority over those with less perceived status as a psychological buffer
against nothingness.
We are fortunate to live in a time when
our technology is making it possible to live free of monotonous, repetitious
tasks and many of the hazards of dangerous backbreaking work. But unless we rid
ourselves of the tribalistic contempt with which we are so easily manipulated
into settling for a future stricken by spite and the insane fear that the poor
are keeping us from living better economically, we will never mature as a
nation.
Equality of opportunity and a society
where dignity is bound to the virtue of work requires an acknowledgment of the
religious and secular, philosophical and moral declaration that human beings
are ends in themselves and are not to be treated only as means to an end. Views
to the contrary are detailed, complex, sophisticated, sometimes eloquent and ubiquitous,
and yet they amount to disingenuous immoral nonsense. The Donald Trump—GOP tax
reform proposal is an overt declaration that only the rich really matter.
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