The Wage Worker’s Desperation

by Tony Chavira

Why exactly is it that we’ve seen corporate profits eat away at 88% of the national growth since the recession began while the aggregate wages and salaries of worker bees like you and me have only accounted for a measly 1% of national growth? Is it because corporate bigwigs are actually worth that much more money than us? Is it because we are worth less? Of course, the answer to both of those questions is no. Instead, I will let former Los Angeles crack dealer/drug kingpin/wage-distribution-economist Freeway Rick Ross explain this phenomenon to you:

When you come from where I was when I started selling drugs, you feel hopeless. You don’t think you're going to live past 24 years old. Go to jail, come out with stripes. Really wasn’t any risk [...] Everything I had going on at the time, it was nothing. I was like a lump on a log. The risk most people would look at—you could get killed, go to prison—was okay.

That’s right, folks! The more desperate Americans become, the less money you have to spend to get them to do risky stuff! It’s genius economics if you think about it: corporations can work to slowly eliminate health care benefits, 401(k)s, vacation days, weekends, everything, and most of us will still diligently work for them simply because we’re too desperate not to. In traditional economics and worker-employer relationships, this is called a “risk premium.”

A good example of a risk premium would be the high pay guys on oil rigs get, since there’s a pretty good chance they’re going to get hurt or die if something goes seriously wrong. In fact, the government pays non-military employees in war zones hazard pay, since they’re likely to get stuck in some kind of bad situation while they’re out there supporting the troops and whatnot. It just seems to make sense: the higher the risk, the higher the reward. It worked for the free market-lovin’ bad boys on Wall Street, after all.

But crack dealers like Freeway Rick Ross understand that if you can make people increasingly desperate, they’ll do whatever you want for practically no pay. And like dealers of crack, some corporations out there have already taken this timeless mandate to heart. Massey Energy, for example, is fully aware of how poor their workers are, how isolated their workers are from services, and how badly those workers need their brutal mining jobs. So Massey management lies on safety data reports, intimidates their workers from speaking up, and simply pay whatever fines they have to in order to keep their operations status quo.

This is nothing new for the coal industry. Eastover Mining Company goons shot a man on camera for protesting for his right to unionize in the 1970s. That man’s life probably didn’t mean much to Eastover; they could just as easily have killed 100 to keep their miners unorganized if they weren’t caught red-handed. It’s much cheaper paying a million dollar fine than completely revamping the safety standards for an entire corporation. And it’s certainly cheaper dishing out a few blood millions here and there to make grieving widows go away than halting production for any period of time. Time is money, people; and I’m sure each miner’s life is insured to pay the company in case of any eventuality.

art: Chris Kelly

Working class Americans have benefited so little from this recovery that a recent report by the Northeastern University Center for Labor Market Studies called it “both a jobless and a wageless recovery.” What the report only hints at is that the battle for our money has only begun. Now that swing states have formally approved the “tax the rich!” mantra (that some deluded Republicans seem to have conveniently forgotten), the process of passing a significant piece of legislation that actually gets that money into the hands of our near-bankrupt government will be the new uphill battle.

Here is the core problem: while we deliberate on who will cave first as the deadline for raising the debt ceiling lurches closer, the American aristocracy is doing whatever it takes to keep their money intact. Even before we began running the risk of defaulting to other countries, the wealthy had shown their true colors: they would rather risk the downfall of America than pay any more taxes. As the risk of a catastrophic economic collapse, they still demand to pay less.

This is, by no means, a shocker. In the 3rd century, the Han Dynasty collapsed because connected families found a way to shield their vast land/wealth holdings from taxation. When workers and ex-soldiers hunted for jobs after floods dealt their farms heavy blows, they realized that most jobs involved working in near-slave labor conditions for aristocratic landowners who paid nothing for their land and even received government subsidies to maintain their crops. This shameless inequality led to a peasant revolt with a particularly bloodthirsty aftermath, leaving multiple high-ranking government officials dead and practically annihilating most central government buildings.

In a fun followup, by 1644 the Ming Dynasty had given so much to their wealthy that they didn’t have enough cash to pay for soldiers to protect them from Manchu invaders. Guess what happened to them.

But we live in the Internet age, and it’s hard for the extremely wealthy to get away with such jerkiness without being called out or caught; which is exactly why the argument for forcing them to pay extra taxes has become ideological, tied to “God” and/or Ayn Rand, and seen as a common theme amongst faux-conservative talking heads on Fox News. Such outlets call this new aristocracy “the wealth producers” and declare “class warfare!” whenever the words “tax increase” peek into the public sphere. After all, anything less than cutting taxes is dangerously anti-American, such people believe, as well as dangerously divisive. Rush Limbaugh would know; he’s an all-inclusive kind of guy:

Here is Obama with corporate jet owners in the crosshairs again—and remember, now, it was just last week, the USA Today ran a story about how the corporate jets were starting to fly again, corporate jet owners were utilizing the aircraft. It was a sign! USA Today so happy! It was a sign of economic recovery. Today in his press conference, Obama once again cranking up the class warfare. [...]

This is just— dangerous is what this is. This is full-fledged demagoguery, and we're listening to this from the chief architect of the destruction of this economy. And once again, pitting groups of Americans against each other. One group—his aim is for one group of Americans to hate and despise another group.

And Rush is right: it is class warfare. The greedy have already declared war on the working poor and we are just now discovering how far they’re willing to go. When 88% of our nation’s “growth” has been gobbled up by corporate profits, how can Rush claim that corporate jet taxin’ can hurt the Main Street working man? Clearly, he can do it easily, because Rush Limbaugh is a snake oil salesman masquerading as a doctor.

If it comes down to parting ways with their ill-gotten gains or watching our economy collapse, the American aristocracy are totally comfortable with the latter, taking zero responsibility for it. If they keep it up long enough, the American worker will eventually become desperate enough to do whatever they want for whatever they’re willing to pay. After all, money is an addictive dopamine trigger.

Rush is right about one thing: Obama is pitting one group against another, and he’s right to do it. We should all despise those unwilling to pay their fair share. They aren’t avoiding taxation to be freer. They’re doing it because they simply do not give a shit about the future of America.

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