Of the many jobs I’ve worked the past few months, there has been one constant I’ve heard from my co-workers: complaints about the pay. These complaints come from the mouths of mostly under thirty, non-collegiate people working blue collar jobs. Nonetheless, I have a feeling their subaltern anger, about their low pay, about their stress of living paycheck to paycheck, and about their worry around basic necessities, is not something on which they have a monopoly.
I want to address the anger they have–the anger that feels representative of the entire contemporary working class–by directing it to its basic cause and origin. In short, I want to explain why wages are so low, and why getting a job is so hard, by explaining who it benefits. This isn’t profound; it’s just a brief explanation of one element of the Industrial Reserve Army of Labour.
The reason why you’re getting underpaid, why you’re living paycheck to paycheck, why you have to work all week, exhausted, just to barely pay the bills, to get in credit card debt, is because those in power want you to stay like this. They want you desperate and on the ropes. They want as much leverage as possible in the job market. It helps their bottom line to keep you poor and dependent; it helps their bottom line because then you’ll need to sell your labour more than they’ll need it. If that’s the case, they can make you do whatever you want, at whatever wage they set.
And who are the people in power? In one sense, they can’t be properly defined because they don’t want to be defined. In another sense, they aren’t a definite group with established or clear boundaries. Power is relative and mutable, and it’s rarely intentional. At the level of power we’re talking about, the level that defines an economic standard for hundreds of millions, power is conglomerated into the hands of an uncentralized group of people with only a minimum set of goals in common. The main goal they share is to maximize profit for themselves, and for others like themselves insofar as it helps them normalize their own wealth.
An easy way to identify this class is to identify those who benefit the most from the present status quo. This has the benefit of removing intentionality, motive, and, therefore, good and bad faith from the equation. Whatever their motive, their actions benefit themselves at others’ expense. Those who are benefitted in the current economic environment are those who are getting richer, and those who are not benefitted, then, are those who are not getting richer.
Those who are getting richer are, overwhelmingly, billionaires. One example is the richest four hundred people in the world increasing their wealth during Covid[1], while much of the world’s wages stagnated.[2] At the same time, the rise of housing and other basic living costs rose dramatically. The median monthly rate of rent has risen by 77% since 2020.[3] All the while, the federal minimum wage hasn’t increased since Obama’s first term.
The people getting richer do so off of the increased desperation of the working class. They accept and fight for this status quo, and, if they could, they would make it more and more difficult to get a high paying job and pay the bills. Economic stability for the working class does nothing more than take leverage away from these people. It seems like their wealth is inversely proportional to the wealth of the average person.
Leverage is one reason for this state of affairs. If regular people are more and more desperate to pay the bills, then they are more and more willing to do whatever those with existing wealth ask them to do. If people are more willing to do anything to pay for basic necessities, to make debt payments, or to pay rent, the more flexibility those with money have to make more money. They can ask people to do more things than they could have asked previously, and they can split the profits more unevenly by taking advantage of the desperation of their employees. At the end of the day, if your only option to pay the bills is the job you’re offered, you have to take the job, regardless of how fair the wage is.
The same is not true of those who want to hire you, though. For just about any existing job, there is always someone else who can do the job well enough to make a profit. This is true of flipping burgers, going door to door, harassing people in Wal-Mart for phone plans, and working basic construction jobs; however, it’s also true of white-collar jobs. Basic software and coding jobs are not as difficult to perform as one would think. The only evidence one needs to see this is the ever-increasing amount of people in tech who’s only qualification is a bachelor’s in some unrelated field and a bootcamp certification. Much of the work is plug-and-chug and office politics. More than that, I’m increasingly convinced that, as difficult as a lot of some white-collar jobs are, the amount of obvious nepotism one sees in them makes it evident that there are very few jobs in the world that only a select, innately talented group of people could actually perform. At the end of the day, most people can be trained to do most things well with the right training and the right amount of time. As difficult and sophisticated as they make white collar work out to be, it seems like the greatest difficulty people have in that line of work is networking sufficiently enough to get the job in the first place.
What all this means is that most companies don’t have nearly as much on the line in the hiring process as those they’re hiring. If they don’t get a secretary right away, or if they underperform, they’re probably not going to go bankrupt. If they don’t have a position filled, even an entire area of the company filled, the worst thing they’ll face is a little trouble on their bottom line, nothing more. The same isn’t true for those they’re hiring. They can afford to take their time in the process--because the longer they do, the more desperate the working class becomes. The more desperate they become, the more companies can ask them to do for less money. Thus, the more profit they can extract from the average worker.
So, if you’re like my co-workers, and the current economic situation confuses you, I understand, but I also don’t think it’s as confusing as it’s made out to be. There’s a reason that rent is astronomical and wages haven’t increased; why getting a job takes hundreds of applications full of convoluted, unnecessary questions; why companies use mysterious, arcane algorithms to search thousands of resumes (even though it’s an ineffective way to measure talent or fit); why finding an entry level job requires learning a useless subset of skills for perfectly framing your resume, for dotting the algorithm, and for getting your resume seen by a pair of human eyes; why applying for work feels like a full-time job in and of itself; and there’s a reason why employers complain they can’t find employees while employees seem incapable of finding a job despite years of qualified experience and skills.
The reason is leverage. If companies (and those in power who own the companies) make finding a job difficult, make living difficult, their leverage in the economic playing field increases. And the more leverage they have, the more leverage they can use for their benefit in pay scales, in work, and, most importantly, in profit extraction in the employee-employer relationship. It’s not a side effect of natural laws in the science of economics. Economics isn’t a science like physics; it’s a social science; it’s descriptive of different ways of doing things, first and foremost; it’s descriptive of different ways of setting up economic relationships in different cultures. Insofar as cultures are full of infinite variables of language, values, and morality, economic choices and relationships are equally infinite. In short, economic relationships do not play out in identical ways across all times and all places; economic relationships are contextual, complex, and contingent. Looking at the present situation, then, it is clear that the leverage in the current relationship between employers and employees is not the only way the relationship has to go. It could be different; it has been different, and it is different in other places in the world. More than that, it is the way it is because it serves the interests of a select group of people: the ones who own companies, the ones who extract the profit from those companies, and the ones who are already exceedingly wealthy.
So, if you’re like my co-workers, and you’re wondering who’s responsible for the present economic situation. If you’re angry that finding a real job seems impossible, if you’re angry that no one pays you what you’re worth (at least enough to survive somewhat comfortably), and, if you’re angry that finding a place to rent seems impossible, then hopefully you have a somewhat clearer picture of the people you need to be angry at.
Be angry at the people who benefiting from the status quo; be angry with those who want to impoverish you for a sick form of economic leverage; be angry with the fact that things don’t need to be this way, that they haven’t always been this way, and that something better is possible.
1. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/oct/05/richest-americans-became-richer-during-pandemic
2. Median Weekly Earnings for Americans ranged from $600-$1,447 in 2020. https://www.bls.gov/cps/aa2020/cpsaat37.pdf