You're subsidizing corporate profits
When people aren't paid a living wage, we all make up the difference
It seems like there are a lot of strikes going on right now — with employees fed up with companies squeezing more work out of them while offering increasingly precarious working conditions. So it’s fitting that Michael Lind’s Hell to Pay: How the Suppression of Wages Is Destroying America made it off my list of library holds and into my library app.
Part of his argument is that a living wage does not mean enough to support yourself today. A living wage is enough to support your future self and the younger generation. That is easiest to ensure through taxes (paid by the employer or employee) that provide for pensions, insurance, and family support. In the age of gig and at will employment, these things need to be set up so all workers are contributing to and qualify for coverage, regardless of the details of their work contracts.
When employers pay a worker for today without compensating for that employee’s past (their childhood and education) and their future (potential disability and retirement), those employers are being subsidized by whoever is actually footing the bill for raising future workers and caring for former workers.
When we pay a doctor $350 for a 7-minute appointment, we’re paying for the doctor’s education, the expertise of their office staff, the facilities and equipment, malpractice insurance, everyone’s disability insurance, everyone’s medical insurance, and everyone’s retirement funds. Employers who pay someone minimum wage are assuming someone else is picking up the bill for that worker’s housing, that the government is providing medical insurance through programs for the indigent, that retirement isn’t for people like them.
In the US right now many people are working full-time and not earning enough income to pay for themselves today. They are working and still qualify for means-tested programs designed to save people from abject poverty without providing comfort. There are workers who rely on a patchwork of subsidized services and charity in order to stay afloat.
When an employer is paying workers so little that it doesn’t even cover today, they’re getting a huge subsidy from the rest of us.
Why are some cultures so individualistic? It might be the types of crops our ancestors farmed.
"Of all the hospice patients in the United States, only 14% of enrollees are people of color"
On being pushed to put your child in institutional care and the struggle to bring them home.
The government has left enforcement of the ADA up to individuals using the court system, an incredibly expensive and incomplete way to create an accessible world in a country where every renovation and new construction project is approved by the government. We're making progress nonetheless.
Thank you, Cori, for another brilliantly difficult collection of reads.