We’re Workers Too

From an economic standpoint, governments look at citizens as workers, consumers or both. Most people, of course, are both: we work and earn, and we spend.

Our dual economic roles inform the core of the affordability discussion at the center of current politics. For as long as everyone but the oldest of us can remember, both major parties have focused on and messaged to the individual as homo consumerus. Clinton promised that tariff-eliminating ‘free trade’ pacts like NAFTA and the WTO would improve our living standards by making imported goods cheaper. On that point, if the prices of imported stuff at Wal-Mart is a good indicator, he seems to have been mostly right.

But Clinton had no good answer to protectionists who worried about offshoring the good manufacturing jobs that propped up the economy of the industrial Midwest. Cheaper prices are well and good, but the unemployed can’t buy anything.

Trump promised to and claims to have reduced not only inflation but prices themselves. He has made progress on the former; the latter is hopeless.

Unlike Clinton, Trump pays occasional lip service to the importance of bringing back dignity and decent pay to working-class jobs, though his focus is sporadic and symbolic. This decades-old systemic problem—stagnant and declining wages—persists.

As the ad says, how much you earn doesn’t matter, it’s what you keep. Nor should you care much about how much you spend.

The political elites’ intense focus on the American consumer at the expense of the American worker serves two purposes. It distracts us from the decades-old problem of rising income inequality (currently being described as a K-shaped economy), which even a socialist-minded economist would find difficult to fix given capitalism’s natural tendency toward monopoly and the market’s expectation of constant GDP expansion. Keeping wages low—by suppressing unions, importing foreign workers, and maintaining at-will employment laws—maximizes the profits of the rich companies and individuals who own our politicians.

We, the consumers, are well taken care of. Producers source cheap goods around the world, forcing countless suppliers to compete for our purchases. But we workers are insecure, overworked and underpaid—and so are miserable.

What are we workers to do?

Like any other prescription that advises people to start thinking differently en masse, the solution to this situation is so unrealistic that it basically serves as an admission that everything is hopeless. If everyone stopped buying SUVs, we might make a dent in the climate crisis. If everyone stopped voting for one of the two major parties, alternative new movements could emerge. If we stopped allowing ourselves to be distracted by appeals to our consumer selves—we’d lower prices, or at least inflation, and how about a personal tariff rebate check personally signed by the president?—and focused instead on our beleaguered worker selves, we’d have a chance at achieving the living standards a demographer would expect from a nation as rich and powerful as the United States.

If we focused on income alongside or in lieu of expenses, we would demand a higher minimum wage. Not because we personally earn $7.25 an hour, but because higher minimum wages push up median wages.

We would demand something workers in other industrialized nations have, a real right to form and join a union. No more requirement that a union be certified by the NLRB in order to be considered ‘official.’ Employers who fire a worker for unionizing should be jailed. No category of worker, including public servants, should be banned from going on strike. Make America Unionized Again, watch wages grow.

Considering that self-employed freelancers account for a third of American workers, creating a system to provide them with health insurance, vacation pay, gig security and minimum fees is long overdue.

Worker solidarity should replicate the culture in Europe, where the elite class isn’t able to easily divide and conquer the workforce. If teachers go on strike, so should cops and coders and cartoonists and everyone else. Again, watch wages go up.

Of course, none of these income-expanding measures is possible as long as we keep equating the affordability crisis with high prices. At most, costs are only half of the equation. We need to start thinking and talking about raising wages too.

(Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of ‘Never Mind the Democrats. Here’s What’s Left.’ Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com. He is co-host of the podcast ‘DeProgram with Ted Rall and John Kiriakou.’)