Читать книгу Inequality and the Labor Market - Группа авторов - Страница 20

It should be fairly obvious why these imperfections in the labor market matter so much: one of the most disturbing aspects of growth in the United States in recent decades is the growing inequality (see, e.g., Ostry, Berg, and Tsangarides 2019; Stiglitz 2012, 2019; and a rash of other books on the topic). Most of the gains in the economy have gone to the top 10 percent, the top 1 percent, and the top 0.1 percent. Some of the growing inequality has to do with increases in wage disparity—known as labor market polarization. But much of it has to do with the decreasing share of national income going to workers.⁸ This is where the decreasing market power of workers and the increasing market power of corporations comes in. This decreasing market power is more than just changes in technology or even globalization: it is also the broader changes in our economy, society, and politics—and especially the changes described earlier in this introduction and elsewhere in this volume—that have led to this growing imbalance of market power.

Research at the International Monetary Fund (Ostry, Berg, and Tsangarides 2014) and elsewhere (Ostry, Berg, and Tsangarides 2019) has highlighted the broader consequences of this growing inequality, even on economic performance. Economies that are more unequal are less stable and grow more slowly. In The Price of Inequality I explain the reasons that we pay such a high price for inequality.

The COVID-19 crisis has provided a dramatic illustration: inequalities in income translate into inequalities in health, especially in a society, like that of the United States, that relies on markets to dispense healthcare. The virus is not an equal opportunity virus—it appears to have the most devastating effects on people who have underlying health conditions. Our health inequalities are undoubtedly one of the reasons that the United States led the world in COVID-19 deaths.

Short-sighted employers did not provide sick leave and government did not require it—even when Congress seemed to recognize that workers without sick leave, who live paycheck to paycheck with virtually no money in the bank, would go to work even when they were sick. They had to work in order to survive, but that meant they helped to spread the disease. After lobbying by the large corporations, Congress decided that employers with more than 500 employees—almost half of the private labor force—were exempt from providing sick leave. With so few workers unionized, employees simply did not have the bargaining power to demand paid sick leave, personal protective equipment, or COVID-19 tests. Government should have required all these things, of course, and it had the power to do so under OSHA, but chose not to. Workers were desperate for the protection, but lacked the bargaining power to get it.