Читать книгу Inequality and the Labor Market - Группа авторов - Страница 28

As a second justification for ignoring labor markets, economists and antitrust enforcers have taken the line that employment and labor law are enough protection for workers. The current state of our economy demonstrates that such justification is absurd. Employment and labor law are at an epic low point in allowing workers to build power sufficient to countervail the power of corporations in order to provide even the most basic labor standards. If we start with employment law, we can see that standards have eroded significantly as unchecked corporate power has translated into unchecked political power. The minimum wage—the most fundamental of workplace protections—is at a historic low point. Stuck at $7.25 since 2009, it has eroded 17 percent in value since that year and 31 percent since 1968 (Cooper, Gould, and Zipperer 2019). We are in the longest period to date without an increase in the minimum wage, which now provides only a poverty wage for a family of four.

Our labor law is equally inept at providing a pathway to countervailing power. One statistic lays bare the law’s failure: the percentage of workers who are now union members is lower than it was before workers had a federally protected right to join a union. This erosion of union membership is happening at the same time that a strong majority of Americans support unions and would prefer to be represented by a union, yet only about 6 percent of private-sector workers are represented by a union (Greenhouse 2020).

We see in the data the connection between the weakening labor movement and workers’ inability to compete for higher wages. As the labor movement has declined, so have the basic measures of economic fairness and equality—wages have stagnated while productivity continues to grow, and so the gap between rich and poor is larger than ever (Saez 2018). In fact, the decline in union density is having a dramatic effect on everyone who works: because the decline in unionization suppresses wages for all workers, it accounts for about one-third of the increase in income inequality over the past several decades (Rosenfeld, Denice, and Laird 2016).

There are several key features of U.S. labor law that inhibit its ability to promote workers’ ability to compete for higher wages. First, too few workers are covered by our collective bargaining laws. The law explicitly excludes agricultural and domestic workers—an exclusion that leaves millions of workers without the right to act collectively. Millions of workers also are excluded from the law’s protection because they are classified as independent contractors, who also are explicitly excluded from the law’s protection (Block and Sachs 2020a).

In addition, labor law constrains the scope of workers’ collective bargaining—they have the right to organize, but only among employees of a single employer within a single workplace. This constraint precludes building unions that can effectively countervail corporate power. For example, in the typical fissured workplace, described above, workers can bargain only with their direct employer, regardless of the contractual relationships between other employers within the enterprise and the influence that those relationships have on the economic options available to the direct employer. In the example offered above, the housekeepers could bargain only with the temp agency, and not with the hotel chain. Countries where unions bargain with all the employers across an industry at one time have lower income inequality—which is evidence of low-wage workers’ greater bargaining power (Block and Sachs 2020a, 37–39).

Labor law also restricts how workers can exercise their power, precluding a strategic use of collective tactics. For example, a union that has a dispute with a manufacturing company is not permitted to try to stop stores from carrying the goods manufactured by their employer. Or if you work for a contractor who provides housekeeping services at a hotel, you are permitted to pressure only the housekeeping contractor, but not the hotel chain or the contractor who provides landscaping services or any other employer who has employees within the hotel (Block and Sachs 2020a, 56–58).

These limits on workers’ collective action are significant in impeding competition, but they are not the only challenges that workplace law interposes for workers. When individual workers try to leverage their own power, the law of the workplace allows employers to put obstacles in their way. As discussed in greater detail in later chapters, employers are allowed to condition employment on workers’ willingness to contract away their rights. Frequently, employers condition employment on workers’ waiver of their right to seek employment with other employers in the same industry—known as noncompete clauses. Employers use these clauses up and down the income spectrum, and not exclusively with workers who hold trade secrets or for whom employers have made significant investments in training. Even more commonly, employers require workers to arbitrate any workplace disputes. Because the outcome in arbitration is often kept secret, these forced arbitration clauses limit competition by hiding from workers information that they could use to force fair treatment and pay.

The harsh reality that wages are not naturally competitive has been exposed by the fading relevance of traditional legal protection for workers. Indeed, empirical evidence is mounting that the puzzle of why the labor share of the dollar is so low and declining is no puzzle at all: labor markets were never competitive and are getting less so.