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My brother works as an inventory clerk in a small-town factory in the midwest that makes small batches of custom metal parts sold to other factories. He has been there several years and is one of the more skilled employees, and makes just under $18,000 per year. No retirement or profit sharing benefits. The work conditions are unsafe, with lax enforcement of safety policies for forklifts, stacks of containers, cleaning chemicals. Most employees are expected to perform the duties of the equivalent of 2-3 workers, including staying late without being paid overtime. The work can be physically grueling at times, even for my brother as inventory clerk, and much worse for some of the general factory floor workers. The company has three salespeople who make The Office look like it was written by Norman Mailer. They interrupt people to go on diatribes about trite motivational anecdotes, talk about how you have to work hard to get places, and then sit in separate offices playing solitaire on their computers with the door open so that anyone can see them doing it. The company's absentee owner comes in every once in a while and holds catered lunches for the sales team, and literally excludes the ~10 other staff in the warehouse who actually do all of the work. Sales people make 5x-10x what the other staff make, and receive bonuses in the form of fully paid family vacations when they close big sales contracts, despite the fact that the rest of the staff often has to do tons of work to close the contracts, even including assisting the sales people with creating their PowerPoint slides, or pointing out statistical errors in charts and things. My brother personally has saved them hundreds of thousands of dollars, possibly over a million, just in 2017, by catching quality control issues with batches of metal they received from an overseas supplier, which could have caused the company to lose one of their critical contracts. He also has had to fill in as a last-minute delivery driver for the company delivery van, working late into the night to drive all over a rural area delivering metal parts when the regular delivery driver was out sick. My brother has 10 days of paid vacation and it's a dogfight every time he wants to use them. His last raise (of $0.25 per hour) was more than a year ago. The company actively preys upon people with past criminal records, knowing that they are hard up for employment in a region where employment is already hard to find, and that once they are hired they will put up with any degree of degrading treatment. (My brother does not have a criminal record, but about 75% of the general warehouse staff do, and many did not finish high school and have a hard time even understanding the terms of their employment. The current staff are sometimes asked informally if they know any people with criminal records to recommend for open positions). This isn't a case of an employer helping the community by fairly considering ex-criminals for open roles. It's a situation where they tacitly target these people on the assumption they won't have to treat them fairly or respectfully, and can exploit them to a greater degree because they'll have fewer options to leave. My brother does not have enough personal savings to move away, and likely would have to have a job lined up that paid relocation before he could even consider it, otherwise just moving to a new location would put him at the point of insolvency. Literally, the option of quitting is logically not an option, because it directly implies insolvency and, probably, a dangerously high risk of suicide. So, despite whatever superficial sense one might want to say he is "in a free labor market," it is just disingenuous junk nonsense. No matter how frugally he lives, his amount of salary is just so egregiously low that it could never be possibly to work his way into a better life situation. Not even decades of savings could do it for him, even if he was living at the absolute most extreme end of frugality (which he pretty much already is). He is just not paid a wage that can possibly sustain a viable savings rate, and there are no other jobs nearby, and moving is not economically feasible. He doesn't have a college degree (dropped out of college due to severe diagnosed clinical depression and anxiety attacks -- still has student loans of course), but is highly intelligent, curious and resourceful. He is one of the few people who can make me laugh. He's a beautiful musician in his spare time, a wonderfully witty writer, and generous with his free time spent helping his friends and family and trying to do odd jobs for extra money when he can find opportunities (not often). And there are many people in the US with even worse employment exploitation situations than my brother -- and vastly worse situations around the world. His story is already so bad we should be morally outraged by it, and it's not even among the worst stories you'll hear. I can't imagine what it's like to be in a similar situation to his, and then to add racial abuse, sexual harassment, or other forms of discrimination or marginalization on top of it. It just blows my mind sometimes how ignorant we all can be of the genuine exploitation in our labor market. There's no sense in which it's a morally acceptable reflection of some market equilibrium. It's just: one side has inherited power and uses power to accrue and entrench more power; the other side is literally in serfdom. Even when people "earn" positions of power through economically productive output, it's on the backs of people in these situations, and through infinite other forms of mass exploitation, in the form of regulatory capture, backroom deals, outright fraud, and manipulation of publicly provided resources. The part attributable to any one person's work ethic or natural talent is so fleetingly small that it's just shocking how we still try to glorify it and hold it up as an example of why they "earned" power and wealth, and why those being exploited somehow are always to blame for it. |
I'm more skeptical about not being in a free labor market. I know many people in London who get by on the minimum wage (~16K). I doubt the cost of living in a small-town factory in the Midwest is comparable to the cost of living in London.
It's a shitty situation, sure, but it sounds like a far cry from not being able to change jobs because a single day without any income would lead to insolvency.