The common belief is that we have a free market for labor. You don’t like working at MacDonalds, walk over to Burger King. You aren’t getting benefits at your janitor’s job, walk over to the next office building and apply there. You think you should get paid at least as much as your fellow workers, so you ask them how much they are making an hour.
Nope. None of those things.
A new report by the Treasury Department details ways that employers keep wages down. Noncompete agreements bar workers from moving to a competing business. Nondisclosure agreements keep workers from sharing info about wages and working conditions. Contractors control wide swaths of certain industries, like janitorial staff or security guards; there is no competing company to go to.
Only 6% of the private sector belong to a union. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. The system sucks.
Info for this post is from Eduardo Porter, “There’s No Such Thing as a Free Labor Market, Study Finds,” New York Times, (March 8, 2022), p. B5.
Absolutely. I've done a lot of thinking about this recently and came to the conclusion every civilization was built on the back of cheap labor.
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