The harder they work the broker they get

Low-level workers labor for short money in a nation that amasses wealth with little strain

The author, doing honest work for once. (Rich Bajjalieh photo)

In America, we all learned in school that if you work hard you’ll succeed.

We might get an argument from fellow citizens working multiple jobs who still can't afford to pay their bills.

We're not talking about bills from the jeweler or furrier or cocaine purveyor. We’re talking rent and food and electricity. The one-paycheck-away-from-having-to-move-back-in-with-the-old-boyfriend sort of thing. About 57% of us are like that.

That means 43% of us aren't. We may be doing better because we're hardworking and talented to boot. Or dedicated to “working smart.”

Or maybe we just fell into a pot of jam.

Don't believe that? Then maybe you're one of those who really did fall into some free jam. You just don’t know it.

Several years ago, some psychologists tried an unusual experiment. They asked folks to play Monopoly, then cheated to help some of the players, and told them. After those players won they were asked why they thought they were victorious. 

Most replied that they were smarter than the other players or, gosh darn it, really good at Monopoly. They said this despite knowing that they won fixed games.

The more comfortable the winners were in their actual lives, the more likely that they would ignore the Black Sox-like reason for their Monopoly victories.

Does that mean we have a nation stocked with millions whose success makes them think they’re superior to the hoi polloi? Yes.

But lots of people on the other end of the employment spectrum are kidding themselves, too. 

Many underpaid workers who could probably improve their lot in life by organizing believe that joining a union would actually make things worse. Maybe they think they’re more likely to be laid off. Maybe it’s the Stockholm Syndrome.

So they vote each November for people who promise to clamp down on organized labor, and the guy risking his job to hand them a signup card is treated as if he was an ax murderer. Since the late 1950s, the number of unionized workers dropped from about 35 percent to about 6 percent.

Over the same period, real wages have stayed flat. Coincidence.

Unions are again on the rise in our pandemic-driven economy, however, largely because many of those who kept working tough jobs soon saw that the boss probably didn't worry much if they lived, let alone lived well.

Those who had to stop working had more time to think while they collected unemployment insurance. They did so while millions of people laboring in their bathrobes called them lazy.

People who get paid a good wage for working at a keyboard all day should thank their lucky stars. And there are more and more of them, at various levels.

Big shots enrich themselves by pushing buttons (or getting other people to push the buttons for them) to digitally command employees to do real, often difficult things without paying them decently or even having to talk to them. It's no wonder that so many people on the lower end of the wage scale are organizing, or quitting long-held jobs. 

In fast-food joints, words need not be spoken by managers, or even customers, to employees running out the doors with bags in obeisance to apps. 

Drivers working for Amazon contractors operate on hurry-up systems that are incentivizing them to quit. They’re replaced by new guys who solve the scheduling problem by hurling packages from the curb. 

There are now restaurants where managers are no longer required to supervise morning prep workers. Instructions on terminals tell them what to do and when to do it, and if they're not pressing the “DONE” button fast enough to satisfy an algorithm, they get automatically reported. 

It almost seems that pay rates are inversely related to the value of the labor to society. For instance, with sincere apologies to my friends in public relations and marketing, it's hard to imagine two vocations less likely to advance humanity. Yet over a million Americans now make their bones in those industries.

Over the last decade, many of my former media colleagues left for marketing and PR, where they don't have to cover night meetings or chase people who call them names. On average, they earn a third more in PR and twice as much in marketing.

They used to produce news reports that benefited their fellow citizens. Now they specialize in baloney.

This is not surprising. Today, our economy is dominated by people energized similarly to those who sell their waste for fecal transplants.

They are trying to make money out of shit.

I’m sorry about the language. But not really. I can’t think of a better way to describe what’s been going on for quite a while now. The pandemic has magnified things to the point where they can easily be seen. But little has actually changed.

Cryptocurrencies were starting to take off before the coronavirus did. Millions of people now mine imaginary money. This is money that exists mainly for the purpose of making more money.  

The concept of skipping the middle man (securities) and just investing in money itself seems weird, but it isn't really new. 

Remember the last investment fad, forex? Investors bet against each other on the future values of foreign currency. It’s a great way to lose a house.

Forex and crypto are actually no more of a gamble than the stock markets.

For some, stocks are no gamble, of course. If you're a CEO who plans to use a big tax break not to expand but to buy back stock to push up the price, it’s no gamble at all.

The fix is in on crypto, too. Local governments here and there are agreeing to take payments in crypto. Like credit cards are too unwieldy.

This may all be beyond most of the working poor. But it’s not because they don’t get technology. What they don’t understand is how to get paid for meaningless work.

They don’t know how to make money out of shit.

Four push-button companies, Amazon, Google, Apple and Facebook, are now more than one-fifth of the economy. In order, describing them honestly: Number One dominates American commerce just by giving customers a single platform to buy almost anything, while using that power to grind sellers; Two is a company that makes billions by altering the order in which it tells you stuff; Three is a provider of personal computers and phones from China and Four makes an obscene amount of money by providing a platform facilitating public lying.

The best way to start to normalize our economy might be to break up these behemoths, which are starting to resemble the trusts of more than a century ago. The government busted those trusts because of vertical integration: they controlled all the supplying companies that contributed to creating important industrial products.

Maybe that’s what’s going on now, too. It’s harder to pin down the suppliers of four sit-on-your-butt-and-stare-at-the-screen-business giants. But it can be done.

You just need a plunger.

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