Nine days after the release of Michael Lind’s Hell to Pay: How the Suppression of Wages Is Destroying America (Portfolio; 240 pages; $29.00), The Wall Street Journal reported that job satisfaction “hit a 36-year high in 2022, reflecting two effects of the tight pandemic labor market: The quality of jobs improved as wages and work flexibility increased, and workers moved into positions that were a better fit.”
Hmm. Perhaps it’s not the best moment to rail against
de-unionization; government trade and investment treaties that make it easier to offshore jobs; government immigration policies that expand low-wage legal immigration or fail to enforce sanctions against hiring illegal immigrants; allowing inflation to lower the value of federal, state, and local minimum wages year after year; and a system of public assistance that compels its recipients to work at poverty-wage jobs, trapping them in a limbo in which they may never be able to earn enough to be free from public assistance.
Don’t worry, though. Lind is game. Reality be damned, defining what’s wrong with America, and enumerating the corrective measures that must be implemented to stave off imminent catastrophe, isn’t asking too much from the public intellectual. With thoroughly predictable stops along the way — the U.S. State Department, The National Interest, The New Republic, The New Yorker — Lind earned his status as a made member of the community of Deep Thinkers. Unimpressed? Lind co-founded New America (“a civic platform that connects a research institute, technology lab, solutions network, media hub and public forum”) and is ensconced as a professor at The University of Texas at Austin’s LBJ School of Public Affairs. (Plus, his C-SPAN appearances are numerous.)
Hell to Pay’s major gripe is that “worker bargaining power” has vanished, smashed by the cruelty of an “economic elite.” It’s a familiar tale. And it’s largely bunk. Some of the brightest minds in economics — including Don Boudreaux, Alan Reynolds, Russ Roberts, Stephen Rose, and Michael Strain — will tell anyone curious enough to listen precisely why.
Let’s start with Lind’s monotonous, and deeply off-base, focus on wages. Employers supply their workers with all kinds of non-money compensation. Healthcare coverage, paid vacations, and contributions to retiree plans aren’t free, and their role is increasing. Last fall, two economists documented that around four decades ago, “benefits constituted a mere 5% of the average worker’s compensation package; as of 2021, they make up roughly 30%.”
Use of an inaccurate method of inflation adjustment is another tool of populist “progressives.” So is selective timing, in which a particularly strong economic period is compared to a recessionary era.
Lind’s pining for a resurgence of unionism is equally unsound. Yes, Americans tell pollsters that they approve of “organized labor.” But even with the National Labor Relations Board stacking the deck in union agitators’ favor, “collective bargaining” is disappearing from the private sector. Rampant corruption, unmentioned in Hell to Pay, is likely one reason. Thuggery is probably another. (A cursory glance at the clientele of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation would raise the author’s consciousness about how brutally unions frequently behave.)
And then there’s manufacturing. Sigh. Like all protectionists, Lind, 61, has a fetish for goods over services. (What Tom Peters calls the “false-nostalgia-for-shitty-jobs phenomenon” severely afflicts Brahmins who’ve never received the dubious blessing of physically demanding work.) His lament that “commercial shipbuilding” is “dominated by China, South Korea, and Japan” is sure to make those aware of the union-backed Jones Act laugh out loud.
If you ever wondered what the ideological love child of Pat Buchanan and Elizabeth Warren would be like, read Hell to Pay. What’s most frustrating is that unlike Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Gavin Newsom, or Mazie Hirono, Lind is not an empty-headed charlatan with puny knowledge of American economics, history, and government. He’s written books on everything from Lincoln to Vietnam, George W. Bush to big businesses. He’s sophisticated enough, one is tempted to assume, to recognize the hollowness of “national developmentalism.”
Well, evidently not. By depicting the men and women at the lowest end of the socioeconomic scale as blameless victims of capitalism’s merciless masters, Lind has chosen preconceived narrative over data-driven observances. Disappointing.
What our good professor needs — indeed, what all of us who study the health of the Republic need — is a heavy dose of humility. The past wasn’t as glorious as we think, and a future in which our policy prescriptions aren’t followed to the letter might not be completely nightmarish.
There is indeed a great deal of ruin in a nation. There are also quite a few surprises.
Appears to be another book by a person who has never run a for-profit business. I ran a small professional services business for 23 years. You pay your valuable employees as much as you can afford to in order to reward the employee and also to reduce the risk that the employee will be hired away by a competitor.
The book is not exactly flying off the shelves. It has one Amazon review and is #43,310 in sales rank: https://www.amazon.com/Hell-Pay-Conspiracy-Destroying-America/dp/0593421256/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?crid=21UEL8ZEJ7324&keywords=Hell+to+Pay+HOW+THE+SUPPRESSION+OF+WAGES+IS+DESTROYING+AMERICA&qid=1684266255&sprefix=hell+to+pay+how+the+suppression+of+wages+is+destroying+america%2Caps%2C145&sr=8-1-fkmr0