Naidu says the answer is obvious: "The workers didn't have any power. Why didn't worker pay increase for at least the duration of the pandemic?
#Suresh naidu textlab windows
It's true that a handful of workers received a few extra weeks of additional hazard pay, but most of those windows of a dollar or two extra per hour have long since expired, even as the risk of catching COVID persists.
In the perfect economic system that we hear about in Econ 101 classes, wages should have increased steadily in the days and weeks after the coronavirus lockdown as the need for workers to perform their duties increased. "hough the risks of being a worker in a grocery store or in a meat processing plant obviously shot up enormously during COVID," Naidu said, "there is no evidence that wages were increasing to compensate these workers." Naidu makes a clear case that those unspoken - and frequently unrecognized - power dynamics have endangered millions of low-wage American workers.Įven in a pandemic, with communities effectively relying on essential workers to get access to food and daily necessities, the new importance placed on these workers hasn't given them more power. In this week's episode of Pitchfork Economics, Nick Hanauer and David Goldstein talk with Suresh Naidu, a professor of economics and public affairs at Columbia University who is working on a book about the history of American labor markets. This power imbalance has grown even wider since the coronavirus pandemic divided the American workforce into two groups: the mostly white-collar employees who have been comfortably working from home since March, and the mostly low-wage so-called "essential" employees who sell, deliver, and make the food and other supplies that the working-from-home crowd needs to perform their duties. In reality, workers are disposable and employers hold almost all of the power. In a perfect economic system, employers would need workers just as much as workers needed their employers. That might make sense in a simplified textbook object lesson, but it doesn't work in the real world, where parents have to feed their children three times a day, and people who work at a manufacturing plant don't have the funds to uproot their lives and move to another state when they want a raise. Trickle-downers who oppose raising the minimum wage, for instance, will often suggest that workers who want a higher wage should simply quit their jobs and find a new employer who's willing to pay their desired rate. It often indicates a user profile.Įconomics as we know it has been around since the late 18th century, but the field still barely acknowledges the existence of power dynamics as a motivating force in the labor market. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.
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