Here is an interesting piece about solidarity and if Americans hate other Americans. An interesting thesis about why we can't have nice things.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
siderea
Find it here: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1511935.html#
--Kim
sidereaCanonical link: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1511935.html
Dear Fellow Americans,
It has of late been brought to my attention that the following weird phenomenon exists: that Americans, many or or most of them, have deep reservations about other people finding out what they earn at their jobs – despite increasingly seeing how being open with that information might benefit themselves and others they would like to benefit, despite nascent social movements making great good sense exhorting people to share the information of how much they make – and, yet, not knowing why they feel leary of disclosing their incomes.
I know why. You probably know why, too, and just haven't let yourself become fully conscious of the reason.
Americans are awful. Truly, truly awful. Awful in many ways, but I'm referring to one specific way that Americans are awful. One you've noticed.
Exhibit A is surely this. If you're in the Blue Nation, you've heard the sad and weary observation that the reason the USA doesn't have universal single payer healthcare is because, all other challenges and circumstances aside, Americans don't want universal single payer healthcare, because of the sticking point universal: if healthcare is universal, then somebody unworthy might get healthcare they don't desreve. Americans, many of them, and they will say so in almost as many words, don't want "their tax dollars" going to pay for healthcare for unworthy people.
Americans have amongst them a whole collection of unworthinesses that they consider disqualifying of providing someone with healthcare. There are those who feel people who have the termerity and bad judgment to be poor shouldn't be indulged with healthcare, and neither should their children. There are those incensed that universal healthcare would mean giving something expensive for free to rich people who could pay out of pocket for it. There are those who feel addicts must have gotten that way by willfully abusing drugs, and therefor deserve to die by medical neglect. There are those who are outraged to contemplate the tax money of real Americans going to healthcare for "foreigners" and "illegals". There are those who feel that healthcare should be reserved for white people, or at least non-black people because why should we pay for them? There are those who object to paying for the heathcare of those who "brought on themselves" their infirmities, like by being gay and getting AIDS. There are those who feel healthcare dollars would be better spent just on people who can benefit by it, unlike the disabled who are all just going to be crippled and die no matter what you do, so why waste the money on them? There are those who think public assistance with healthcare should be reserved for the truly ill and disabled, and why are we wasting money providing care for people who are mostly walking around fine?
There comes a point, and if you haven't gotten there yet, this is your invitation to hurry along and finally dig it already, where one starts to notice that there's so very many excuses for why this people or that people shouldn't be provided with healthcare, that the issue isn't any specific prejudice, but the deeper, scarier problem of prejudicialness itself. Wow, we might notice, Americans really feel entitled to discriminate in the allocation of a literally life and death resource.
And once you see that, well, it's not just healthcare, is it?
It is a deep and unquestioned part of American culture that Americans feel entitled to pass judgment on their fellow Americans' worthiness to receive the most basic of resources.
Now I'm sure you can immediately fill in other examples from other government-provided social services. I can hear some of you thinking about the cuts to "food stamps" aka Welfare aka EBT, and others of you thinking about how drug testing was made a condition of receiving food stamps in several states, and others thinking about how Section 8 housing vouchers discriminate against people with criminal records and anyone who might want to live with such a person, and so forth and so on. And I can hear a few of you pulling in memories – personal or in the media – of similar judgments made not by government programs but private charities.
But here's the thing: it's not just about charity or "government handouts" is it? It's not just about who is worthy to receive some resource they "didn't earn".
Oh, no. Americans are so entitled to pass judgment on whether others deserve the resources they get, they're quick to say you didn't earn what you were paid.
Americans hate Americans. Americans are so spiteful of their fellow Americans, they readily – reliably – attack their fellow Americans, you don't deserve to be paid so much.
If they know how much you're paid.
Check this out. It's a comment from a discussion back in late 2015 on UniversalHub.com, a Boston-area news blog. The discussion concerned information that came out about what MBTA (public transit) employes were being paid (all emphasis as in the original):
Allow me to hammer this home: MBTA bus service doesn't go much beyond Route 128. At $35/hr, a bus driver for the MBTA is not being paid enough to afford to live in an average market-rate apartment anywhere within the MBTA's bus service area.
What's the larger context of this comment? The MBTA was asking for a fare increase, again, so, of course, the MBTA was being accused of wasting taxpayer money, and, as usual, they're wasting taxpayer money on paying their employees too much is where that argument went. It always does.
In America, it always does.
I don't know this commenter, this "ccd" user. I don't know if he's a garden variety Mass liberal, or one of UH's resident conservative opposition. What's so very interesting here is that one can't tell and it doesn't matter. It could be either, couldn't it? Both liberals and conservatives do this all the damn time. It's so usual, we don't even register it as a thing. And we certainly don't ascribe it to one political position or another.
It isn't owned by either Red or Blue America. This is a true aspect of a truly national American culture.
Where did "ccd" get his information? Oh, he was pointed at it by UH, where the item was posted by the proprietor, newsman adamg, who is reliably Blue:
Where did WCVB get their information?
I've been seeing this my entire life, and I bet you have too. I remember it coming up in news reporting about the teachers' strikes in the 1970s - What are they striking for!? They're paid like kings!. I remember it in the news coverage of automobile plant closings in the 70s and 80s, and manufacturing jobs leaving the country, where is was insinuated or stated that if autoworkers hadn't been so greedy and demanded such unfairly high wages for what was such unworthy work, then the plants wouldn't have had to close, and if they wanted to be paid reasonably, well, they should have stayed in school, gone to college, and become worthy white-collar worker, deserving of a stable well-paying job like, you know, a school teacher or college professor or a newspaper reporter.
I remember it from the air-traffic controllers strike in 1981, the one which Reagan broke, making the very same comparative argument [YouTube] [Wikisource]:
But if Reagan had the grace to allow that maybe they deserved more pay, the media took their cue. Consider this news coverage [YouTube], which argues that the strike isn't having all that much effect on air travel, so has the subtext that what air traffic controllers do just isn't that important so isn't worth very much. And the American public ate it up. We named an airport after Reagan, didn't we?
We see it in healthcare, here in the 2010s, where people blame doctors for making too much money, and advocate single-payer as a way to force healthcare providers' incomes lower as a way to save money. That's what it means when people praise "Medicare-for-All" for how "Medicare can get lower rates". Right: lower rates of provider pay, which it "gets" by those prices being fixed by Congress. But, yeah, absolutely, if we had single-payer, we could force medical providers to provide healthcare for less money; we could force them to provide it for so much less money they just go out of business.
But you don't have to look to the conventional media to see this; it's writ large on the internet. Any time issues of compensation come up on any forum, such as Metafilter, there will be bitter, jealous, spiteful responses to the tunes of you know there are people who would be grateful to earn that much - stop whining and what you do isn't as important as really important workers, you know and what you earn is a function of how useful what you do is to society so I guess what you do isn't very useful and if you'd made better choice then you'd make better money and you're going to bankrupt your employer/industry/government/society by demanding more and then where will we all be and so on and so forth.
This is why every damn time in this journal I discuss personal earnings, mine or anybody else's, I tie it back to rents. Because without that objective sanity check, the knee-jerk splenetic American response will reliably kick in and make a discussion of earnings into a referrendum on someone's subjective worthiness – their worthiness of the means of sustenance. If I don't nail the discussion to objective facts of how incomes compare to rents, some asshole will inevitably volunteer in the comments that – no matter how little we're talking – it is too much, and no one has no right to complain how little it is.
This is what happens when people try to oragnize for a living wage in the US: it becomes a referrendum on whether "people" – all people, some people – deserve – morally, culturally – to earn what they're already paid.
I'd like here to stop a moment to give due props to Ann Landers for radicalizing me about this. Or rather for the pseudonymous letter writer with whom she shared her bully pulpit on one occasion in my youth. Yeah, that bomb-throwing radical, Ann Landers. Lord, do you kids even know who/what Ann Landers was? She was a pseudonymous advice columnist - she was the pseudonymous advice columnist. The pseudonym and column live on; she's long deceased. She was massively, massively syndicated in US papers. Everyone in American for generations knew who Ann Landers was.
On this occasion (it was IIRC in my teens, so sometime in the 1980s), there was a letter she ran, setting her straight. Apparently – I gathered from context, having not seen the previous column – a letter from another reader editorializing on the compensation of teachers. Apparently the previous letter writer had been arguing for better pay for teachers, and had – and this was the crucial bit, addressed in the present letter – based that argument on observing that teachers are paid less than garbage collectors.
Let that sink in for a moment. Just confront it.
Think about what it means to raise that as an objection to teacher compensation.
Think about what it means to use that rhetorical maneuver, without any further argument or explication as to why teachers should earn more than garbage collectors, secure in the knowledge that one's audience – in the case of Ann Landers' readers, the entire newspaper-reading US population of that day in 1980-something – would understand your point, and probably concur.
The implications are that:
• Teachers should be earning more than garbage collectors
• Because teachers' work is more valuable and worthy than that of garbage collectors
• Therefore (or maybe just coincidentally) teachers are more deserving and worthy of compensation than garbage collectors are
• And, key, that this superiority of deservingness of teachers over garbage collectors is so manefestly obvious, so unneeding of explanation, as to be outrageous on the face of it and a self-evident injustice.
• That the self-evident injustice of teachers being paid less than garbage collectors is because garbage collectors are self-evidently very undeserving of compensation.
I remember when I read the rebutting letter, encountering this proposition at the beginning and understanding in a flash all the above implications – and not thinking a thing of it. Sure. Sounds sensible to me. Teachers, very important, should be paid more than mere garbage collectors. And one thing more I understood. Teachers are white-collar. Garbage collectors are blue-collar. In the "how outrageous!" implication of the comparison was not just an argument for the comparative superiority of the worth of the work of teachers to that of garbage collectors, but to the worth of teachers to the worth of garbage collectors. How dare any sort of blue-collar worker – especially the bluest of blue-collars, the dirtiest of hands – collect more money than a white-collar worker, especially than a virtuous, pedestal-perched, saintly white-collar worker like a schoolteacher. It is an insult - it implies that the schoolteacher is worth less than the garbage collector. That is not to be borne. Not by the white-collar middle class.
I didn't need anybody to explain that. It was already in my head at the ripe age of, what, 15? Self-evident.
The rebutting letter, setting Ann Landers straight, was from a garbage collector's wife.
The letter writer pointed out what the value of garbage collectors is to society. She pointed out that it is hard, dangerous work, and that it's very grueling physical labor that takes a toll out of the bodies of those who do it. She pointed out that it happens out of doors in all weather, from blizzards to heatwaves. She pointed out that it is nasty, dirty work that few people want to do, and many are not up to the arduities of.
She pointed out it was honorable work and an honest living, one earns by the sweat of one's brow.
She pointed out that if garbage collectors are well compensated, well, shouldn't they be? Don't they deserveit?
Her argument wasn't that teachers should be poorly compensated. It was to rebut the self-evidentness of the presumption that garbage collectors should be poorly compensated – the presumption that consequently any white-collar worker being paid less than a garbage collector was being paid less than they deserve.
It was one of those moments for me of being shaken awake - and apparently Ann Landers found it so, too, thanking the letter writer for calling her out, and, IIRC, apologizing for endorsing the previous letter's stance.
Teachers are paid less than garbage collectors!!: it is the purest example I know of American classism. The idea that some people just are more worthy than others of the means of sustenance, by virtue of their class. That there is a hierarchy of works that we all know, whereby teachers are above garbage collectors, obviously, and that the resources of society should be allocated on the basis of this hierarchy, naturally.
I would propose that, famously, for the distribution of resources in American society there are two bases that have ever been considered legitimate, the Red one and the Blue one – and this is neither.
The Red Nation champions capitalism – or so it claims. Under a laissez-faire market, what one is entitled to be paid for one's labor is whatever one can get, which, it is understood, is a simple matter of supply and demand. If you bring rare capabilities to the market, the price for your labor – your wage – goes up. if there are many people who can do what you offer, the price goes down. The value of your work is the value of that work to the market. It has nothing to do with the moral value of your work to society (though there are those who have gone there), or any other subjective notion of value. It's quite simply all the market will bear, a thoroughly amoral notion of the value of work. By this logic, if there are more people who want to work as teachers than there are who want to work as garbage collectors – or rather, if the rate of people wanting teacher jobs per number of teacher jobs thare is higher than the rate of people wanting garbage collector jobs per number of garbage collector jobs there are – then, yes, garbage collectors will – and should – be paid more than teachers.
The Blue Nation inclines of late to a shadow of communism – though it will deny it. It may call it "socialism", but in it one can see moving the other principle of how resources should be allocated in a society: "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need". This is the notion that every person should be able to count on having a decent standard of living, and that shouldn't be dependent on their ability to compete in a labor market to earn it for themselves. The only deserving you need to be to receive a share of the common bounty you did by being born a human being; even the unjust and undeserving of admiration or commendation are deserving of food and shelter, clothing and medicine. By this logic, garbage collectors are amply deserving of being well compensated – as well compensated as teachers. They certainly are no less deserving than teachers, and teachers are no less deserving than garbage collectors. Perhaps over a basic layer of security there can be some compensation set by capitalistic means, where those who offer services less available are paid some bonus to incent it, in which case perhaps garbage collectors should be paid more than teachers to make sure there's still people willing to collect garbage, but neither should be paid poorly.
But the ugly truth of American culture is that most Americans don't really believe in either capitalism orcommunism. They believe in classism. They believe it is natural and self-evident that resources should be allocated on the basis of who is the most deserving, where deservingness refers primarily to a hierarchy of social classes, secondarily mediated by moral deservingness.
Consequently, in America, all discussion of who gets paid what turns into an argument of whether the recipient is deserving of their pay. Which is to say, it entails an argument of why someone isn't deserving of what they earn.
Along come people on the left, Blue Nation Americans, who have noticed that sharing salary data would allow workers to organize, would help root out sexism and racism in pay rates, would benefit all employees in their salary negotiations by equalizing the knowledge imbalance across the negotiating table with employers. Everybody should share their salary information! they exhort.
There's a reason you don't feel like doing that. For Americans that's a lot like stripping naked and jumping in a tank of piranhas.
There's a reaon that hospitals and other health care institutions keep insisting that they are up against the financial ropes and are having trouble keeping the lights on, but don't release numbers. (A bunch of reasons, of which this is but one, actually.) They know that if they say "this is how much we need to pay our medical professionals" the American public will respond, "Why do you need to pay doctors so much?! So greedy, just pay them less."
There's a reason that I rebutted April Dembosky's "Sorry, The Therapist Can't See You — Not Now, Not Anytime Soon" by breaking down in excruciating length what the reported compensation numbers actually meant.
A Canadian friend of mine visited me, some moons ago, and our peregrinations took us through a union protest happening in Harvard Square. My friend had been a shop steward of their union back home, and asked me why it was that Americans didn't do unions. I don't remember if I put this across at the time, but all this I have explained here was what came to mind. When Americans see a picket line, they don't think, "good on those workers, standing up for themselves and getting themselves a fair share of the pie." They think, "those scoundrels, trying to get more than they deserve, stealing from the rest of us."
Americans (I remember saying) have no sense of solidarity. They don't look on their fellow Americans and identify with them, or see them as fellows. Americans look on their fellow Americans with suspicion, with spite, with spleen.
Ben Franklin, we are told, once quipped to the nascent nation, "We must all hang together, or we will surely hang separately." Well, we've certainly made our choice, haven't we?
What would it look like, for us not to be like this? It would look like any time you heard, well, anyone, really, but especially your fellow Americans insist that they aren't paid enough – that they're struggling to make ends meet, that they're struggling to get ahead, that they're struggling to have a decent lifestyle – that you start from an assumption they're right, and the assumption that they have as reasonable a claim to a better life as anyone. (We could call this "Believe Workers".) It would look like approving of people's efforts, individually and collectively, to command more pay than they've been getting, and cheering them on, even if they make more than you do, even if that raises your personal expenses.
It looks like not crossing picket lines. Not ever. It looks like honoring other people's strikes.
It looks like shutting down people who start sniping and spiting in knee-jerk spleen about other people being undeserving of compensation. It means stepping up and saying, "Not cool" or "You jeal bro" or "We don't do that here" or "Look, I don't know if you consider yourself a liberal, but that's not what solidarity looks like" or "Market likes them better, huh?" or "Don't piss on other people's pay" or "Build up, not tear down."
It looks like abandoning the American preoccupation with deservingness and who doesn't have it, in favor of believing either that sellers of labor have as much right to throw their collective weight around as do the buyers of labor, God bless capitalism, or that every person is deserving of their own vine and fig tree, out of the collective prosperity, God bless America. Either being a Red Nation good sport about market competition, or being a Blue Nation humanitarian in the face of human failings.
It looks like giving up quarreling about who is getting more than their fair share of pie, and starting to demand answers about why so many people are being expected to make due with so few pies between them, and how might there be more pie to go around.
I looks like responding to people saying they need more pie with the agreement they should have all the pie they need, even if there isn't more pie to give them right just now, even if we aren't the people able to give them any pie. It's certainly not responding that they don't deserve any more pie than they have, and probably don't even deserve that much.
It means being generally in favor of people, all people, your fellow Americans, making more money and having nicer lifestyles. Even people who are different from you. Even people you may think morally your inferiors. Even people who belong to classes you don't think of as as good as yours. Even people who offend you with their ways. It means making a moral principle of it: even if I don't like you, and don't like your people, I wouldn't see you starve, and I wouldn't see you suffer poverty. It means accepting the limitation: I don't believe I should be entitled to punish you – or agitate for your punishment by others – merely because I dislike you and your way of life, and I believe it is immoral of me to celebrate your misforture or take any satisfactions from it.
It would mean regarding our fellow Americans with a default assumption of their good faith and inherent human worthiness. We could even, later, once we have some practice and we're up to it, branch out to other, non-American peoples.
It would mean actually doing that tedious, uncool thing it says in the Bible about loving your neighbor as yourself, even when one's neighbor is a different color, or isn't a native English speaker, or doesn't worship the Bible. (None of which, I'll point out, are mentioned in the Bible as "Get Out of Following the Bible Free" cards.) You don't have to be sentimental and smarmy about it, and it doesn't involve protestations or declarations - the Bible doesn't say "Go to thy neighbor and tell them you love them." (Quite to the contrary: 1 Corinthians 13:1 – "charity" or "love", it works either way.) You just have to be on the side of them doing okay. You just have to be in favor of their prosperity and wellbeing. You just have to concern yourself with their struggles.
It would mean deciding you are on the side of Americans. All of them. Not against the other peoples of the world, but against the world itself, the caprices of fortune and the vicissitudes of fate.
"But Siderea," I can hear one of you nervously thinking, "this all sounds heart-warming and warm and fuzzy and all. But... does this mean we can't say that CEOs don't deserve their exorbitant paychecks? And other obscenely wealthy captains of industry?"
Yes, it does. Every time one indulges in criticizing executive compensation on the grounds of deservingnessone reinscribes the notion that how much someone should be paid depends on how much they deserve to be paid.
You're not going to do your target a lick of harm that way. It's such an easy argument to rebut, for captains of industry – "we're at the top of the class hierarchy, of course we deserve to have all the money" – and they can afford PR teams to promulgate excuses like "we deserve the money for making so many jobs" and "actually our skills are so leet we do deserve all our compensation". There's no way such an argument will ever reduce their compensation one red cent. But it will rebound on everyone else – everyone who doesn't have a wall of money to hide behind. It reinforces a culture of tearing down everyone in arms reach – which means lower on the class hierarchy than the top-out-of-sight. It normalizes debating compensation – debating the allocation of the means of sustenance in our society – in terms of deservingness, and then all the rest of us have to live in that world.
The good news is you don't need that argument. If what you want is to reduce income inequality, you'll find it's far more effective to argue that everyone deserves all they can earn, but nobody deserves to get out of paying their fair share of taxes. Which, by the way, is basically the social compact we had previously, that Reagan et al. undid in the 1980s, which lead to our present economic situation and the explosion of CEO compensation.
We need to be arguing that while it's totally understandable why you might want to get out of paying taxes, it's treasonous, and why do you hate America? And why do you hate Americans?
There's something else to be said here, about how this American preoccupation with deservingness is a morally warped form of concern for justice. In Americans' willingness – even, apparently, eagarness – to forego benefits they, themselves, might enjoy, rather than that the unworthy also enjoy them, we could find folly, accusing them of biting their noses to spite their faces. But there's this concept from economic anthropology called altruistic punishment. It refers to being willing to accept a cost to oneself to punish wrongdoers. It is not clear to me to what extent it is folly, and to what extent it is a more deliberate martyrdom. Americans have been, times ago, a people of noted generosity and self-sacrifice. Is this what it looks like when that goes bad?
Dear Fellow Americans,
It has of late been brought to my attention that the following weird phenomenon exists: that Americans, many or or most of them, have deep reservations about other people finding out what they earn at their jobs – despite increasingly seeing how being open with that information might benefit themselves and others they would like to benefit, despite nascent social movements making great good sense exhorting people to share the information of how much they make – and, yet, not knowing why they feel leary of disclosing their incomes.
I know why. You probably know why, too, and just haven't let yourself become fully conscious of the reason.
Americans are awful. Truly, truly awful. Awful in many ways, but I'm referring to one specific way that Americans are awful. One you've noticed.
Exhibit A is surely this. If you're in the Blue Nation, you've heard the sad and weary observation that the reason the USA doesn't have universal single payer healthcare is because, all other challenges and circumstances aside, Americans don't want universal single payer healthcare, because of the sticking point universal: if healthcare is universal, then somebody unworthy might get healthcare they don't desreve. Americans, many of them, and they will say so in almost as many words, don't want "their tax dollars" going to pay for healthcare for unworthy people.
Americans have amongst them a whole collection of unworthinesses that they consider disqualifying of providing someone with healthcare. There are those who feel people who have the termerity and bad judgment to be poor shouldn't be indulged with healthcare, and neither should their children. There are those incensed that universal healthcare would mean giving something expensive for free to rich people who could pay out of pocket for it. There are those who feel addicts must have gotten that way by willfully abusing drugs, and therefor deserve to die by medical neglect. There are those who are outraged to contemplate the tax money of real Americans going to healthcare for "foreigners" and "illegals". There are those who feel that healthcare should be reserved for white people, or at least non-black people because why should we pay for them? There are those who object to paying for the heathcare of those who "brought on themselves" their infirmities, like by being gay and getting AIDS. There are those who feel healthcare dollars would be better spent just on people who can benefit by it, unlike the disabled who are all just going to be crippled and die no matter what you do, so why waste the money on them? There are those who think public assistance with healthcare should be reserved for the truly ill and disabled, and why are we wasting money providing care for people who are mostly walking around fine?
There comes a point, and if you haven't gotten there yet, this is your invitation to hurry along and finally dig it already, where one starts to notice that there's so very many excuses for why this people or that people shouldn't be provided with healthcare, that the issue isn't any specific prejudice, but the deeper, scarier problem of prejudicialness itself. Wow, we might notice, Americans really feel entitled to discriminate in the allocation of a literally life and death resource.
And once you see that, well, it's not just healthcare, is it?
It is a deep and unquestioned part of American culture that Americans feel entitled to pass judgment on their fellow Americans' worthiness to receive the most basic of resources.
Now I'm sure you can immediately fill in other examples from other government-provided social services. I can hear some of you thinking about the cuts to "food stamps" aka Welfare aka EBT, and others of you thinking about how drug testing was made a condition of receiving food stamps in several states, and others thinking about how Section 8 housing vouchers discriminate against people with criminal records and anyone who might want to live with such a person, and so forth and so on. And I can hear a few of you pulling in memories – personal or in the media – of similar judgments made not by government programs but private charities.
But here's the thing: it's not just about charity or "government handouts" is it? It's not just about who is worthy to receive some resource they "didn't earn".
Oh, no. Americans are so entitled to pass judgment on whether others deserve the resources they get, they're quick to say you didn't earn what you were paid.
Americans hate Americans. Americans are so spiteful of their fellow Americans, they readily – reliably – attack their fellow Americans, you don't deserve to be paid so much.
If they know how much you're paid.
Check this out. It's a comment from a discussion back in late 2015 on UniversalHub.com, a Boston-area news blog. The discussion concerned information that came out about what MBTA (public transit) employes were being paid (all emphasis as in the original):
Good stuffWell, if someone is getting paid $35.58 an hour, their gross income for a 40 hour week is $1,423.20. One week's pay is one months' rent: that $36/hr employee can afford up to $1.4k rent a month. According to this 2018 Zumper report, the average rent for a one bedroom apartment in the "Boston Metro Area" was $1,854. That includes all of Eastern Mass, excluding the Cape but including Fall River. if you re-run their numbers for just within Rt 128 (the ring road around Boston that is by local convention demarcates the "Boston Metro Area"), the median one bedroom rent is $2,147.
By ccd on Tue, 12/22/2015 - 11:27am
So we pay top dollar for bottom of the barrel service...
"However, the control board was also told that the average hourly wage for MBTA rail employees is 30 percent above the national average. That $35.58 per hour average wage exceeds the averages at the top five transit agencies in the nation.
Bus operators make slightly less, at $34.99 per hour, but the presentation reportedly indicated that is about 50 percent above the national average."
Allow me to hammer this home: MBTA bus service doesn't go much beyond Route 128. At $35/hr, a bus driver for the MBTA is not being paid enough to afford to live in an average market-rate apartment anywhere within the MBTA's bus service area.
What's the larger context of this comment? The MBTA was asking for a fare increase, again, so, of course, the MBTA was being accused of wasting taxpayer money, and, as usual, they're wasting taxpayer money on paying their employees too much is where that argument went. It always does.
In America, it always does.
I don't know this commenter, this "ccd" user. I don't know if he's a garden variety Mass liberal, or one of UH's resident conservative opposition. What's so very interesting here is that one can't tell and it doesn't matter. It could be either, couldn't it? Both liberals and conservatives do this all the damn time. It's so usual, we don't even register it as a thing. And we certainly don't ascribe it to one political position or another.
It isn't owned by either Red or Blue America. This is a true aspect of a truly national American culture.
Where did "ccd" get his information? Oh, he was pointed at it by UH, where the item was posted by the proprietor, newsman adamg, who is reliably Blue:
And that, in turn points to an ostensibly muckraking news bit from a local news station (WCVB):
Some T tracks maintained by a guy working more than 80 hours a week
By adamg on Tue, 12/22/2015 - 11:09am
Don't worry, he's getting paid overtime. Lots and lots of overtime.
BOSTON —Note: "rail and bus employees". We're not talking about administrators or executives. We're talking about the people who get their hands dirty. We're talking about the people who make the trains and buses go. We're talking about the people who are up before dawn and the people working at midnight. We're talking about blue-collar workers.
Members of the T's Fiscal and Management Control Board learned Monday evening that rail and bus employees are both being paid drastically more than the national average.
Where did WCVB get their information?
"[...] the State House News Service reported, citing a presentation from Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority Chief Administrator Brian Shortsleeve.""State House News Service": boy, that sure sounds official. Is that a government agency? Nope.
The News Service is located in Room 458 of the State House. We are an independent, privately owned wire service covering Massachusetts government in depth. Our staff tries to serve as a primary source of information on legislation, issues and background, in additional to producing traditional news copy.Well, nothing wrong with that. But they're just another news outlet, one that, fascinatingly, sells to a market of journalists (they're subscriber funded). Consequently, they're also behind a paywall. It's not clear that there's anything back there that more fully illuminates what WCVB reports that they reported. The upshot seems to be that – despite their proud claim to "objectivity" and neutrality – they are terribly, terribly alarmed that blue collar MBTA employees be paid enough to maybe, possibly, make enough to afford to rent an very modest apartment for themselves, within the area in which they work, if they can find one on the left end of the price bell-curve. Accusation that the MBTA costs too much is generally considered a conservative rallying cry here (liberals castigate the T for doing a bad job), which suggests a right-leaning bias to the organ, but, hey. Who knows. The practice of attacking workers for being paid too much for the work they did is a truly non-partisan aisle-crossing sport.
I've been seeing this my entire life, and I bet you have too. I remember it coming up in news reporting about the teachers' strikes in the 1970s - What are they striking for!? They're paid like kings!. I remember it in the news coverage of automobile plant closings in the 70s and 80s, and manufacturing jobs leaving the country, where is was insinuated or stated that if autoworkers hadn't been so greedy and demanded such unfairly high wages for what was such unworthy work, then the plants wouldn't have had to close, and if they wanted to be paid reasonably, well, they should have stayed in school, gone to college, and become worthy white-collar worker, deserving of a stable well-paying job like, you know, a school teacher or college professor or a newspaper reporter.
I remember it from the air-traffic controllers strike in 1981, the one which Reagan broke, making the very same comparative argument [YouTube] [Wikisource]:
[...] At one point in these negotiations agreement was reached and signed by both sides, granting a $40 million increase in salaries and benefits. This is twice what other government employees can expect. It was granted in recognition of the difficulties inherent in the work these people perform. Now, however, the union demands are 17 times what had been agreed to — $681 million. This would impose a tax burden on their fellow citizens which is unacceptable.Reagan, at least, had the grace to allow that maybe they deserved more than they were being paid "in recognition of the difficulties inherent in the work these people perform", but note the insinuation of unfairness inherent in framing it as "twice what other government employees can expect", a phrase which is bewildering in its goofy incoherence. ("What other government employees can expect"? Which other government employees? Are all government employees being paid more or less the same, that you can compare what air-traffic controllers to it? How much are these other government employees being paid? Is what they "can expect" something reasonable, or are they being woefully cheated of a living wage? Should they be striking too?) And then he frames it as, "we already agreed to give them an unfair raise, but then they demanded even more".
But if Reagan had the grace to allow that maybe they deserved more pay, the media took their cue. Consider this news coverage [YouTube], which argues that the strike isn't having all that much effect on air travel, so has the subtext that what air traffic controllers do just isn't that important so isn't worth very much. And the American public ate it up. We named an airport after Reagan, didn't we?
We see it in healthcare, here in the 2010s, where people blame doctors for making too much money, and advocate single-payer as a way to force healthcare providers' incomes lower as a way to save money. That's what it means when people praise "Medicare-for-All" for how "Medicare can get lower rates". Right: lower rates of provider pay, which it "gets" by those prices being fixed by Congress. But, yeah, absolutely, if we had single-payer, we could force medical providers to provide healthcare for less money; we could force them to provide it for so much less money they just go out of business.
But you don't have to look to the conventional media to see this; it's writ large on the internet. Any time issues of compensation come up on any forum, such as Metafilter, there will be bitter, jealous, spiteful responses to the tunes of you know there are people who would be grateful to earn that much - stop whining and what you do isn't as important as really important workers, you know and what you earn is a function of how useful what you do is to society so I guess what you do isn't very useful and if you'd made better choice then you'd make better money and you're going to bankrupt your employer/industry/government/society by demanding more and then where will we all be and so on and so forth.
This is why every damn time in this journal I discuss personal earnings, mine or anybody else's, I tie it back to rents. Because without that objective sanity check, the knee-jerk splenetic American response will reliably kick in and make a discussion of earnings into a referrendum on someone's subjective worthiness – their worthiness of the means of sustenance. If I don't nail the discussion to objective facts of how incomes compare to rents, some asshole will inevitably volunteer in the comments that – no matter how little we're talking – it is too much, and no one has no right to complain how little it is.
This is what happens when people try to oragnize for a living wage in the US: it becomes a referrendum on whether "people" – all people, some people – deserve – morally, culturally – to earn what they're already paid.
I'd like here to stop a moment to give due props to Ann Landers for radicalizing me about this. Or rather for the pseudonymous letter writer with whom she shared her bully pulpit on one occasion in my youth. Yeah, that bomb-throwing radical, Ann Landers. Lord, do you kids even know who/what Ann Landers was? She was a pseudonymous advice columnist - she was the pseudonymous advice columnist. The pseudonym and column live on; she's long deceased. She was massively, massively syndicated in US papers. Everyone in American for generations knew who Ann Landers was.
On this occasion (it was IIRC in my teens, so sometime in the 1980s), there was a letter she ran, setting her straight. Apparently – I gathered from context, having not seen the previous column – a letter from another reader editorializing on the compensation of teachers. Apparently the previous letter writer had been arguing for better pay for teachers, and had – and this was the crucial bit, addressed in the present letter – based that argument on observing that teachers are paid less than garbage collectors.
Let that sink in for a moment. Just confront it.
Think about what it means to raise that as an objection to teacher compensation.
Think about what it means to use that rhetorical maneuver, without any further argument or explication as to why teachers should earn more than garbage collectors, secure in the knowledge that one's audience – in the case of Ann Landers' readers, the entire newspaper-reading US population of that day in 1980-something – would understand your point, and probably concur.
The implications are that:
• Teachers should be earning more than garbage collectors
• Because teachers' work is more valuable and worthy than that of garbage collectors
• Therefore (or maybe just coincidentally) teachers are more deserving and worthy of compensation than garbage collectors are
• And, key, that this superiority of deservingness of teachers over garbage collectors is so manefestly obvious, so unneeding of explanation, as to be outrageous on the face of it and a self-evident injustice.
• That the self-evident injustice of teachers being paid less than garbage collectors is because garbage collectors are self-evidently very undeserving of compensation.
I remember when I read the rebutting letter, encountering this proposition at the beginning and understanding in a flash all the above implications – and not thinking a thing of it. Sure. Sounds sensible to me. Teachers, very important, should be paid more than mere garbage collectors. And one thing more I understood. Teachers are white-collar. Garbage collectors are blue-collar. In the "how outrageous!" implication of the comparison was not just an argument for the comparative superiority of the worth of the work of teachers to that of garbage collectors, but to the worth of teachers to the worth of garbage collectors. How dare any sort of blue-collar worker – especially the bluest of blue-collars, the dirtiest of hands – collect more money than a white-collar worker, especially than a virtuous, pedestal-perched, saintly white-collar worker like a schoolteacher. It is an insult - it implies that the schoolteacher is worth less than the garbage collector. That is not to be borne. Not by the white-collar middle class.
I didn't need anybody to explain that. It was already in my head at the ripe age of, what, 15? Self-evident.
The rebutting letter, setting Ann Landers straight, was from a garbage collector's wife.
The letter writer pointed out what the value of garbage collectors is to society. She pointed out that it is hard, dangerous work, and that it's very grueling physical labor that takes a toll out of the bodies of those who do it. She pointed out that it happens out of doors in all weather, from blizzards to heatwaves. She pointed out that it is nasty, dirty work that few people want to do, and many are not up to the arduities of.
She pointed out it was honorable work and an honest living, one earns by the sweat of one's brow.
She pointed out that if garbage collectors are well compensated, well, shouldn't they be? Don't they deserveit?
Her argument wasn't that teachers should be poorly compensated. It was to rebut the self-evidentness of the presumption that garbage collectors should be poorly compensated – the presumption that consequently any white-collar worker being paid less than a garbage collector was being paid less than they deserve.
It was one of those moments for me of being shaken awake - and apparently Ann Landers found it so, too, thanking the letter writer for calling her out, and, IIRC, apologizing for endorsing the previous letter's stance.
Teachers are paid less than garbage collectors!!: it is the purest example I know of American classism. The idea that some people just are more worthy than others of the means of sustenance, by virtue of their class. That there is a hierarchy of works that we all know, whereby teachers are above garbage collectors, obviously, and that the resources of society should be allocated on the basis of this hierarchy, naturally.
I would propose that, famously, for the distribution of resources in American society there are two bases that have ever been considered legitimate, the Red one and the Blue one – and this is neither.
The Red Nation champions capitalism – or so it claims. Under a laissez-faire market, what one is entitled to be paid for one's labor is whatever one can get, which, it is understood, is a simple matter of supply and demand. If you bring rare capabilities to the market, the price for your labor – your wage – goes up. if there are many people who can do what you offer, the price goes down. The value of your work is the value of that work to the market. It has nothing to do with the moral value of your work to society (though there are those who have gone there), or any other subjective notion of value. It's quite simply all the market will bear, a thoroughly amoral notion of the value of work. By this logic, if there are more people who want to work as teachers than there are who want to work as garbage collectors – or rather, if the rate of people wanting teacher jobs per number of teacher jobs thare is higher than the rate of people wanting garbage collector jobs per number of garbage collector jobs there are – then, yes, garbage collectors will – and should – be paid more than teachers.
The Blue Nation inclines of late to a shadow of communism – though it will deny it. It may call it "socialism", but in it one can see moving the other principle of how resources should be allocated in a society: "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need". This is the notion that every person should be able to count on having a decent standard of living, and that shouldn't be dependent on their ability to compete in a labor market to earn it for themselves. The only deserving you need to be to receive a share of the common bounty you did by being born a human being; even the unjust and undeserving of admiration or commendation are deserving of food and shelter, clothing and medicine. By this logic, garbage collectors are amply deserving of being well compensated – as well compensated as teachers. They certainly are no less deserving than teachers, and teachers are no less deserving than garbage collectors. Perhaps over a basic layer of security there can be some compensation set by capitalistic means, where those who offer services less available are paid some bonus to incent it, in which case perhaps garbage collectors should be paid more than teachers to make sure there's still people willing to collect garbage, but neither should be paid poorly.
But the ugly truth of American culture is that most Americans don't really believe in either capitalism orcommunism. They believe in classism. They believe it is natural and self-evident that resources should be allocated on the basis of who is the most deserving, where deservingness refers primarily to a hierarchy of social classes, secondarily mediated by moral deservingness.
Consequently, in America, all discussion of who gets paid what turns into an argument of whether the recipient is deserving of their pay. Which is to say, it entails an argument of why someone isn't deserving of what they earn.
Along come people on the left, Blue Nation Americans, who have noticed that sharing salary data would allow workers to organize, would help root out sexism and racism in pay rates, would benefit all employees in their salary negotiations by equalizing the knowledge imbalance across the negotiating table with employers. Everybody should share their salary information! they exhort.
There's a reason you don't feel like doing that. For Americans that's a lot like stripping naked and jumping in a tank of piranhas.
There's a reaon that hospitals and other health care institutions keep insisting that they are up against the financial ropes and are having trouble keeping the lights on, but don't release numbers. (A bunch of reasons, of which this is but one, actually.) They know that if they say "this is how much we need to pay our medical professionals" the American public will respond, "Why do you need to pay doctors so much?! So greedy, just pay them less."
There's a reason that I rebutted April Dembosky's "Sorry, The Therapist Can't See You — Not Now, Not Anytime Soon" by breaking down in excruciating length what the reported compensation numbers actually meant.
A Canadian friend of mine visited me, some moons ago, and our peregrinations took us through a union protest happening in Harvard Square. My friend had been a shop steward of their union back home, and asked me why it was that Americans didn't do unions. I don't remember if I put this across at the time, but all this I have explained here was what came to mind. When Americans see a picket line, they don't think, "good on those workers, standing up for themselves and getting themselves a fair share of the pie." They think, "those scoundrels, trying to get more than they deserve, stealing from the rest of us."
Americans (I remember saying) have no sense of solidarity. They don't look on their fellow Americans and identify with them, or see them as fellows. Americans look on their fellow Americans with suspicion, with spite, with spleen.
Ben Franklin, we are told, once quipped to the nascent nation, "We must all hang together, or we will surely hang separately." Well, we've certainly made our choice, haven't we?
What would it look like, for us not to be like this? It would look like any time you heard, well, anyone, really, but especially your fellow Americans insist that they aren't paid enough – that they're struggling to make ends meet, that they're struggling to get ahead, that they're struggling to have a decent lifestyle – that you start from an assumption they're right, and the assumption that they have as reasonable a claim to a better life as anyone. (We could call this "Believe Workers".) It would look like approving of people's efforts, individually and collectively, to command more pay than they've been getting, and cheering them on, even if they make more than you do, even if that raises your personal expenses.
It looks like not crossing picket lines. Not ever. It looks like honoring other people's strikes.
It looks like shutting down people who start sniping and spiting in knee-jerk spleen about other people being undeserving of compensation. It means stepping up and saying, "Not cool" or "You jeal bro" or "We don't do that here" or "Look, I don't know if you consider yourself a liberal, but that's not what solidarity looks like" or "Market likes them better, huh?" or "Don't piss on other people's pay" or "Build up, not tear down."
It looks like abandoning the American preoccupation with deservingness and who doesn't have it, in favor of believing either that sellers of labor have as much right to throw their collective weight around as do the buyers of labor, God bless capitalism, or that every person is deserving of their own vine and fig tree, out of the collective prosperity, God bless America. Either being a Red Nation good sport about market competition, or being a Blue Nation humanitarian in the face of human failings.
It looks like giving up quarreling about who is getting more than their fair share of pie, and starting to demand answers about why so many people are being expected to make due with so few pies between them, and how might there be more pie to go around.
I looks like responding to people saying they need more pie with the agreement they should have all the pie they need, even if there isn't more pie to give them right just now, even if we aren't the people able to give them any pie. It's certainly not responding that they don't deserve any more pie than they have, and probably don't even deserve that much.
It means being generally in favor of people, all people, your fellow Americans, making more money and having nicer lifestyles. Even people who are different from you. Even people you may think morally your inferiors. Even people who belong to classes you don't think of as as good as yours. Even people who offend you with their ways. It means making a moral principle of it: even if I don't like you, and don't like your people, I wouldn't see you starve, and I wouldn't see you suffer poverty. It means accepting the limitation: I don't believe I should be entitled to punish you – or agitate for your punishment by others – merely because I dislike you and your way of life, and I believe it is immoral of me to celebrate your misforture or take any satisfactions from it.
It would mean regarding our fellow Americans with a default assumption of their good faith and inherent human worthiness. We could even, later, once we have some practice and we're up to it, branch out to other, non-American peoples.
It would mean actually doing that tedious, uncool thing it says in the Bible about loving your neighbor as yourself, even when one's neighbor is a different color, or isn't a native English speaker, or doesn't worship the Bible. (None of which, I'll point out, are mentioned in the Bible as "Get Out of Following the Bible Free" cards.) You don't have to be sentimental and smarmy about it, and it doesn't involve protestations or declarations - the Bible doesn't say "Go to thy neighbor and tell them you love them." (Quite to the contrary: 1 Corinthians 13:1 – "charity" or "love", it works either way.) You just have to be on the side of them doing okay. You just have to be in favor of their prosperity and wellbeing. You just have to concern yourself with their struggles.
It would mean deciding you are on the side of Americans. All of them. Not against the other peoples of the world, but against the world itself, the caprices of fortune and the vicissitudes of fate.
"But Siderea," I can hear one of you nervously thinking, "this all sounds heart-warming and warm and fuzzy and all. But... does this mean we can't say that CEOs don't deserve their exorbitant paychecks? And other obscenely wealthy captains of industry?"
Yes, it does. Every time one indulges in criticizing executive compensation on the grounds of deservingnessone reinscribes the notion that how much someone should be paid depends on how much they deserve to be paid.
You're not going to do your target a lick of harm that way. It's such an easy argument to rebut, for captains of industry – "we're at the top of the class hierarchy, of course we deserve to have all the money" – and they can afford PR teams to promulgate excuses like "we deserve the money for making so many jobs" and "actually our skills are so leet we do deserve all our compensation". There's no way such an argument will ever reduce their compensation one red cent. But it will rebound on everyone else – everyone who doesn't have a wall of money to hide behind. It reinforces a culture of tearing down everyone in arms reach – which means lower on the class hierarchy than the top-out-of-sight. It normalizes debating compensation – debating the allocation of the means of sustenance in our society – in terms of deservingness, and then all the rest of us have to live in that world.
The good news is you don't need that argument. If what you want is to reduce income inequality, you'll find it's far more effective to argue that everyone deserves all they can earn, but nobody deserves to get out of paying their fair share of taxes. Which, by the way, is basically the social compact we had previously, that Reagan et al. undid in the 1980s, which lead to our present economic situation and the explosion of CEO compensation.
We need to be arguing that while it's totally understandable why you might want to get out of paying taxes, it's treasonous, and why do you hate America? And why do you hate Americans?
There's something else to be said here, about how this American preoccupation with deservingness is a morally warped form of concern for justice. In Americans' willingness – even, apparently, eagarness – to forego benefits they, themselves, might enjoy, rather than that the unworthy also enjoy them, we could find folly, accusing them of biting their noses to spite their faces. But there's this concept from economic anthropology called altruistic punishment. It refers to being willing to accept a cost to oneself to punish wrongdoers. It is not clear to me to what extent it is folly, and to what extent it is a more deliberate martyrdom. Americans have been, times ago, a people of noted generosity and self-sacrifice. Is this what it looks like when that goes bad?
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment