Written by Rosemary Agonito   

GUESS WHO FEELS MOST ENTITLED TO “FREE STUFF” – NOT THE 47%

By Rosemary Agonito


For too long poor folks, low income workers, disabled people, the elderly, and others have been bashed for being “takers,” for feeling entitled to programs, “free stuff,” that sustain their meager lifestyle in the absence of an adequate income. But these “entitlements” pale next to the sense of entitlement exhibited by the “job creators,” the so-called “makers.”

Call them capitalists, business owners, financiers, entrepreneurs, industrialists – they’re employers, the people who hire others to do the work that builds wealth for themselves. What do they feel entitled to? The labor of others at whatever wages and benefits, or lack of benefits, they choose to pay - $1 a day or less in third world countries, minimum wage without benefits in the United States, $2.20 in the restaurant and domestic service businesses, a living wage with benefits, or whatever they choose to offer.

For job applicants who cannot negotiate their wages (and that’s most workers), it’s here’s-what-the-job-offers and take-it-or-leave-it. In hard economic times, when workers exceed available jobs, “leaving it” is not really an option.

In exchange for the wage offered, the employer then owns the labor of that employee on the job. The owner dictates the work, working conditions, when work begins and ends, what one can and cannot do on the job. The employer also determines the safety or risks inherent in the work and workplace, in effect, controlling the health and safety, and in some cases, the life of workers. (According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 4, 690 workers were killed on the job and about 50,000 died of occupational diseases in 2010, while 3.8 million were reported injured on the job, estimated to be at least half the actual number.) Far too often, given the meager wage, this is not a just or appropriate bargain by any measure.

Employers, of course, argue that because the person is getting paid, they are entitled to that labor and its control. But when that labor is gotten without adequate and just compensation, the employer appropriates something to himself he is not entitled to.

In its simplest sense, it’s about justice and reciprocity: I give you X; you give me something equivalent to X. Since a worker is “selling” himself/herself and the wage literally enables a worker (and family) to live a human life, it must be a just and adequate wage. This means, at the very least, a living wage which enables the worker to provide necessities, minimal comfort for self and family, and savings for retirement and unforeseen emergencies. A living wage should not be confused with the minimum wage, which fails to do this.

Yet with rare exception, employers do not feel obligated to adequately compensate workers as evidenced by the fact that employers, first and foremost, seek to maximize profits. Invariably this means the less one pays employees, the greater the profit. I grant, of course, that there are employers with a sense of justice and reciprocity. However, they are the exception. In most cases where employers pay a decent wage with benefits, they are reacting to market forces that require this, for example, a shortage of skilled workers, not a sense of justice.

Even a cursory look at the history of employer/employee relations, in the absence of laws regulating employment, say in the 19th and early 20th century, reveals an unabashed sense of entitlement by employers to the labor of others - an unbroken pattern of horrifically low wages, lack of benefits, long hours, and poor and often dangerous working conditions. So unjust were employers, they “hired” children at even lower wages and paid women far less than men for the same work. And need we mention the horrors of slave labor, when “employers” routinely appropriated to themselves the labor and personhood of their slaves in exchange for minimal food and shelter, never mind a wage.

It took protracted worker struggles, massive protests, resistance, and union organizing – often met with violent responses by their employers – to improve conditions and wages. In the case of slave labor, it took a civil war. Unions and collective bargaining, coupled with hard won federal and state regulations, alone insured some semblance of just reciprocity between employer and employee.

In recent decades, however, we’ve seen a slow but steady return to low wages, fewer benefits, poor working conditions, and large scale unemployment, as employers outsource jobs to low wage countries with little or no employment or environmental regulation. Those same jobs in third world countries resemble exactly the conditions American workers once experienced – starvation wages, long hours, child labor, and horrible working conditions (suicide nets around windows to catch workers trying to kill themselves in China, textile workers burned alive because of blocked exists in Bangladesh . . .).

At the same time that workers have lost ground, employers (CEOs and other executives of companies) have seen their compensation (salary, benefits, pension plans, stock options, bonuses, etc.) increase exponentially. So we have CEOs making multimillions of dollars annually while paying their workers minimum wage (or slightly better) with few or no benefits – workers who make the product or provide the service that actually generates wealth. Excessive pay at the top robs workers of the millions that a few decades ago were spread among workers. So the “job creators” have become the wealth takers, while the wealth makers, workers, are consigned to poverty or economic deprivation.

Meanwhile, company profits continue to grow. Even as the country crawled its way out of recession in 2010, American corporations earned the most profits since government records began. But as corporate profits have soared, workers’ wages have stagnated or dropped – the annual median wage of U.S. workers is an appalling $26,364. Workers have not shared in those grand profits. Both astronomical salaries at the top and unprecedented corporate profits have squeezed workers’ incomes.

These changing conditions - deterioration at the bottom and advancement at the top - have paralleled a decrease in representation by labor unions. Without collective bargaining, most workers have no leverage with employers who can exercise their sense of entitlement at will. A recent Harvard/Washington University study concluded that “the decline of organized labor explains a fifth to a third of the growth of inequality.”

Employers seem oblivious to their egregious sense of entitlement to the labor of others for whatever they choose to pay, however inadequate and unjust. And they don’t object when the Republican Party, which they largely support, complains bitterly about all those people who want “free stuff” (food stamps, medicaid, school lunches for needy children, student loans, etc.), while turning a blind eye to all the “free stuff” employers want from their workers – poorly compensated labor, the loss of worker autonomy on the job, the ability to determine an employee’s standard of living, control over worker health and safety on the job . . . Nor will they acknowledge that the low or inadequate wages they pay and the benefits they fail to provide cause the need for these programs - that government largesse is subsidizing their greed and enabling their sense of entitlement.

Ironically, business owners not only take from employees; they also demand “free stuff” from government - tax breaks and incentives for locating in a particular area, tax breaks and loopholes in the tax code that benefit them personally and their companies, government subsidies for research and development and countless other purposes, use of government land for free or at below market price, government payment of the necessary benefits employers fail to provide their employees (Walmart offers guides to employees on how to get medicaid.) Local and state governments fork over at least $70 billion a year to corporations, never mind the astronomical amounts the federal government gives. Then there’s taxpayer funded government infrastructure networks that enable the very existence of businesses. And there’s government favoritism resulting from corporate pressure and outright collusion with government to undermine public employee unions which set an employment standard corporations don’t want to compete with.

Employers, of course, will tell us that they cannot afford to pay more than minimum wage, or whatever they pay. In some cases, especially with really small businesses, this may be true. But if it is true, then employers are not entitled to the labor of workers. If an employer hires a worker at minimum wage, say $7.25 hour for 40 hours, he/she is appropriating an employee’s labor for $290 a week. That is not a living wage for anyone. Now suppose a living wage for this person is $14 hour. That would mean that the $290 the employer can afford to pay only entitles him/her to roughly 20 hours a week of that employee’s labor. The other 20 hours a week, the employer feels entitled to unjustly appropriate for free. It’s akin to having $500 to buy a sofa, yet extorting the shopkeeper to give you the $1,000 sofa.

Americans need to shatter, once and for all, the myths of the “makers” and the “takers,” earned stuff and “free stuff.” We need to stop the adulation of billionaires and millionaires and their so-called “earned success” (nobody “earns” five or ten or twenty million dollars a year, but plenty of people “take” it). Most of all, we need to work to revitalize and expand union membership across industry sectors if we are ever to empower workers, revitalize the middle class, restore the American Dream, and end poverty in the richest country on earth.

Rosemary Agonito is an award winning author whose most recent book is HYPOCRISY, INC.: How the Religious Right Fabricates Christian Values and Undermines Democracy. www.RosemaryAgonito.com?HypocrisyInc