For generations, many Americans have bought into the thought that wages are always determined by impersonal labor markets, and that greater productivity leads inevitably to higher wages. Author Michale Lind says that, in reality, wages are influenced by worker bargaining power. He says, since the 1980s, American employers and their political allies in both parties have crushed worker power by nearly annihilating private sector unions, outsourcing jobs, weaponizing trade and immigration policy against workers, and rigging labor contracts in favor of the bosses.
The result is today’s American economy which he describes as a low-wage, high-welfare system, in which many Americans in some sectors are paid so poorly that they must rely on government welfare to survive. Cheap-labor employers' profit from low wages, while the taxpayers pick up the bill.
In Hell to Pay: How the Suppression of Wages is Destroying America, historian and journalist Michael Lind discusses the myths that he says prop up a system that keeps too many American employees underpaid and overworked.
