Back to the 19th Century

02/09/2015 07:34 pm ET | Updated Apr 11, 2015

My recent column about the growth of on-demand jobs like Uber making life less predictable and secure for workers unleashed a small barrage of criticism from some who contend that workers get what they're worth in the market.

A Forbes Magazine contributor, for example, writes that jobs exist only "when both employer and employee are happy with the deal being made." So if the new jobs are low-paying and irregular, too bad.

Much the same argument was voiced in the late nineteenth century over alleged "freedom of contract." Any deal between employees and workers was assumed to be fine if both sides voluntarily agreed to it.

It was an era when many workers were "happy" to toil twelve-hour days in sweat shops for lack of any better alternative.


Finally, after decades of labor strife and political tumult, the twentieth century brought an understanding that capitalism requires minimum standards of decency and fairness - workplace safety, a minimum wage, maximum hours (and time-and-a-half for overtime), and a ban on child labor.



By the 1950s, when 35 percent of private-sector workers belonged to a labor union, they were able to negotiate higher wages and better working conditions than employers would otherwise have been "happy" to provide.

But now we seem to be heading back to nineteenth century.


The nation's biggest corporations and Wall Street banks are larger and more potent than ever.


So it's not surprising we're once again hearing that workers are worth no more than what they can get in the market.

But as we should have learned a century ago, markets don't exist in nature. They're created by human beings. The real question is how they're organized and for whose benefit.



During the thirty years after the end of World War II, as the economy doubled in size, so did the wages of most Americans -- along with improved hours and working conditions.


This isn't because most Americans are worth less. In fact, worker productivity is higher than ever.


That includes trade agreements protecting the intellectual property of large corporations and Wall Street's financial assets, but not American jobs and wages.

Bailouts of big Wall Street banks and their executives and shareholders when they can't pay what they owe, but not of homeowners who can't meet their mortgage payments.


Antitrust leniency toward a vast swathe of American industry - including Big Cable (Comcast, AT&T, Time-Warner), Big Tech (Amazon, Google), Big Pharma, the largest Wall Street banks, and giant retailers (Walmart).

But less tolerance toward labor unions -- as workers trying to form unions are fired with impunity, and more states adopt so-called "right-to-work" laws that undermine unions.


So what will be the galvanizing force for change this time?
