(Photo by Giorgio Trovato on Unsplash)
One of the quick responses to our resistance to wealth inequality is that we don’t want to disincentivize hard work. Why shouldn’t someone who works hard get rich?
Well, I think that they should. The question is what we mean by works hard, and by rich.
For example, let’s take our road foreman. Responsible for the safety and accessibility of a town of 800, supervising the condition of 35 miles of mostly gravel road. He holds a commercial driver’s license, so he’s allowed to drive massive trucks on public roads. He can also operate a grader, a loader, a mid-sized excavator, a backhoe. He can do fundamental maintenance and repair on each. He knows how to plow, how to repair mud-sinks, how to replace culverts, how to drain water. He wrestles plow assemblies up onto frames, chops frozen salt-sand mix before it clogs the sander, sprays calcium chloride onto dusty roads in the summer. He knows how to buy and install road fabric, how to specify grades of gravel, when to call in reinforcements for heavy storms.
He works hard. He isn’t rich.
Here’s how I think about it. There are exactly 168 hours in everyone’s week, whether you’re an infant or an elder, whether you’re homeless or a tycoon. Let’s look at what happens at different hourly wages.
- 40 hours at $15 an hour: $600 a week, $30,000 a year
- 40 hours at $150 an hour: $6,000 a week, $300,000 a year
- 40 hours at $1,500 an hour: $60,000 a week, $3,000,000 a year
That seems rich, don’t you think? But let’s say that we aren’t talking about 40 hour weeks, let’s say that our miracle CEO never sleeps and never takes a minute to rest. At $1,500 an hour and 168 hours for 52 weeks, he or she would make $13,104,000 for a year of continuous toil.
At that rate, it would take this person over 76 years to become a billionaire if they never spent a penny of it.
There comes a scale at which money no longer comes from work. It comes from the work of others. It comes from the ways that others have made bets with it, or on it. It comes from political influence. It comes from everywhere OTHER THAN hard work.
As I read last week, “record profits” is just a synonym for “low wages.” The paradox of “rewarding hard work” is that oligarchs become and remain so by ensuring that hard work isn’t well rewarded, that benefits flow upward rather than outward. Who works harder than our road foreman? Who works harder than an ER nurse, than a kindergarten teacher, than a McDonalds line cook at lunch rush?
It’s time for not merely a minimum wage, but a maximum as well. Reward hard work, regardless of what it looks like, instead of the logic of the casino and the grifter.
