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Sat, 23 May 2009
About 20 years ago, when I was earning my keep as a rope-walker and fire-eater, I prevailed on Roger, an old-time circus performer who wintered in Fall River, to give me a lesson in rigging. Roger was a cool guy, and performed atop a 120-foot sway pole that wobbled back and forth while he did handstands and the like way up there. Circus performers all do their own rigging -- because who else would you trust? -- and he turned out to be as expert as any long-term survivor of a career like that.
I went over to his place one day, and Roger showed me the sequined capes and clogs he made his entrance with. I seem to remember a chimpanzee costume, too, though I can't remember how that fit in.
Over lunch, Roger showed me how to arrange stakes in the ground to hold weight, according to what kind of ground it is and how much the load. He had tons of other useful advice for a beginner, about minimizing props and the importance of acquiring a second act. (He also had a very funny plate-spinning act that involved breaking a lot of china.) The best advice he gave me, though, he saved for last. As we made ready to part, Roger looked straight in my eyes and said, "I've given you some help here, and here's how you can return it: Don't work cheap."
He was right, too. Since then, I've noticed the rate for a variety performer has barely budged. Individual performers I know have seen their wages grow, as they improved and found new markets, but overall, I don't think the market rates have gone up much.
The reasons why aren't too hard to see. Performing is a fun job, and anyone would rather be working than not working, so the temptation to work cheap is strong. Plus, when negotiating a gig, you're always hearing, "It's a fundraiser for a good cause," or "It'll be great exposure."
But what's good for us individually isn't always good for us collectively. A performer who works cheap helps make the market worse for everyone else. In just the same way, a worker who gives back some wages may keep his or her job, but is contributing to the erosion of wages for everyone else.
The "paradox of thrift" is the economists' version of this conundrum. If every family increases the rate at which they save their income, we'll all go broke together, even while we save money. A certain amount of spending is necessary to keep businesses afloat and if everyone does what is rational for themselves, our economy will tank -- worse than it already has.
So in the current economic conditions, what can we do to keep wages and spending from diving? What's needed is an institution to hold wages up and prevent people from working cheap. Unions are one answer, and government is another. Peer pressure from people like Roger is still another.
One of the interesting features of wages in Rhode Island is that, according to statistics from the US Labor Department, white-collar work pays on a scale comparable to similar jobs in Connecticut and Massachusetts, while blue-collar work tends to pay much less. I spent a little time with this data a while ago, and noticed that Rhode Island is unique in the Northeast in this respect. In all the other Northeastern states, the ranks are comparable, or reversed, with the blue-collar work ranking higher compared to the national average than white-collar work. According to my analysis of the statistics, we sit with California and the states of the deep South. This wage disparity helps explain why our average income is lower and our poverty rate is higher than our neighbor states.
There are some who say this is just the market at work and it should be left alone. But it's hard to see why, really. These are private matters in one respect, but these low wages collectively have a huge -- and depressive -- impact on the economy that we all make our living in.
What can the government do? It can crack down on the abuse of contracting, for one thing. Employment laws exist for a reason, but long-term contracting jobs exist to get around those laws. Many of these people are employees in every sense of the word except the official. They tend to make less than market wages, and they don't have workers comp or disability coverage. Freshman Representative Chris Fierro of Woonsocket has been doing yeoman's work in pushing the Assembly to do something about this in the construction industry, and I wish him luck with it. Other possible reforms might involve raising the minimum wage further, or enacting "living wage" ordinances. It's never popular to insist something ought to be more expensive, but it's the way to keep our economy moving.
Free market ideologues will doubtless clamor this is interference in the free labor market. At which point I'll ask what does it mean to require welfare recipients to work (or prisoners for that matter), or to provide health benefits for Wal-Mart and other employers who won't insure their employees. This is not to mention the state's own abuse of contracting -- the janitorial services company staffed by illegal aliens, for example. These all act to depress wages or benefits. In other words, the government already interferes with the market, against the interests of blue-collar workers. We've been doing that for a long time, and no one says boo about it.
This is even before you consider the economic impact of the cutbacks and layoffs associated with the state budget debacle, itself largely caused by discredited supply-side tax policy, again working against the interests of the great bulk of our population. In other words, in one category after another, from tax policy to employment, your state government is committed to policies that make our economic debacle worse.
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