Last week, Walmart, still America’s largest employer, announced it would reduce starting wages for new hires by a dollar an hour. Though no existing workers will see reduced wages, Walmart retains their fiscal advantage, partly, through constant employee rollover; they’re banking on shedding most current workers quickly and refilling their ranks at lower wages. Under ordinary circumstances, this might anger customers and workers, but would be forgotten quickly.
Except that same Walmart announced a $20 billion stock buyback program in November. That means Walmart had $20 billion in unallocated revenues, and rather than spending it on wages, benefits, or corporate development, they rededicated that money to manipulating stock values by creating artificial scarcity. Contra the Reaganite belief that wealthy people plow revenues into the common good, Walmart is actively using its surplus to take value off the market.
On one level, this demonstrates the falsehood underlying libertarian thinking: most people might do right without compulsion, but the rich absolutely won’t. They became rich through resource hoarding, market manipulation, and wage theft, and they won’t stop unless somebody in authority forces them. On another level, though, this demonstrates not only an economic outcome, but a social principle. We’re witnessing the return of a modern technocratic serfdom.
Throughout my lifetime, Americans have accepted a public ethic that employment is a moral imperative, regardless of anything produced. We expect teenagers to get jobs at McDonalds, Walmart, or the mall, the minute they’re physically capable of working and handling the equipment safely. Not only have we accept that teenagers should work, to gain putative “skills,” but we accept the obverse: that low-skilled, poorly paying jobs are for teenagers.
This moral imperative to work continues into adulthood. Since the 1990s, America has tied receipt of poverty protection, like EBT and WIC, to having a job—regardless of whether regions and communities have employment available. This commitment is bipartisan: the work requirement was shepherded through Congress by Newt Gingrich, and ratified by Bill Clinton. Administrations representing both major American political parties have preserved this requirement ever since.
The current administration seems unlikely to reverse this. As Joe Biden said at the 2020 Democratic National Convention: “A job is about a lot more than a paycheck. It’s about your dignity…. It’s about your place in the community.” Biden has repeatedly stressed work’s moral component ever since, speaking some variation of his 2020 bromide: “My economic plan is all about jobs, dignity, respect, and community.”
All due respect to Brandon, but nobody applies to Walmart seeking dignity. The uncomfortable uniforms, Spartan conditions, and dismal hours are compounded by customers who believe themselves entitled to treat poorly compensated employees abusively. People seeking dignity work for themselves or their families—where that’s feasible. People seek employment outside the home because they need to get paid. Dignity and community aren’t negotiable currencies to cover rent and groceries.
So people need employment, but we’ve cheapened work by making employees ubiquitous. Walmart stores live and die by workers’ contributions, but when the corporation has excess revenue, it doesn’t return to employees. It enriches those who own stocks, which are inert legal documents that produce no value without workers. The fact that America’s largest employer can devalue wages during a period of surplus revenue demonstrates that America doesn’t value work.
When workers don’t own their produce, and work only for the enrichment of “owners” who don’t manage workplaces, this increasingly resembles serfdom. Conditions are worse than medieval serfdom, though, because lords of the manor at least had an obligation to their serfs’ health and defense. Modern aristocracy, by contrast, has liberty to cut employees loose, retain the value of labor already provided, and return revenues to the ownership class.
This pattern repeats throughout the economy. When schoolteachers in red states struck for better conditions in 2018, or the actors’ and writers’ strike right now, we hear defenders of the status quo insisting that workers should value their work, and gain satisfaction from jobs well done, regardless of pay. Whenever necessary workers demand more respect and better pay, some asshole inevitably says, “just quit.” It’s like clockwork.
Like slavery before it, this modern serfdom isn’t sustainable. Workers demand pay because they have obligations: housing, clothes, food. But modern aristocrats pay below the subsistence level necessary for these goods. Housing prices are worse now than they were before the 2008 housing bubble meltdown. Public health is as bad as it was before COVID-19. After twenty years of lessons, the aristocrats running our lives have learned nothing.
The New American Serfdom, Part Two
The New American Serfdom, Part Three
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