Low wages: what is to be done?
New Yorker columnist John Cassidy interviews Arin Dube about his new book, ‘The Wage Standard: What’s Wrong in the Labor Market and How to Fix It’:
Between 1980 and 2019, Dube notes, the hourly productivity of American workers rose by seventy-three per cent, while the inflation-adjusted hourly wage of the median worker—the person right in the middle of the wage distribution—increased by just twenty-three per cent. That’s a huge gap, and low-wage workers fared even worse….
In his book, he writes, “many workers and middle-class Americans have received paychecks smaller than they should be even as our society has grown more prosperous.” He goes on, “I aim to show you why—and more importantly how—we can change the labor market to work better for us all.”
