Minimum wages only flourish when societies also have what amounts to "maximum wages." In the mid-20th-century United States, we almost had what amounted to a maximum wage — in the form of a 91-percent tax rate on top-bracket income. But we couldn't sustain that top-bracket rate against the relentless top-bracket assault upon it.
How could we have a better shot at sustaining both healthy minimums and maximums? By linking the two, by making the max a multiple of the minimum. An example: subjecting all income above 10 or 20 or 50 times the minimum wage to a 100-percent tax rate.
That sort of a link, at the national or international level, would give the richest among us an incentive to raise the minimum. Without that link, our wealthiest will continue to have an ongoing incentive to keep any existing minimums as weak as possible. The weaker that minimum, the quicker their route to grand fortune.
A max wage does nothing for the primary sources of income for the very rich (dividends perhaps, capital gains - this would amount to and require a revolution).
That would generate no money at all. No one would be paid at that level if it is 100% confiscated, it would just shift to other types of wealth taxed at a lower rate.
In the 50s plenty of people were very wealthy, they just funneled compensation into less highly taxed forms.
Sure, sure, now you will want a "wealth tax," but that is incredibly tough to enforce. A reasonable progressive tax rate generates more tax than confiscatory rates, but has less of the "F the rich" onanism that many enjoy.
Don’t you think that the capitalists will invest in automation before ever agreeing to actually pay people more? Why raise living standards for people you’re just going to have to keep paying more when you can invest in robots and hire the bare minimum number of humans to manage them as possible? Since they only care about profit and maximizing shareholder value, it seems that humans will lose a CBA every time. I would love to be proven wrong.
Capitalists will always invest in automation if it will lower labor costs no matter what the laws are. It is important to grasp this. They will always try to push labor costs to zero no matter what. That is their inherent incentive. This is actually the rationale for imposing regulations upon them.
I appreciate this so much and your work in general -- I am guessing that this is the type of piece written to be compelling and move our collective imaginations away from how limited they are currently.
But I struggle to see how to build the leverage for something like this nationally or internationally -- it feels like a idealistic push that ignores one of the most critical parts of the current administration's awful plan, which is that the US is about to finally lose any kind of real international trade power (happening faster than ever).
How do we -- nationally or internationally -- meaningfully build leverage around this?
It is not any more idealistic than 140% tariffs on China are. Just in a better direction. There are already minimum wage agreements in trade deals between specific nations, this is just an expansion of it.
I don't mean to be all doomer, but we can no longer assume:
1. The US state can be a stable vehicle for redistribution
2. The US has enough moral or political capital internationally to lead anything re: international economic policy.
You're right that it's not more outlandish than the tariffs, but precedent around this kind of thing (when the US was the Global Economy Force) was already unenforced, non-binding, or symbolic.
There's nothing more annoying than commenting on an essay to complain that the essay isn't about something completely different -- but it troubles me when I see so many of our best labor thinkers ignoring that the US is no longer in the same place in the world order.
Trump is making awful plans because he was able to get enough power to do any plan, no matter how awful. I don't understand how to move forward without engaging with our lack of comparative power domestically or internationally...
Like Dean Baker has done consistently decade after decade, Mr. Nolan you point out the simplest most common sense solution that no one whose voice has any reach in the US talks about or ever considers. 9 out of 10 people - if they are paying attention at all - never hear anything but apologetics and propaganda for positions that benefit the swindlers in the ruling class.... scammed and screwed year after year for entire lifetimes consistently believing that each consecutive deception by the rich will benefit them... if they just have faith in representatives of the system and do nothing... the dream is always right around the corner about to come true...
Do you have any thoughts about how enforcement would work? I mean, preventing slavery in the shrimp farming supply chain has been a huge problem, that's maybe getting a little better with enormous effort by NGOs (as I understand it). Wage theft is a big deal all around the world. How would an international minimum wage be implemented?
By lobbying for local minimum wages, the workers themselves could demand and win the wages through supporting politicians who wanted their vote and by strikes and protests. An organic, worker centric method that eliminates the biased guesses of the greedy.
My default comeback to people who cape for corporate offshoring or how good the economy is has for about a decade now been "Oh yea, the GDP. I havent checked my mailbox, have our GDP dividend checks for the month come in?"
There hasn't been a stock market bubble, housing bubble, or AI bubble thats actually enriched anyone who didn't hang his bag full of shit around some other poor sucker's neck and jumped clear at the right moment.
Speaking of. If you own a 401k, ask anyone who was around for 2000 or 2008 what happens when "money returns to its rightful owners" as JP Morgan said about crashes.
You used to get a pension and now that money is given to a bunch of pinstripe suited millionaires to give to corporations and if you manage to pull all your money in between crashes, great. Otherwise fuck off and eat catfood if you invested in tech or enron or housing or tech again.
fun fact no one who retired at 65 and lived to 80, has managed to not see a crash erase any stock investment's since 1980 or so. this last 15 year stretch has been the longest weve gone and I imagine the hangover is gona be proportional.
If you pull all your money out of a 401k, and you can at any time, you will pay a 10% penalty in addition to the taxes you would owe anyway on withdrawal at retirement. That is to say, if you think the value of your portfolio will go down by LESS than 10% across whats coming, stand pat. Otherwise you can get cash in hand and wait for this to settle out.
You can even take half out as a loan, the interest of which is reinvested in your 401k balance so the only thing you "lose" out on is the "growth" your money would have experienced in the market in the intervening.
When I dreamed up the idea of an international Paycheck Party, the bedrock of the idea was that politicians and bosses could only work for the Party, which was basically everyone who works for a Paycheck. It was a new way to say Labor that was expansive and includes the huge percentage of workers who don’t work with their hands. The core tenets I imagined to be the focus of everyone who purported to support the Paycheck Party politically and legally were the Minimum Laws. In addition to the Minimum Wage, there had to be Minimum Severance Pay, Minimum Healthcare, Minimum Vacations, Minimum Maternity and Childcare, Minimum Portable Pension, and on and on. Like you state so eloquently, this is the only efficient method to transfer wealth from the Global parasite class to the people who create it.
These people aren't in the Paycheck Party, though they might want to be if the Paycheck Party were ever to gain the kind of self-awareness Hamilton wants them to have.
The concept has already been established... but maybe not entirely implemented by the Asia Floor Wage Association. They argue not for a minimum wage, but a livable wage based on:
"All garment workers in Asia need a wage increase to be able to provide for themselves and their families’ basic needs – including housing, food, education and healthcare. However often when workers struggle to improve their wage and conditions in one country, global brands relocate to another country where wages and conditions are lower.
To counter this divide and conquer strategy of global brands, AFWA built regional unity for a cross-border Asia-level living wage for garment workers in Asia – the first of its kind. AFWA living wage formulation is woman-centred and includes unpaid household and care work. Today, Asia Floor Wage is internationally recognised as a credible and legitimate living wage benchmark for garment workers in Asia.
AFWA demands that global brands pay – across Asia — the difference or the “gap” between national minimum wage of each country and the Asia Floor Wage so that workers manufacturing their clothing will get a living wage."
I love this idea! I would also like to reiterate what I said in response to a commenter above, that there should be tax incentives not to outsource to other countries. This is particularly true in the software industry, which has been severely damaged by outsourcing. Of course we need to pair such incentives with decent wages and benefits *and* education, for heaven's sake. I am no fan of Ramaswamy, but he's right that people in this country are not being prepared to work in high tech. (They're not being prepared to do much of anything as far as I can tell. We need to support public education!)
I have advocated for a global minimum wage for decades. It's the only way to prevent the economic inequality we have seen over the last 40 years. To take advantage of a worker's suffering to make a larger profit is indecent.
I started to wonder if Trump's tariffs didn't send countries to the WTO, which seemed like a big player in international trade only a few years ago. Turns out the US hasn't been paying its dues since 2019, plus this (from a site called Freshfields): "It is to be expected that the US will avoid a negative WTO panel ruling being formally adopted, which it can do by ‘appealing into the void’. This is now possible because there are currently no Appellate Body members, due to the US having blocked all appointments since 2019. However, some WTO Members, including the EU, have adopted legislation permitting them to retaliate against unsuccessful respondent WTO members in such circumstances. It would further be expected that the EU, at least, would retaliate against the US should it be successful in any WTO proceedings. This is not however necessarily the case for other WTO members, including China and Canada."
What’s lacking in proposals for an international minimum wage, such as the UAW’s proposed North American manufacturing minimum wage, is a reasonable strategy to achieve it. The only way workers have ever gotten a minimum wage is by organizing and fighting for it, both by worker direct action and by political struggle. If we want an international or regional minimum wage, which is a great idea, we will have to organize workers internationally or regionally and fight the corporations and governments that will resist with all their power. So far the UAW and most other US unions have not adopted a strategy of organizing regionally, much less internationally, and have supported Trump’s auto tariffs, which divides US, Canadian and Mexican workers instead of uniting them. The US labor movement needs to use some of the millions of dollars in their treasuries to support the struggles of Mexican workers, and must unite with the Canadian labor movement, if we wish to get a more level playing field for North American workers.
I am brain damaged by my American education but my thought immediately jump to:
If the US consumer pays the "tarriff" to workers in other countries instead of the US as a tax... Doesn't that transfer money from the US to "our enemies" and that is fundamentally unacceptable?
(As a leftist, I understand empowering workers globally is actually good, but as a policy maker or american capitalist isn't that option just totally off the table?)
Minimum wages only flourish when societies also have what amounts to "maximum wages." In the mid-20th-century United States, we almost had what amounted to a maximum wage — in the form of a 91-percent tax rate on top-bracket income. But we couldn't sustain that top-bracket rate against the relentless top-bracket assault upon it.
How could we have a better shot at sustaining both healthy minimums and maximums? By linking the two, by making the max a multiple of the minimum. An example: subjecting all income above 10 or 20 or 50 times the minimum wage to a 100-percent tax rate.
That sort of a link, at the national or international level, would give the richest among us an incentive to raise the minimum. Without that link, our wealthiest will continue to have an ongoing incentive to keep any existing minimums as weak as possible. The weaker that minimum, the quicker their route to grand fortune.
A max wage does nothing for the primary sources of income for the very rich (dividends perhaps, capital gains - this would amount to and require a revolution).
That would generate no money at all. No one would be paid at that level if it is 100% confiscated, it would just shift to other types of wealth taxed at a lower rate.
In the 50s plenty of people were very wealthy, they just funneled compensation into less highly taxed forms.
Sure, sure, now you will want a "wealth tax," but that is incredibly tough to enforce. A reasonable progressive tax rate generates more tax than confiscatory rates, but has less of the "F the rich" onanism that many enjoy.
"F the rich" for F-ing the poor is the sentiment. If they would stop, problem solved.
I love this!!
Don’t you think that the capitalists will invest in automation before ever agreeing to actually pay people more? Why raise living standards for people you’re just going to have to keep paying more when you can invest in robots and hire the bare minimum number of humans to manage them as possible? Since they only care about profit and maximizing shareholder value, it seems that humans will lose a CBA every time. I would love to be proven wrong.
Capitalists will always invest in automation if it will lower labor costs no matter what the laws are. It is important to grasp this. They will always try to push labor costs to zero no matter what. That is their inherent incentive. This is actually the rationale for imposing regulations upon them.
I appreciate this so much and your work in general -- I am guessing that this is the type of piece written to be compelling and move our collective imaginations away from how limited they are currently.
But I struggle to see how to build the leverage for something like this nationally or internationally -- it feels like a idealistic push that ignores one of the most critical parts of the current administration's awful plan, which is that the US is about to finally lose any kind of real international trade power (happening faster than ever).
How do we -- nationally or internationally -- meaningfully build leverage around this?
It is not any more idealistic than 140% tariffs on China are. Just in a better direction. There are already minimum wage agreements in trade deals between specific nations, this is just an expansion of it.
I don't mean to be all doomer, but we can no longer assume:
1. The US state can be a stable vehicle for redistribution
2. The US has enough moral or political capital internationally to lead anything re: international economic policy.
You're right that it's not more outlandish than the tariffs, but precedent around this kind of thing (when the US was the Global Economy Force) was already unenforced, non-binding, or symbolic.
There's nothing more annoying than commenting on an essay to complain that the essay isn't about something completely different -- but it troubles me when I see so many of our best labor thinkers ignoring that the US is no longer in the same place in the world order.
Trump is making awful plans because he was able to get enough power to do any plan, no matter how awful. I don't understand how to move forward without engaging with our lack of comparative power domestically or internationally...
Thank you for writing, as always.
Like Dean Baker has done consistently decade after decade, Mr. Nolan you point out the simplest most common sense solution that no one whose voice has any reach in the US talks about or ever considers. 9 out of 10 people - if they are paying attention at all - never hear anything but apologetics and propaganda for positions that benefit the swindlers in the ruling class.... scammed and screwed year after year for entire lifetimes consistently believing that each consecutive deception by the rich will benefit them... if they just have faith in representatives of the system and do nothing... the dream is always right around the corner about to come true...
Do you have any thoughts about how enforcement would work? I mean, preventing slavery in the shrimp farming supply chain has been a huge problem, that's maybe getting a little better with enormous effort by NGOs (as I understand it). Wage theft is a big deal all around the world. How would an international minimum wage be implemented?
By lobbying for local minimum wages, the workers themselves could demand and win the wages through supporting politicians who wanted their vote and by strikes and protests. An organic, worker centric method that eliminates the biased guesses of the greedy.
𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘪𝘴 𝘢 𝘨𝘰𝘰𝘥 𝘰𝘱𝘱𝘰𝘳𝘵𝘶𝘯𝘪𝘵𝘺 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘢𝘴 𝘢 𝘭𝘦𝘧𝘵𝘪𝘴𝘵 𝘵𝘰 𝘣𝘦𝘨𝘪𝘯 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘞𝘚𝘑 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘍𝘛 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘉𝘭𝘰𝘰𝘮𝘣𝘦𝘳𝘨 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺 𝘥𝘢𝘺, 𝘸𝘩𝘪𝘤𝘩 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘣𝘦 𝘥𝘰𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢𝘭𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘥𝘺 𝘪𝘯 𝘰𝘳𝘥𝘦𝘳 𝘵𝘰 𝘬𝘦𝘦𝘱 𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘬 𝘰𝘧 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘤𝘢𝘱𝘪𝘵𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘴 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘶𝘱 𝘵𝘰.
Dang it HamNo, I don't got time for MORE publications, I'm just trying to keep up with what my County and State are doing. This is why I read YOU!
Is Shawn Fain reading this?
Sell out. He is NOT a Unionist.
My default comeback to people who cape for corporate offshoring or how good the economy is has for about a decade now been "Oh yea, the GDP. I havent checked my mailbox, have our GDP dividend checks for the month come in?"
There hasn't been a stock market bubble, housing bubble, or AI bubble thats actually enriched anyone who didn't hang his bag full of shit around some other poor sucker's neck and jumped clear at the right moment.
Speaking of. If you own a 401k, ask anyone who was around for 2000 or 2008 what happens when "money returns to its rightful owners" as JP Morgan said about crashes.
You used to get a pension and now that money is given to a bunch of pinstripe suited millionaires to give to corporations and if you manage to pull all your money in between crashes, great. Otherwise fuck off and eat catfood if you invested in tech or enron or housing or tech again.
fun fact no one who retired at 65 and lived to 80, has managed to not see a crash erase any stock investment's since 1980 or so. this last 15 year stretch has been the longest weve gone and I imagine the hangover is gona be proportional.
If you pull all your money out of a 401k, and you can at any time, you will pay a 10% penalty in addition to the taxes you would owe anyway on withdrawal at retirement. That is to say, if you think the value of your portfolio will go down by LESS than 10% across whats coming, stand pat. Otherwise you can get cash in hand and wait for this to settle out.
You can even take half out as a loan, the interest of which is reinvested in your 401k balance so the only thing you "lose" out on is the "growth" your money would have experienced in the market in the intervening.
When I dreamed up the idea of an international Paycheck Party, the bedrock of the idea was that politicians and bosses could only work for the Party, which was basically everyone who works for a Paycheck. It was a new way to say Labor that was expansive and includes the huge percentage of workers who don’t work with their hands. The core tenets I imagined to be the focus of everyone who purported to support the Paycheck Party politically and legally were the Minimum Laws. In addition to the Minimum Wage, there had to be Minimum Severance Pay, Minimum Healthcare, Minimum Vacations, Minimum Maternity and Childcare, Minimum Portable Pension, and on and on. Like you state so eloquently, this is the only efficient method to transfer wealth from the Global parasite class to the people who create it.
Tony, can you please talk about workers who are self-employed and also retired people? Tx!
These people aren't in the Paycheck Party, though they might want to be if the Paycheck Party were ever to gain the kind of self-awareness Hamilton wants them to have.
Trump seems to be trying to get more Company's to come to the US.
This means Visas/Green Cards etc. Who is going to go to the US considering what is happening to immigrants?
The concept has already been established... but maybe not entirely implemented by the Asia Floor Wage Association. They argue not for a minimum wage, but a livable wage based on:
"All garment workers in Asia need a wage increase to be able to provide for themselves and their families’ basic needs – including housing, food, education and healthcare. However often when workers struggle to improve their wage and conditions in one country, global brands relocate to another country where wages and conditions are lower.
To counter this divide and conquer strategy of global brands, AFWA built regional unity for a cross-border Asia-level living wage for garment workers in Asia – the first of its kind. AFWA living wage formulation is woman-centred and includes unpaid household and care work. Today, Asia Floor Wage is internationally recognised as a credible and legitimate living wage benchmark for garment workers in Asia.
AFWA demands that global brands pay – across Asia — the difference or the “gap” between national minimum wage of each country and the Asia Floor Wage so that workers manufacturing their clothing will get a living wage."
I love this idea! I would also like to reiterate what I said in response to a commenter above, that there should be tax incentives not to outsource to other countries. This is particularly true in the software industry, which has been severely damaged by outsourcing. Of course we need to pair such incentives with decent wages and benefits *and* education, for heaven's sake. I am no fan of Ramaswamy, but he's right that people in this country are not being prepared to work in high tech. (They're not being prepared to do much of anything as far as I can tell. We need to support public education!)
I have advocated for a global minimum wage for decades. It's the only way to prevent the economic inequality we have seen over the last 40 years. To take advantage of a worker's suffering to make a larger profit is indecent.
I started to wonder if Trump's tariffs didn't send countries to the WTO, which seemed like a big player in international trade only a few years ago. Turns out the US hasn't been paying its dues since 2019, plus this (from a site called Freshfields): "It is to be expected that the US will avoid a negative WTO panel ruling being formally adopted, which it can do by ‘appealing into the void’. This is now possible because there are currently no Appellate Body members, due to the US having blocked all appointments since 2019. However, some WTO Members, including the EU, have adopted legislation permitting them to retaliate against unsuccessful respondent WTO members in such circumstances. It would further be expected that the EU, at least, would retaliate against the US should it be successful in any WTO proceedings. This is not however necessarily the case for other WTO members, including China and Canada."
ps://riskandcompliance.freshfields.com/post/102k86k/trumps-tariffs-wto-consultations-requested-by-china-canada-and-the-european-un
What’s lacking in proposals for an international minimum wage, such as the UAW’s proposed North American manufacturing minimum wage, is a reasonable strategy to achieve it. The only way workers have ever gotten a minimum wage is by organizing and fighting for it, both by worker direct action and by political struggle. If we want an international or regional minimum wage, which is a great idea, we will have to organize workers internationally or regionally and fight the corporations and governments that will resist with all their power. So far the UAW and most other US unions have not adopted a strategy of organizing regionally, much less internationally, and have supported Trump’s auto tariffs, which divides US, Canadian and Mexican workers instead of uniting them. The US labor movement needs to use some of the millions of dollars in their treasuries to support the struggles of Mexican workers, and must unite with the Canadian labor movement, if we wish to get a more level playing field for North American workers.
Hamilton, this is brilliant. This is what the American people should be demanding.
I am brain damaged by my American education but my thought immediately jump to:
If the US consumer pays the "tarriff" to workers in other countries instead of the US as a tax... Doesn't that transfer money from the US to "our enemies" and that is fundamentally unacceptable?
(As a leftist, I understand empowering workers globally is actually good, but as a policy maker or american capitalist isn't that option just totally off the table?)