Expecting Payment for Work Is Not a “Free Lunch”
Of all the arguments against a minimum wage increase I’ve ever seen, this is the dumbest.
Last night, Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell published a piece with one of the dumbest headlines I’ve ever read. Be sure not to stare at this thing for too long or it may blind you with its ignorance:
‘Free lunches’ like the $15 minimum wage may hurt the people they’re meant to help
First of all: as many of you know, writers don’t often get a say in the headlines that run on their stories, and so it’s worth checking to make sure that Rampell isn’t being mischaracterized by a foaming-at-the-mouth headline writer at the Post. But Rampell does, in fact, warn the reader against anyone “peddling free lunches” in the editorial, so it’s fair to say the headline is an accurate representation of her position.
I’ve been covering the minimum wage media beat for Civic Ventures for nearly three years now, and I’ve seen lots of dumb takes: people who earnestly believe there should be no minimum wage, people who think the government should subsidize immensely profitable low-wage employers like McDonald’s and Walmart, people who argue that awful restaurants should be protected from the free market.
But I have never, ever, ever before seen an argument that expecting payment for work is a “free lunch.” Right-wing Republicans and libertarians prefer to use the term “free lunch” to cast the social safety net in a negative light. They love the phrase because it transforms the poor and unlucky into greedy, salivating takers who are leeching on the good will of average Americans.
Rampell’s use of the phrasing furthers a mindset that worker expenses are a drag on the economy. Her argument that workers expecting a livable wage from their employers are takers in search of a “free lunch” sets a dangerous precedent, shifting expectations even further to the right. The idea that compensation is a handout redefines the idea of work in such a fundamental way that you can’t even fairly call it capitalism — it’s corporatism at best, and slavery at worst.
Once you set aside that exceptionally dumb phrasing, the rest of Rampell’s argument is about what you’d expect. It’s traditional trickle-down thinking from someone who likes to believe she’s pro-worker. Using a single data point—one outlying UW study that is facing criticism from economists and skepticism from thoughtful reporters—she decides that everything is terrible and $15 was a mistake. And then she sides with Donald Trump over an Obama-era regulation that would have raised the overtime threshold, thereby giving a much-deserved raise to middle-class workers.
Look: I get it. Many newspaper columnists like to think of themselves as sensible centrists, thinkers who find the middle ground in a contentious atmosphere. But Rampell’s prescriptions aren’t centrist; in fact if they weren’t so dangerous, they’d be outright laughable. She’s promoting a dangerous assertion about wages, tipping the scales in favor of business at the expense of the middle and working classes.
And the truth is, the scales are already tipped way too far in that direction already.
For 40 years, those in the top one percent have kicked the rungs out of the ladder behind them as they’ve climbed ever higher. We can see the results of their actions every day with a booming stock market and a stagnating economy that leaves most Americans stranded at the bottom. If the minimum wage tracked productivity growth over the last 40 years, the lowest-paid of all Americans would be making over twenty dollars an hour. CEOs used to make twenty times more than their lowest-paid workers. Now they make more than 250 times more.
The American economy is dangerously unbalanced. You know it. I know it. Even Trump voters know it. There’s way too much money loaded up at the top, so the qualities that used to be considered a standard feature of the American dream—a house, vacations, a modest savings account, a retirement plan—are disappearing for the vast majority of us.
We have to fix this system. I can think of two levers to accomplish this without some sort of class warfare. First, we can tax the wealthy at sensible levels. And second, we can ensure that all Americans can participate in the economy. When minimum-wage workers can afford to live in the cities where they work, the economy does better. Without that base of empowered consumers, the economy slows down and tensions start to rise.
I cannot emphasize this enough: when we consider wages to be a handout given to a parasitic working class, we are redefining the employer/employee contract in a frightening way. And by furthering this malicious argument, people like Rampell—people who very well may believe they have the best intentions of workers at heart—are the ones who are hurting the very people they mean to help.
