The Price of Everything - Eduardo Porter [54]
Substitute illegal immigrants for slaves, and similar patterns emerge in the United States today. For decades American farmers have relied on cheap immigrant labor to tend their crops. In 1986, they pressed to pass the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which legalized nearly 3 million illegal immigrants. After that, their investments in laborsaving technology froze. By 1999, capital investments had fallen 46.7 percent from their peak in 1980.
Indeed, the institution of immigrant work in the United States may provide an answer to the question about the seeming unpopularity of slavery: it is not as unpopular as it may seem; it has just taken on a different, subtle form. Illegal immigrant workers look not too unlike indentured servants. Hiding from the cops, unable to stand up for their rights in the workplace, illegal immigrants are beholden to their employers like no other workers. Some legal immigrant laborers are formally tied to their jobs through visa requirements that forbid them to seek alternative employment.
But perhaps the most compelling answer is that, on average, workers are too cheap to make slavery worthwhile. Some workers draw high wages—bankers and other professionals with sought-after, lucrative skill sets. But the federal minimum wage is lower than it was thirty years ago. What’s more, globalization has provided manufacturers with an enormous supply of cheap workers. In March 2010, the Vietnamese government raised the monthly minimum wage to 730,000 dong—less than $40. Slaves might not be any cheaper.
WHAT’S FAIR PAY?
The price of work is probably the most important price in people’s lives. The labor market is where we trade our skills for our keep—the rent, the food. Our wage will go a long way in determining the sort of life we will lead.
It has improved since slavery gave way to a free market for work. In developed industrial economies, wages soared in the past century alone. In 1918 a dozen eggs cost the typical American manufacturing worker the equivalent of a little more than an hour of work at the prevailing wage. Today she can afford them in less than five minutes. The Montgomery Ward catalog, launched in the late nineteenth century to bring big-city goods to small-town America, in 1895 offered a one-speed bicycle for $65—about six and a half weeks of work for a typical worker. Today the online Ward catalog lists multispeed models for about $350, which the average worker at the prevailing wage can pay for in fewer than nineteen hours of work.
But though the pay may be better, the market for labor is in some respects no less ruthless than it ever was, and in some regards perhaps more so. Two things drive wages: productivity—how valuable the job is to the employer—and the supply and demand for workers of a given skill. Rising pay has nothing to do with justice. Today, a worker can produce in less than ten minutes what it took a worker in 1890 an hour to make. That’s why wages rose.
Some patterns of compensation are fairly easy to understand. Highly educated workers tend to earn more than those with less schooling. In India, men who are fluent in English earn 34 percent more than those who don’t speak the language, even if they otherwise have the same level of education. Other patterns are less so. The tall make 10 percent more for every four inches in extra height. American men who are six feet two inches tall are 3 percent more likely to be executives than those who are only five feet ten inches. And the ugly earn less than the pretty—regardless of whether beauty has anything to do with the job. A study based on job interviews in the United States and Canada concluded that workers who were identified by the interviewer as of below-average beauty made about 7 percent less than the average, while those of above-average looks made 5 percent more. Men suffered a 9 percent ugliness penalty; ugly women