Major League baseball players are on strike. National Hockey League players may soon be locked out. National Football League referees have threatened to walk if they don’t get a new contract and there are rumblings the National Basketball Association may go dormant next season unless players and owners get together on money.
Welcome to Labor Day, 1994, the year America was reminded that labor-any form of labor-is worth whatever someone is willing to pay for it.
It is a lesson worth pondering over the sport-less days ahead, when erstwhile fans should have time to play with the kids and brush up on matters not often considered, such as labor economics.
In an open, profit-driven market such as ours, employers such as baseball teams are free to pay top players million of dollars a year because they can wallop a baseball a long distance or snap off a curveball for strikes. They are also free to pay the minumum wage of $4.25 an hour to someone whose job it is to sweep up after the game.
Home run hitters and strikeout pitchers are rare. Sweepers are common and so is their pay.
Some consider the huge disparity unfair. Does not the sweeper work as hard as the ballplayer, if not harder? Where’s the justice?
Free markets, of course, operate on their own form of justice called “supply and demand.” That which is dear commands a higher price than that which is not.
That’s worth remembering on this centennial of America’s first official Labor Day, because today’s labor market bears little resemblance to that of 100 years ago, or even 20 years ago. Markets are globalizing and adjusting constantly to technological change. Workers with the education and training demanded by the times command premium wages. Those with only muscle-power to contribute are seeing demand for their labor evaporate as low-skill jobs disappear or shift to low-wage, Third-World labor markets.
So the wage gap is widening between America’s skilled and unskilled, a worrisome trend that has begun to undermine the nation’s social fabric, and left unchecked, will threaten its political stability.
Minimum wage laws and social welfare programs can ameliorate the worst effects for a time, but in the long run America needs to retool its work force-blue collar as well as white collar-into a high-tech, high-skill product that will, like that cleanup hitter, command top dollar on the world market.
Labor justice isn’t a good-paying job. It’s the access a society provides to the education and training required to get one.
