Finance

Workers Gaining Leverage To Take On Corporate Power

If job market numbers like these keep popping up, a reckoning may be on the horizon.

By  
on

I turned 36 years old a few days ago, which gives me close to a quarter-century in the labor market (I started pretty young). I’ve only had two day jobs since getting my law degree, but I’ve had plenty of extra white-collar gigs on the side too as an adjunct/writer/speaker. 

Long before I was a lawyer, I also had a healthy string of at least a dozen jobs that ran the gamut from paperboy to meatpacking laborer to figure model for a college art class (not necessarily in that order). Even though the vast majority of my various employment endeavors featured pretty good employer-employee relationships, it’s still fair to say I’m familiar with the cliché, “You should just consider yourself lucky to have a job at all.”

I’ve even been accused of uttering that phrase myself, although it’s certainly been an oversight if I have, because that is not at all how it’s supposed to work. No, you should not consider yourself lucky to have a job at all.

Your employer should consider itself lucky to have an individual like you who is willing to work at a rate of pay that is necessarily lower than the amount of money you are earning/saving/attracting for the employer. 

Trust me, corporations and other types of entities with employees are not in it to lose money just so they can altruistically provide people with jobs.

Theoretically, in a tight labor market, businesses should have to increase pay, benefits, or perks, or do something else to attract talent. It hasn’t always played out like that in the real world, however. 

It’s not because jobs are inherently a scarce resource and there have always been more jobseekers than open positions. It’s because corporations have been able to leverage long-term labor market trends to keep wages relatively low, because labor (that is, you and everyone you know who works or can work) hasn’t organized to do anything about it. 

Sponsored

In the labor market, we’re all honey bees trying to take on a Japanese giant hornet — it’s not going to go that well one-on-one, you have to all swarm up together and (ah, symbolically, let’s make clear) cook the big bastard with your wingbeats.

Now, though, for the first time in a long time market forces are tilting so heavily in favor of labor that a reckoning with corporate power might be on the horizon.

In June, there were more than 10 million job openings in the U.S. economy. That was way up from the 9.2 million openings in May, it was about 10 percent more than the 9.1 million openings expected in June by economists polled by Dow Jones, and it set a new record for the highest number of monthly job openings ever.

The monthly Job Openings and Labor Turnover survey also notched a near-high with close to 3.9 million workers calling it quits in June. This shows workers are confident in being able to get better jobs than the ones they are leaving.

The record on this metric is 4 million workers quitting their jobs in a single month, and that was set just this past April. The overall unemployment rate was down by about half a percentage point in June too, and there were about 943,000 totally new jobs created, according to the latest Labor Department figures.

Sponsored

As important as I’m sure we’d all like to feel at times, as individuals, every single one of us is fairly replaceable in the employment context. Together, though, we’ve always had the power to come together and make conditions generally more favorable for workers.

We haven’t bothered to use that power much in recent decades, but if job market numbers like these keep popping up, it’s only going to get easier to do so.

You don’t need to consider yourself lucky just to have a job making your employer more money than you cost it. But a little gratitude might be warranted in finally seeing large-scale labor market conditions that favor workers over employers rather than the other way around.

Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at [email protected].

Topics

, , , ,