Member-only story

From ‘Nobody Wants to Work’ to ‘We Need Higher Unemployment’

The prevailing economic consensus is always to discipline labor

Mitchell Peterson
4 min readOct 7, 2022
Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash

Imagine a world where headlines consistently shout and passionate weekly op-eds are penned calling for an end to insanely excessive CEO pay, stock buybacks, and corporate greed. Sure, the likes of Robert Reich will occasionally break through and get a piece that speaks some truth in mainstream media, but they are very much the exception to the rule.

Picture a media that consistently shamed wage theft, ILLEGAL anti-union practices, and a lack of salary and benefit increases despite record profits.

They very well could create that image.

Those are real trends in our economy. CEO pay has increased 1322% since 1978, wage theft is $8 billion a year, every corporation is disregarding the law in trying to clamp down on the rising unionization movements across the country, stock buybacks are not real economic activity — and used to be illegal — but are hundreds of billions of dollars inflating paper values, profit margins in many sectors are at all-time highs, adding to the inflationary pressure, and wages have been stagnant for five freaking decades.

Week after week, the media could be exploring those topics, creating the anger, motivation…

--

--

Mitchell Peterson
Mitchell Peterson

Written by Mitchell Peterson

Freelance writer in his tenth year outside the US. Currently in rural Spain writing the Substack bestseller and soon-to-be book, 18 Uncles.

Responses (9)