There are many types of privilege. We can quantify them. Some of them may benefit us.
For example, pretty privilege. Which often overlaps with white privilege. Educational privilege. The privilege of not living in a food desert, or a tenement infested with roaches, or in a trailer park with meth dealers.
Ultimately, it all comes down to money, though, doesn’t it?
And COVID has only made the disparities between the rich and poor worse. According to this article, the 400 richest Americans added 40% to their fortune, or about $4.5 trillion dollars. That’s not a typo.
Meanwhile:
- Most millennials can’t buy a house. Nearly half of those between 18 to 34 spend over a third of their take-home on rent.
- While the pandemic has made things worse for everyone except the rich, inequality has been growing since 1979. The U.S. middle class earned $17,867 less in 2007 than it did that year.
- Workers have gotten more productive but are paid less. While in the three decades after WW II, wages rose 91%, commensurate with a 97% growth in productivity, since 1979, except for a couple of years in the late ’90s, wages for workers rose 9% while their productivity rose 74%.
- While the middle-class faced stagnation, except for the late 1990s, the working class fared worse. Their wages fell 5% from 1979 to 2013. In contrast, the hourly wages of high-wage workers rose 41 percent
The indignity doesn’t stop there. Amazon has greatly helped Jeff Bezos’ fortunes. Good for him. But his warehouse workers have to pee in bottles or hold it in. How is this acceptable?
The Fair Labor Standards Act addressed this issue, as well as many others when signed into law in 1938. Not only did it codify bathroom breaks, but limited non-overtime paid hours to 40 per week, provided fair salaries, and protected children.
Yet in recent years that progress has been eroding. Why aren’t we up in arms?
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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.
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