LESSER EVIL

Back in the days when Google executives actually seemed interested in following through on their famous “Don’t Be Evil” slogan, they required a commitment to decent working conditions from the companies they paid to provide food service, janitorial, and other such work at their offices. It was pretty basic non-evil stuff, like a requirement that contractors pay their employees at least $15 an hour and provide their employees health insurance and other benefits.

But things took a turn this January, when a court found that Google functioned as a “joint employer” of workers directly hired by a staffing firm, and that they therefore had to bargain with the union which represented employees of those companies. In other words: Google had to actually do a non-evil thing… which apparently was a bridge too far. So the company announced they’re entirely eliminating these requirements, and instead simply stating that contractors have to follow the law, which is of course, something they’re already required to do. In other words: after claiming to take responsibility for working conditions at their contractors, Google was then forced to actually take responsibility for working conditions at their contractors… so they decided to stop taking responsibility for working conditions at their contractors.

Make it make sense.

will get more time, more money, or a little bit of both now that the Department of Labor has officially released new rules restoring overtime protections to salaried workers making up to about $58,500 a year. Employers will no longer be able to compel underpaid salaried workers to work long hours without any additional pay for their additional time.

will be created every year thanks to the FTC’s new ban on noncompete agreements. Almost one in five workers —including engineers, fast food workers, and hair stylists — have been forced by their employers to sign exploitative noncompete agreements which prevented them from finding new jobs or starting new businesses.

published an open letter arguing that efforts to unionize autoworkers in the South would “put our states’ jobs in jeopardy,” that union supporters “call themselves Democratic Socialists,” and that unions are unnecessary because “in America, we respect our workforce.” Workers at a Tennessee Volkswagen plant then proceeded to vote for the union by 75% in a historic victory.

Raising taxes on the rich is one of the most popular positions in American politics, and this chart below shows a big part of the reason why: the top marginal tax rate for the very richest people has been on a long downward trend since the 1960s. And despite the strong public consensus that rich people ought to pay more taxes, it’s still hard to imagine the political dynamics that get us back to the top marginal tax rates that were in effect before the trickle-down era.

But it’s not just the taxes directly paid by the rich. The top corporate tax rate is also down to about half the level it was during t he era when our economic growth was the strongest & most equitable. Estate taxes — paid on inherited wealth by only the richest sliver of the population — are down significantly. Even capital gains taxes on investment profits are down. The trickle-down inflection point in the late 1970s and early 1980s is all too clear in the path of all these lines, and confirms the need for a middle-out inflection point that turns in the opposite direction.

chart from Axios showing recent rapid increase in car insurance costs

We often think about economic policy and democracy as two largely separate things. Sure, the outcome of elections obviously affects our economic policies, but it’s less obvious how our economic conditions affect our democracy. But in a recent Time Magazine piece, Steph Sterling of the Democracy Revival Center and Felicia Wong of the Roosevelt Institute make a provocative and compelling case about “the relationship between the economy Americans want and the political system that must exist to achieve it.”

As they explain, a bedrock component of a successful democracy is a general public sense that the political system functions to deliver the economic outcomes that people want — and, more broadly, that our government generally seeks to pursue policies that benefit most people. While there can and should be debates on what such policies should be, the reality today is that far too many people have far too many reasons to doubt whether the system has been structured to help them at all. And that needs to change, too: a more robust political system that includes as many people as possible and a more robust economy that includes as many people as people are two sides of the same coin. We need both in order to be confident we have either.