The “Hot Labor Summer” Is Over…

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“Show me a good loser, and I’ll show you a loser.”—Vince Lombardi

So, with the WGA looking like its coming to an end, and with the UAW claiming it has made “significant progress” with the #2 automaker in the country, I am reminded of an interview I saw this summer, and how Leftists still conceive of “worker power”:

It was with a Jacobin writer named Alex Press—someone I vaguely remember reading many years ago when I was abroad. Like all Jacobin staffers, they still believe in the boss/worker relationship as the basis of struggle.

Maybe. Perhaps I am a stodgy old commie who sees things entirely different than my younger cohort of socialists and various Leftist factions.

However…

Would it be wrong to point out that then front-runner for the Democrat nomination in 2020 when a Michigan autoworker told Biden “You’re working for me,” he replied, “I’m not working for you!”? [starts at 0:53]:

Now. Trump may come out and say it differently. He might come out and say something very trite like:

“I promise you that I will work so hard. We’re gonna get it turned around.”

I want to lay out a slight difference between the two parties that the GOP has taken full advantage of in the past decade or so. Because of the Leftist conception about what fascism is or is not, they have it in their heads that only Trump is the fascist because he seems to court more socially “backwards” coalitions to his cause. People see that he wants absolute power and is the ultimate reactionary in fomenting the kind of popular support that would bring him such a broad latitude of executive authority. This is mistaken for a few reasons:

1.) Fascism is not necessarily just a social or an authoritarian threshold that is crossed once the levies of democracy break. It is a political-economic system that is enforced by the so-called national-capitalist (the totality of the state managing the totality of capital).

2.) Fascism has been perfected by the Democrats and the Republicans can only either play catch-up or smash it with MAGA (the opposite of what we’re told about their character).

3.) Trump may well be a fascist, but he would only be a fascist in the vein of his predecessors (and not a very good one at that).

4.) Fascism and democracy are not antithetical to one another. Much like labor is as empty and detached to the capital is it servile to. Democracy is as empty and detached from the people who send a small group of executives to Washington—the most minority faction to ever rule in world-history.

When Biden was snapping back at that Michigan worker, he was doing so as the personification of the “national-capitalist.” I saw people on Twitter say, “No, he actually works for his corporate donors!” The thing about that claim is this: their corporate donors are just that—donors. They don’t run anything. If you listen to Alex Press in the interview, it’s quite clear that she doesn’t understand that, in a world awash in absolute overaccumulation, only the state can further self-perpetuate capital. Just because lobbyists and a revolving door in Washington exists, does not mean on the other side of that door is an equal power to Washington. If Washington, for example, did not exist, capitalism would be over in less than a day. The mode of production is not self-sustaining like a fusion ignition. It requires tremendous efforts by the state to keep the rate of profit from cratering and for certain degree of debt levels to stave off deflation. Absolute overaccumulation assumes no amount of investment can alter the composition of capital without causing a further decline in the rate of profit. It also assumes it needs a third party to financialize this process and bypass the previous limits of the working-day to increase (or at least realize) unpaid labor-time in a geometrically growing manner. This is where debt, deficits and the interest on them come into play. It’s where the proliferation of bonds and fictitious assets in the stock market begin taking on crucial importance as well.

The reason I harp on this issue is because, if the companies people are striking against are so powerful, how come they need the state to manage their affairs for them? How come they need the state to prop up aggregate profits at year’s end? How come they need the state to run x-amount of deficits in order to make their fiscal nut? You might say, “Oh, well, this is cronyism” or “this is actually socialism,” but it’s not. It’s fascism. Until we understand that, our conception of “worker-power” is sorely lacking in context. In fact, given that the WGA strikes are wrapping up, and the UAW is more or less going to make concessions—i.e., they’re going to go back to being wage-slaves—one could argue, there is no such thing as “worker-power” outside of not returning to work.

First As Tragedy, Then As MORE Tragedy

The people who are all extra-motivated by the apparent resurgence of the labor-movement are delusional. I see nothing to get excited about.

In her interview, Alex was asked:

“…It seems like there’s more strikes than normal. Is that really true?”

She replied:

“Yeah. If normal is the past couple of years, there absolutely are more strikes and new union campaigns. Historically, we’re not reaching the levels of millions of workers striking—like there were back in the 20th century—but, you know, as you mentioned, I was in Erie, where 1400 workers were on strike on this gigantic locomotive manufacturing plant at WabTec. And between the UPS strike, which is the largest private sector contract in the country—some 340,000 workers—and even a little further down the horizon, in mid-September, we’ll see the expiration of the Big Three automakers’ contract with the UAW, that’s another 150,000 workers. So, there’s really something happening here that’s not just an illusion created in the media.”

How wrong you are, Alex! You are the media, and it’s being reproduced by you and your outdated ideas. For example, WabTec already settled a month ago (back to wage-slaving!). UPS? Settled. (back to wage-slaving!).

And soon, the UAW will return—with or without the shortened workweek—and nothing will change. The Big Three will get subsidies of some kind, along with their network of suppliers, all while Leftists and communists and socialists kiss their fucking asses, rather than tell them the hard, cold truth: your demise is inevitable.

Let’s take automotive manufacturing as an example.

Like Marx knew from the outset, large-scale industry would be the beginning of the end of capital and labor. When he embarks on this inquiry to discuss “große Industrie,” he is now talking about the power of science, not labor. Labor becomes so inconsequential to production that Marx’s entire model is premised off this contradiction which precipitates capitalist breakdown.

When the great industrialist Henry Ford set out to implement his assembly line:

“His innovation reduced the time it took to build a car from more than 12 hours to one hour and 33 minutes.”

That’s a lot of dead labor! And look what happened to the cost of the Model-T once he did this:

It is no different than today, where we know that, according to Shawn Fain:

“The cost of labor that goes into a vehicle is 5% of the vehicle. They could double our wages. And they could not raise the price of vehicles and they would still make billions of dollars.”

The biggest difference is that all that labor is now inflationary owing to the state devaluing wages and subsidizing the auto industry. If I were Shawn Fain, or if any communist were Shawn Fain, I wouldn’t look at those figures and think to myself, “How can we get a pay raise?” I would think, “Wait a minute. So, you’re telling me, if we just get rid of 5% of the remaining labor costs, you guys will have no way of making any profits…unless the government just pays for all the cars? Ok. We don’t want anything besides for you to up and fucking die.” But modern communists don’t think this way. I have no clue as to why. Strategically, even if you didn’t want to strike against the state—which is my preferred course of action—why would you even want to protect the tiny sliver of labor that’s incorporated into the product of said labor in the first place? You could double your wages or you could double your free-time, thereby doubling (or probably more) the amount of capital investment these corporations would have to take on in order to make up for lost profits. This means, further automation, further replacement of living labor, and more importantly, a cheaper product. In Henry Ford’s day, driving down the cost of his product was always offset by increased demand. But in the age of fascism, demand is met by the state. They make this very clear in their budgets and what they choose to invest in. We thus do not have an underconsumption problem. Dumb Leftists say absolutely ridiculous things, like, “In Ford’s day, he built cars his workers could afford!” Ok. So what? We live in the epoch where the state is now Henry Ford and their job is to starve the shit out of us, so that production of surplus-value can continue and self-augment directly out of our entire subsistence fund. If the entire wages of the working class goes up to v+1, ad infinitum, all the state has to do is make sure v+1 is less than v of the previous cycle. This is how the system doesn’t crash. The +1 is the reserve army of the labor, except the state figured out to employ them. Or, rather, Keynes did (i.e. to boost unemployment, nominal wages would have to fall more than prices). This is why you can’t afford the very product you produce: fascism is a political-economic environment which ensures that labor constantly be sold below its value and, because of this, prices run away from the actual SNLT to produce a wage-unit.

Ultimately, this is why I am not all that excited by the strikes. Keynes knew precisely that labor would not resist such cuts in any meaningful way through unions:

“If, indeed, labour were always in a position to take action (and were to do so), whenever there was less than full employment, to reduce its money demands by concerted action to whatever point was required to make money so abundant relatively to the wage-unit that the rate of interest would fall to a level compatible with full employment, we should, in effect, have monetary management by the Trade Unions, aimed at full employment, instead of by the banking system.”

This is an admission that wage-cuts themselves would not necessarily lead to “full employment.” However, it also implied that it could not simply be commanded from the labor-side by demanding purchasing-power be commensurate to the investment requirements necessary to procure full-employment. A central authority would be best suited for this, since they could cut the wages of the working-class all at once and set interest rates accordingly. Written 87 years ago, Keynes basically told us that wages—that is, the value of labor-power itself—would have to be permanently decimated since this is the only true commodity that superseded all other commodities of having needed a way to increase its demand in the market. His postulations on the conditions of an economy gravitating towards full employment, and the demand that wages cooperate with an increase in the money supply, ends with ceding that this results in nothing less than progressive wage inflation.

Unions are thus not in command of much other than conceding that all there is to life is riding the wave of this progressive motion towards an upward curve that they’ve no real control over (unless all of labor were to unilaterally decide to resist all nominal increases in wages and instead decide to induce its opposite: deflation—i.e., wages go to zero; i.e., full unemployment).

***

Alex is then asked, “Why is this happening?”

Her response:

“…I would say, there’s three explanations for this…The first is that the pandemic made it clear to people that their bosses viewed them as expendable. Secondly, the Bernie Sanders campaigns of 2016 and 2020 introduced class politics to millions of people and put that back on the table. When you speak to young workers, such as those at Starbucks who are on strike, the workers who are trying to unionize Amazon, they’ll often point to that as a key moment for them in changing their thinking about how they could make political change. Third, I’d say, we’re living in a time of record inequality, and a growing number of people are seeing unions as the most effective means of fighting back.”

If the pandemic made it clear to people that they were expendable, then they should’ve taken the hint! All it proved is that there was a fuckton of labor that was unnecessary to production and that the productive sector of the economy was very small and could probably be automated swiftly if we got rid of the unproductive sector (including the state).

As far as Bernie Sanders goes—ha! I am willing to concede only one point about him: he has been a tremendous influence on young people and it has been a net-negative. Fascism, whether they know it or not, has been the ruling force in their lives, their parents’ lives, and their grandparents’ lives. As a communist, everyone expects me to say, “Oh, class is so important.” And yet, it’s not. I don’t know how many times I have to say this, but: the proletariat are not a class. All Bernie Sanders has done is what I have read online (sorry, Haz, buddy, I have to use you as my example again, since your group claims some monumental difference worth bragging about between yourselves and the Left, and all I see are twins) about the same bullshit Alex Press is talking about when she says, “class politics” is “back on the table”:

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Except in some minor cases, communists can’t even agree with one another! What makes you think the proletariat are any different? Whither their common aims? Whither their common interest(s)? You will say to me, “Their common interest is against the ruling class!” Even if this were true, the point remains—to what ends? Marx and Engels could not have been clearer: every class up until now has had a class interest to assert—and they do this through the state. Since proletarians are not a class, but a product of another class, they can only abolish the other class, not usurp them in any meaningful way as the bourgeoisie did to the feudal system. In abolishing ourselves—that is, as abolishing the essential product of bourgeois society, the activity of surplus-value progenerating—we abolish classes altogether. However—because there’s always a however—when Press begins to speak of inequality, she only means between the proletariat and the capitalist class. She doesn’t mean between the proletariat (nor the capitalist class) and the state. The consumption of the capitalist class is of much consternation to Leftists and communists alike. But the largest consumer on the planet is the fascist-state. It’s not even close. They consume almost half the entire economy. They’ve spent $100 billion dollars since the debt ceiling deal. We’ve paid $3 billion in interest per day as well. That is the true source of your inequality right there. Absolutely nobody believes me that the state is also exploiting the capitalist class, even though this is precisely what fascism must entail in order for capital not to completely depreciate. Do you think Henry Ford would freely hand over his capital to the state in the form of a “loan” if he thought he could get better returns by investing in labor-power? The U.S ran a ZIRP (zero interest rate policy) for decades and capitalists still handed it over, because it’s better than LOSING IT ALL! Meanwhile, you pay increasing fractions on this mounting volume of debt. Every dollar of debt held by the government there is on the opposite end a private creditor who views this as their “wealth.” But is that what Marx meant by wealth? For Marx, wealth was not claims on debt obligations. It was command over surplus labor-time, its realization as profit. The “anti-imperialists” all see this as some scam cooked up by the “elites” (yes, even in Hudson’s fascinating book, “Super Imperialism.”) However, nothing could be further from the truth, even though Hudson makes it seem as if Nixon was conspiring to financialize the entire global system, when this was viciously imposed on his administration once there had been an oversaturation of government investment into labor-power, and the state needed to deliver a coup de grâce to wages—forever. Inequality thus begins where unlimited state spending and its own alteration to increase the amount of unproductive labor living off the productive sector ends. The only true distinction that seems to verify my claims is that the state sector grows faster than any private sector industry. Within that knowledge is not some condemnation of those who hold these positions, but merely the recognition that their redundancies are contributing to inflation, inequality, cost of living, and from that of communism itself. The petty squabbling over who is “working class” and who is most “proletariat” is like arguing over who is the fattest sumo wrestler. This is not a prize to be won. Our job is actually just to convince everyone that they could have a shorter workweek and that the state is in their way of this. MAGA seems to have an intuitive understanding that we’re dealing not with class war, but rather, we’re dealing with the burdens of carrying the state—something we can’t afford. As I’ve pointed outed many times, their top priorities are not anything other than shutting the government down and reducing deficits. How to accomplish this is academic but knowing that MAGA is for these—and not that they are comprised of mostly blue-collar workers—is what is relevant. To give you an idea of how irrelevant blue-collar work is to analyzing MAGA, there was a paper published called “Automation and Urban Planning” from 1960 that concluded this:

All the communist goons who want to “re-industrialize” can politely fuck off. We’re 67 years past this so-called “Post-Fordian” threshold…and you want to appeal to this sliver of the proletariat by promising them what exactly? They don’t need us to tell them what their birthright is: free-time and freedom from the state. We need them to tell them us that! Probably the only thing I care that Mao talked about, in this respect, was his “Down To the Countryside Movement” where he said:

“I fear that for over twenty years people will not see rice, mustard, wheat or millet growing; nor will they see how workers work, nor how peasants till the fields, nor how people do business. Moreover their health will be ruined. It is really terribly harmful. I said to my own child: ‘You go down to the countryside and tell the poor and lower-middle peasants, ‘My dad says that after studying a few years we became more and more stupid. Please, uncles and aunts, brothers and sisters, be my teachers. I want to learn from you.’”

Of course, the contexts can’t be transposed so easily. Mao was afraid the youth was exhibiting “bourgeois” behavior (which, frankly, is inevitable). But so what? The bourgeoisie want the state destroyed as well. MAGA’s utility to communists is not how they grow fucking wheat or fix a carburetor. We learn from them by understanding their hostility and uncompromising belief in their historical mission. Do I, as an atheist, give a shit that they believe it’s some demonic war between good and evil? Of course not. What they’re experiencing has to be grounded in their material lives. And what they’re experiencing is what Postone called “the crisis of industrial labor.” It is what comrade Jehu has called “barbarism…to meet the requirements of capitalist accumulation.”

The Leftist standpoint is that we have to support unions because we have to support the working class. Well, no the fuck we don’t. All the empirical data suggests that unions could only ever serve to merge with one another on a national-scale in order to crush the state. Even if the UAW went nuclear and decided, “fuck it, we’re not coming back,” I would only foresee it as being a template for what others could do by way of demonstration to other large corporations. However, the fastest path remains organization against the state. It’s interesting how people always say, “Follow the money!” when trying to prove their conspiracy theories. For example, another Infrared acolyte posted this schizophrenic schematic of the German banking system as “proof” of the “end of capitalism”:

Ok. This “follow the money” doesn’t stop at hedge funds though. It goes all the way to who owns that money—the state. I do not know why they ignore this. Oh, wait. Yes, I do. It’s because Lenin told them so (and they just retrofit his conclusions from 1916 and skip over the part where the state told everyone from here on out what money was—i.e., valueless fiat):

“In other words, the old capitalism, the capitalism of free competition with its indispensable regulator, the Stock Exchange, is passing away. A new capitalism has come to take its place, bearing obvious features of something transient, a mixture of free competition and monopoly. The question naturally arises: into what is this new capitalism “developing”? But the bourgeois scholars are afraid to raise this question…

…Thus, the twentieth century marks the turning-point from the old capitalism to the new, from the domination of capital in general to the domination of finance capital.”

Once the state confiscated gold, and once the break-down of exchange-value forces state intervention to the likes Lenin himself could not have even imagined, the “new capitalism developing” is just fascism. It’s capitalism without exchange-value. It’s not defined by monopoly capital. It’s defined by a state which monopolizes the durée of the workday and what constitutes necessary labor. No one has yet to adequately explain the wild divergences between wages (labor-value) and prices by using Lenin’s theory or presuppositions. Leftists can’t explain it, because they focus on the disparity of wages and profits. Communists can’t explain it because they still measure this inequality in constant dollars (and must therefore result to conspiracy theory rather than labor theory).

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

The T.V. host then asks an important question: “Are they getting their way? Are their strikes successful?”

Press:

“Yeah…even the threat of a strike can lead to a success…Just that strong show of force itself could lead to a strong, fair deal at the bargaining table. Because a strike is a worker’s strongest weapon. It’s their ability to cut-off profits to an employer. And when they exercise that weapon…it can actually force that employer to the table in a way that employer would have never otherwise agreed to.”

Here, Alex finally gets to some valid points—but then fumbles it all the same, because she is still stuck in 1925.

This is actually one of the first times I heard someone mention going after profits rather than just getting higher wages. I don’t know Press’s background, but she should realize that you can do both at once: by reducing hours of labor, you are already threatening profits (since we know labor-power is the source of them), and supply and demand works on labor-power as it does any other commodity. The more you control the supply, the more demand you can create for it, thus, driving up its price (wages).

On the other hand, unions and strikes have not demonstrated to be a “worker’s strongest weapon.” Why is that? A lot of Leftists will go on some long spiel about Reagan, neoliberalism, and the disciplining of labor as its result. However, rarely do they look on the positive side of such an advancement. This turn after the 1970s, where union participation falls:

…is not recoverable. Nor do I care. You do not have to be in a union to strike. That is to say, you don’t have to pay dues to withhold labor-power. Generally speaking, you need 50%—a majority—of your workplace to start a union and have it recognized. That…takes forever. Look it at from the opposite perspective I offered on Keynes’s solution to wages: it’s easier for a central authority to cut them all at once than waiting for the private sector to attend to it in the course of the business cycle (especially where various industries maintain different needs and labor costs). In this case, you could just have existing unions form mega-unions and then have them convince other workers—not to unionize, but merely to join in withholding labor-power. Moreover, you convince them that their enemy is the state. A strike fund would have to be expanded, but that’s what GoFundMe and the like are for anyways.

As to the question of whether these strikes are successful? No!!! They go back to work—that’s a huge “L.” Why bother bringing up the fact that you’re attacking profits and then go back to producing it for them? Some asshole like Richard Wolff might whisper “co-ops” into your ears, as a solution, but the problem would still remain—that is, unless the total value being produced doesn’t exceed what is socially necessary. But this is almost never the case. They promise altruistic outcomes like profit never leaving the community and more worker-control, but they’re ultimately just a different form of organizing redundant labor. If the U.S. government even suggests they’re for co-ops—especially in rural America—-then you can be assured, they are no threat to the state:

“What resilient economic engine creates market opportunities, helps underrepresented people, keeps profits in the local community, and fights climate change? The cooperative!

In a cooperative, people with a common interest pool their funds and create a business that they own, control democratically, and benefit from financially based on how much they patronize (or use) the cooperative.

Cooperatives can address community needs, focus on a broad range of purposes beyond profits, raise wages, and operate in almost every industry. They provide electricity, broadband, rural groceries, child care, home care, financial services, housing, and operate in the supply chain, agriculture, and education. Cooperatives address market gaps by providing essential goods and services. They can also preserve local jobs when a retiring business owner converts the business to a worker cooperative.”

Once again, we don’t have a common interest. We are individuals to our core. I’m not going to quote Marx again on this, but we must assert ourselves as individuals to break the social order of the division of labor, and the state which prevents this. The division of labor doesn’t need to be brought under cooperation. The law of value already regulates this as a directly social function of commodity production. We need to smash this false social unity but also this false division. While the division of labor has made tremendous gains for labor productivity, we have eclipsed the point where this information is relayed back to the social producers in the form of sufficient means to reproduce ourselves on the basis of it. To drive home this point, it’s not even sufficient for capital to reproduce itself on the whole. The entire problem is already that there isn’t enough surplus-value to go around. A cooperative would only make this problem self-evident when the cooperative themselves began to overproduce. In which case, you’d have to have an extremely loyal clientele or, as in the case of the United States, they literally tell the agricultural industry what they can and can’t produce and upon how much acreage they can or can’t do it. Such is the nature of capital.

It is thus unwise to assume unions are where our power lies, if even the step above that, in the form of co-ops, are just another stopgap to “democratize” superfluous labor rather than have global communism.

***

The T.V. host asks a final question: “Can you talk about the ways that these strikes potentially impact the lives of people who have nothing to do with these companies?”

Press:

“…People might be inconvenienced by these strikes…But this is how workers can exercise power in society…They also fight for all workers. When they win, that can raise standards across the board, as other employers then have to improve their own pay and benefits to compete for those workers.”

Again, they do not fight for all workers. Google is not going to raise its employees’ salaries because of any of these strikes. This is simply pulled out of her ass. Do you know who could improve the standard of living for all employees simultaneously? THE FUCKING STATE! And they wouldn’t do it by raising wages via Executive Order or through Congress. They’d do it by self-immolating and dissolving their own workforce. If their millions of public employees all of a sudden had to find work in the private sector, then—and only then—would you see a raise in wages once those private enterprises would have to compete for them. Moreover, as I’ve pointed out many times, these companies would need to make room, which means work-sharing (i.e., a shorter workweek). This alone would drive wages through the roof. Doubling down on unions and strikes that only attack individual corporations or small businesses is a waste of time. I purposely used this older video to show that, even though the strikers and unions she mentioned “won,” they didn’t really. They had to go back to work. That’s not a victory. Their workweeks will still be between 40-50 hours. Cost of living increases will continue to kill whatever meager gains they made in their negotiations, and in a few years’ time they will be back trying to preserve what automation and capital is coming for all the same.

The late 20th and early 21st labor movements are the definition of insanity.

Summary: “In the casino, the cardinal rule is to keep them playing and to keep them coming back. The longer they play, the more they lose, and in the end, we get it all.“—Casino, 1995

Communists and the Left are like gambling addicts. That or they have an insane humiliation fetish. You can’t beat the house, so to speak, by playing. You have to abstain. Casinos, like any business, operate off your losses. They—like the state—have a distinct edge over anyone who walks through their doors: they own the chips, have unlimited liquidity based off the accumulation of their prior victims, and the games are rigged.

I only speak this way to communists and the Left. There’s no point in convincing the average person that communism is “right.” When I made a Twitter post about explaining to my father why I was a communist, all I did was tell him what I’d hope others would say about their own parents: I wish I had more time to spend with you because I love very much. And you know what? It was my most “viral” tweet. It resonated far more than any of the technical or empirical details I could get into about labor theory and the history of fascism. These little labor movement blips will come and go, like universes popping into and out of existence. What remains is cosmic inflation and the continuum of the real movement of society. That real movement doesn’t point to affirming labor or the working-class. It doesn’t suggest either are the revolutionary subject. It doesn’t suggest we can spare them their jobs or make them somehow better. Marx said to be a productive laborer was a “misfortune.” Why are we trying to raise them above this misfortune on the same premises their unluck rests upon? The critical errors of the past 50+ years are based upon focusing everywhere besides the state. It is not enough to call it a “corporate state.” Every doofus with a hammer and sickle in their bios calls it that:

No one would dare call it fascism. Do you know why? For the same reason I accuse everyone else of being Leftists: if they adopted my definition of fascism, it means they couldn’t use the state for anything besides fascism. In other words, even if under some odd circumstances they gained control of the state, if their first action wasn’t to begin dismantling the state, they would themselves be part of the fascist machine. Some of these progressives or socialists make a huge deal about not having corporate donors. So what? If you don’t understand that we live under a fascist economy, a fascist state, and that communism is possible now, and not decades into the future, then you’re just a second-rate preacher on a street corner with the rest of the lunatics. I don’t care if your delusions are self-financed.

And so, Fall is officially here. There never was a “Hot Labor Summer” because labor still exists, and once the UAW capitulates, the Leftist class-addicts will turn their eyes to 2024 just in time for their “protest vote” for Cornel West or Marianne Williamson (or maybe no one at all). But not in time to watch as MAGA does the job I’m repeatedly told only we possess the adequate theory to identify the root of the problem (in this case, Washington D.C.) and extirpate it. I guess we’ll know for sure if indeed there’s another “Hot Labor Summer” or “Free-Time Year-Round.”

One response to “The “Hot Labor Summer” Is Over…”

  1. James Avatar
    James

    Could you explain a bit further on how an influx of formally employed public sector employees would cause private sector wages to rise? It seems to contract the intuitive, first impression that if there is more labor available, then the price of labor (ie wages) would fall. What is the resolution to this conundrum in your view?

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