The Craft of a Sustainable Economy, Part 1

Strip-mining human labor isn’t sustainable. The values of craftsmanship have much to teach us about ensuring fair wages and a more equitable tax system, and creating an economy that's built to last.

Dear Friends,

If your livelihood depends on the work you do every week, you are likely to be among the 70-odd million Americans—nearly half the U.S. workforce¹—who live inside a frustrating reality: good jobs have become more and more scarce, and whatever jobs you can get don’t pay enough to cover the basic costs of living. As this problem has spread, Americans’ health and happiness have steadily declined. Meanwhile, the rich, especially the ultra-rich, are living comfortably removed from all this pain. Swaddled in tax rates that are a fraction of what everyone else pays, the rich only get richer. Much richer.

I know I’m not telling you anything new, but that is precisely the point. The fact that the ravages of economic inequality have been going on for so long, across the globe, while most politicians either ignore the problem or pay only lip service to solving it, is a tragedy and an outrage. Instead of building an economy that is sustainable for generations to come—full of workers who are well-fed, well-cared for medically, and well-supported by their communities’ civic institutions—business and government leaders are essentially strip-mining the workforce.

What’s left behind for workers is plenty evident in the chart below, which lays out how much workers’ shares of corporate earnings have declined in the last 45 years.

What’s stunning about this sorry state of affairs is that it’s entirely unnecessary. Solutions to runaway economic inequality have long been well-known, well-studied, and widely available for businesses and policymakers to pursue. In fact, many of the world’s industrialized societies already use some of them. So why don’t America’s leaders do the same?

Before I try to answer this question, let me be clear about where I sit on this issue politically. To me, the responsibility for economic inequality getting out of control lands on the doorsteps of liberal leaders just as much as it does for conservatives. In fact, the issue’s persistence, going back decades if not centuries, proves an inconvenient truth: Time and again, Democrats and Republicans, in Congress and in state legislatures, have gone out of their way to make sure the system remains rigged against workers at the bottom of our economic barrel.

In the coming months, I will dig into this conundrum more deeply in a series of columns exploring how we might halt this trend and begin “crafting” a truly sustainable economy. For now, I want to use this first installment to explain why we’re covering this topic, and how we’ll do it.

First, let me explain why a magazine about artisans is writing about economics. To us, the subjects of economic equality and craft are intimately linked because they are each based on a core value: durability. The principle of durability—or “sustainability,” as it’s often called in discussions about modern-day challenges—strikes us as so central to the pursuit of excellence, in any endeavor, that it shaped our organization’s founding credo: “Create a World Built to Last.”

When it comes to the economy, think of it this way. No laborers—whether they be master furniture makers, software coders, or journeyman pipefitters—can produce at their best when they have to, as an Illinois Congressional candidate says, “work two jobs just to still be poor.”² When workers are paid well, however, they not only do better work, they also show up more regularly; stick with a company for years; and have the income necessary for consumer spending on a range of goods and services. That spending of course sustains other businesses, and builds a varied, stable economy that can keep growing for years to come. In short: Sustainable jobs create a sustainable economy; and unsustainable jobs create an unsustainable economy.

Now, how the heck am I going to tackle this sprawling problem in a series of short columns? (Believe me, that question has been keeping me up at night for quite a while.) Basically, I’m going to pick at it, subtopic by subtopic, with brief, narrowly focused commentaries, which will run roughly once a month throughout this year.

For example, my next essay, coming in February, will round up some of the most eye-popping factoids about where we are with inequality.³ That will be followed by essays that ask why America has such trouble paying workers wages they can live on; and whether a fairer economic system, something that could justifiably be called “democratic capitalism,” is even possible. I will also profile companies, large and small, that do pay livable wages to everyone, all the way down to frontline workers, and that take care of these workers in the ways that once were the norm for American business. How, one wonders, do they manage to pay so well in this economy, especially when their competitors don’t? To fully answer that question, I’ll then profile a handful of corporations that pay frontline workers a pittance, while lavishing executives with salaries far larger than any human needs.

I will also dig into our system of taxation, unearthing the boondoggles and loopholes that politicians have snuck into our tax code. As these goodies have piled up over the decades, they have created what’s essentially an affirmative action program for the wealthy. With luck, I will land a few interviews with some of the business and government leaders responsible for this mess, or who could have done something about it but didn’t.

I plan to also interview some of the enterprising leaders, both in the U.S. and abroad, who are seriously trying to build a pathway to an economy that is more fair, and more sustainable. With even more luck, a few of these columns will be written by guest contributors who have more expertise in these topics than I do. The series will culminate with a portrait of Whiteville, N.C.—a rural, economically depressed, and largely Republican community, where a small band of citizens have started to push their state legislators for liveable wages.

Finally, in the spirit of laying all my cards on the table, I want to tell you what inspired this series, because it involves some work I’ve been doing that goes outside journalism, and into the world of politics.

For the last six years, I’ve been volunteering for an organization that’s fighting economic inequality, by advocating for higher taxes on the ultra-wealthy, and higher wages for the working class. Obviously, plenty of other organizations care about these issues; what’s unusual about this group is its membership, made apparent by its name: The Patriotic Millionaires (the P.M. tagline: “Proud to Pay More”).

It is only fair to tell you, gentle reader, that I am now one of the Patriotic Millionaires’ 300-plus members, and have regularly traveled for them to Washington, D.C., where we’ve met with dozens of elected officials and their staff. During those meetings (and many others, via Zoom), I have lobbied for various forms of legislation that would increase the minimum wage, and taxes on the wealthy. Given that history, many of my upcoming columns will feature, or be informed by, research and work done by The Patriotic Millionaires.

By the strictest definition, my affiliation with P.M. makes me guilty of a conflict of interest, but I hope readers will grant me clemency for two reasons: First, my membership in P.M. gives me no financial gain. (If anything, it creates a financial loss—caused by P.M.’s hefty membership dues, and any higher taxes I might eventually pay.) Second, whenever the P.M.’s work is used or referred to in these columns, I will disclose my personal involvement, at whatever level it has occurred. Then, at the very least, everything is out in the open.

See you again in February,

Todd Oppenheimer
Publisher & Editor-in-Chief, Craftsmanship Magazine

1. Estimates on the percentage of working Americans who don’t earn enough to cover basic costs of living range from slightly under 50 percent to slightly over. The variations depend on where someone lives, what’s counted as a basic necessity, and whether more than one person in a household needs to be supported by a given job. The most common finding is that just under half of American workers aren’t working at jobs that make ends meet. (A good example is this report from the Society for Human Resource Management, which puts the figure at 44 percent.) With approximately 160 million people currently in the U.S. workforce, that would mean 70 million people are working for wages that don’t meet the most basic costs of living.

2. This comment is often made by Yasmeen Bankole, a candidate for Illinois’ 8th Congressional district, a suburban community on Chicago’s northwest side. The demographics of the district show a population that is well-educated, but nonetheless has a median income of less than $47,000 a year—just under MIT’s calculation of Illinois’ basic cost of living.

3. To whet your appetite for next month’s column, here are a couple of stunners:

a) One of the most common arguments for giving tax breaks to the wealthy and to corporations is that they will use those savings to invest in their business, create new ventures, and pay workers more generously. In 2020, the London School of Economics decided to investigate this theory, using data from 18 advanced democracies. The study’s conclusion: reforms that reduce taxes on the rich “do not have any significant effect on economic growth and unemployment.” Why? Instead of investing in new business growth, the wealthy generally keep their winnings for themselves.

b) During the COVID pandemic, when people were losing their jobs and even their loved ones, America’s 700-odd billionaires saw their wealth grow by 50 to 70 percent. This added some $2 trillion to their collective net worth, a take averaging nearly $3 billion each.

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ICYMI...

If you’re new here, you may not know that we cover much more than “traditional” craft. We’ve been publishing stories about labor and the economy—viewed, like today’s article, through the lens of craftsmanship—since 2015. As just one example, check out “The New Workforce Dilemma,” written by Kristin Sharp and Molly Kinder.

To find more stories on this topic, and many others, try our Topic Search tool on the main website. (And pro tip: It also works for videos, podcasts, and photo essays.

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Craftsmanship Magazine focuses on master artisans and innovators whose work informs our quest: to create a world built to last.