Today’s the day! We’re thrilled to announce that our new book, Pay the People! Why Fair Pay is Good for Business and Great for America, is now available to order online and in bookstores across the nation – and that our journey to ensure fair pay for all has entered an exciting new chapter.
Hopefully we can entice you to order your own personal copy of Pay the People! from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Bookshop. You can also learn more about the book at paythepeople.com. Every book you purchase and any positive reviews you share about the book help us get our message out.
As authors and proud members of the Patriotic Millionaires, we’re excited for this opportunity to make a compelling business and economic case for raising wages for millions of American workers. It is beyond time for American businesses to commit to paying a living wage, and it’s irresponsible for politicians and Congress to simply wait for them to do it – rather than raising the federal minimum wage.
One of us (John Driscoll) is a former healthcare CEO and executive at Walgreens Boots Alliance, and the current chair of a staffing company that manages over 700,000 employees. The other (Morris Pearl) is a former Managing Director at BlackRock, the world’s largest asset management firm. We’ve had very different careers and life experiences, but they’ve ultimately led us both to the same, very simple conclusion: we need to pay the people if we want to fix what’s wrong with our economy, our politics, and our nation.
In our book, we argue that the combination of Congress’ failure to raise the minimum wage and business leaders’ refusal to pay employees fairly is a trifecta failure. It is a loss for workers, who can’t afford basic necessities like food, rent, and clothing. It is a mistake for businesses, which can only thrive in the long term when they invest in their employees. And it is damaging for the economy, which is sustained by consumer demand from the millions of working Americans who are also consumers. We make the case that lawmakers and business leaders need to raise workers’ wages to meet the cost of living if we want to get the country back on a path to stable and inclusive economic growth.
As a sneak peek, we wanted to share an excerpt from the introduction of the book with you:
More than 40 percent of working people in America—over 50 million people—make less than the cost of living for a single person working in low-wage jobs, which include everything from retail clerks to home health aides to cooks. For most of them, especially those with kids, it’s simply not enough to make ends meet.
When you really look at the math, you see that there is a simple solution to what ails the nation, and it can be summed up in three little words: pay the people.
That’s right, the single most efficient, effective (and obvious) way to stabilize the economic lives of working people—and the country—is to make sure that their jobs pay enough so they can meet their cost of living. It is time to reconnect the prosperity of American families to the success of American businesses. When businesses do well, all the people who work for those businesses should do well too—not just the ones in the C-suite. That begins by paying people something close to the actual cost of living. It’s simple. If you can’t afford to pay an employee something they can live on, you can’t afford an employee. If you’re making money while everyone who works for you struggles to survive, you aren’t running a business, you’re running a human exploitation scheme.
Consider this: from 1948 to 1973, productivity rose by 97 percent while hourly compensation rose by 91 percent. During these years, workers received the benefit of increased productivity in the form of higher wages. After 1973, productivity continued to rise, but compensation no longer rose with it. From 1973 to 2014, productivity rose by 72.2 percent while hourly compensation rose only 9.2 percent. Essentially all the productivity gains made post-1973 accrued to the owners of companies rather than the workers themselves. Productivity and compensation became decoupled in the mid-1970s and have remained uncoupled since then. But why? Look no further than the declining value of the nation’s minimum wage.
Stop for a minute here. Stomp your foot on the floor. Now stand up and jump up and down. Did the floor collapse? If so, we’re terribly sorry, but that will teach you how important it is to have a solid floor underneath you. The wage floor is like that. The minimum wage—the wage floor—provides a foundation on which wages much further up rest. Would you rather have a floor with lots of holes in it, or a solid floor that you can jump up and down on? Ask yourself that question every time someone challenges the idea that a strong wage floor is essential to a strong middle class.
Today, there is not a single state in the country where the minimum wage is equal to the cost of living for a single person with no children. Not one. Put another way, there is nowhere in the country where a single person working full-time can support themselves on minimum wage. The “living wage gap,” the difference between what it costs to live somewhere and the hourly minimum wage, is substantial and growing—ranging from $7.89 per hour in Maine to a whopping $16.04 per hour in Georgia. Twenty states with the biggest gaps follow the federal minimum wage of $7.25.
We believe this book is the exact message this country needs, coming at an incredibly important time. Working people are going to be exceptionally vulnerable in the years to come, and we’re doing everything we can to ensure they have fair pay and economic security.
Along with the rest of the Patriotic Millionaires, we’re on a mission to pay the people. We hope that our book will inspire you and the rest of America to join us.
Order a copy of Pay the People! TODAY from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop.