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REWARDING WORK
* For political economist Edmund Phelps, fostering self-
worth and social responsibility rely on the ability to earn a
respectable wage. In his book Rewarding Work, Professor Phelps
shows that earning a good wage has been increasingly hard for
those at the low end of the wage distribution as productivity has
come to rely more on knowledge and skills and less on brawn and
hard work.
Phelps: "For two hundred years, the economic engine of
capitalism has enabled people who are willing to work hard and
save money to lead a comfortable life. Since the 1970s, however,
a gulf has opened between the wages of low-paid workers and those
of the middle class."
Phelps asserts that a crucial task for our economic and political
system is to devise methods to help less productive workers draw
a reasonable wage, thereby reintegrating them into the economic
mainstream. His solution: a graduated schedule of tax subsidies
to enterprises for every low-wage worker they employ. As firms
hire more of these workers, the labor market will tighten and pay
levels would rise. Professor Phelps believes that ultimately his
program would be largely self-financing, because its cost would
be offset by reductions in the cost of welfare, crime, and
medical care - as well as by taxes paid by formerly unemployed
workers.
"Rewarding Work -- how to restore participation and self-
support to free enterprise" by Edmund S. Phelps (pub Harvard
University Press 1997)
C R E D I T S
-------------------
Editor -- Vivian Hutchinson
Associates -- Ian Ritchie, Dave Owens and Jo Howard
ISSN No. 1172-6695
S U B S C R I P T I O N S
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An e-mail version of this letter is available to international
friends and colleagues on an "exchange of information" basis
and on the understanding that the Letter is not re-posted to
New Zealand... this is because we need the paid subscriptions
>from our New Zealand colleagues in order to pay our way.
Thanks.
