Pay the People!

From an unlikely source, a compelling argument that when workers are paid fairly, everyone, including businesses, benefits.

Seventy percent of the U.S. economy is based on consumer demand, but almost 40 percent of Americans make less than the cost of living. Nearly all the economic gains made in the last several decades have gone to the top 1 percent and Wall Street, while working families whose spending habits drive the economy have fallen further behind, and our economy has suffered as a result.

In Pay the People!, two members of the top 1 percent—John Driscoll, former healthcare CEO and current Walgreens executive, and Morris Pearl, a former BlackRock executive and board chair of the Patriotic Millionaires—pin the blame squarely on short-term corporate greed and policies of both government and employers that impose austerity on some of the hardest-working employees and families. They argue that business leaders’ refusal to pay wages that workers can live on and Congress’s failure to raise the federal minimum wage trap millions of workers in cycles of poverty. At the same time, Driscoll and Pearl demonstrate, these policies undermine the economy for all of us and threaten the foundation of democratic capitalism.

This highly illustrated, data-informed call for a major readjustment in our pay scale for workers at all levels, from two individuals who profit mightily from the current imbalanced system, presents a rebuke of modern American business practices and congressional paralysis. But it also offers a road map forward, with chapters describing what a reconfigured economy would look like. In an issue that is too often covered as a zero-sum game where there’s a winner and a loser, Driscoll and Pearl offer resounding evidence to the contrary.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Morris Pearl, a former managing director of BlackRock, is board-chair of the Patriotic Millionaires, a group of high-net-worth Americans committed to making America better off by building a more prosperous, stable, and inclusive nation, and ensuring that millionaires, billionaires, and corporations pay their fair share of taxes and that every company pays a living wage to all of their workers. He is the co-author, with Erica Payne, of Tax the Rich! and co-author, with John Driscoll, of Pay the People! (both from The New Press) and lives in New York City.

John Driscoll chairs the Waystar Corporation and is a senior advisor at Walgreens Boots Alliance. Previously, he was CEO at CareCentrix, president of Castlight, group president at Medco, and SVP at Oxford Health Plans. John also served as a captain in the U.S. Army Reserve and is a longtime board member of the Alliance for Hunger and The Patriotic Millionaires. The co-author, with Morris Pearl, of Pay the People! (The New Press), he lives in Stamford, Connecticut.

The Patriotic Millionaires is a group of high-net-worth Americans committed to making America better off by building a more prosperous, stable, and inclusive nation, and ensuring that millionaires, billionaires, and corporations pay their fair share of taxes and that every company pays a living wage to all of their workers. It is the co-author (with Morris Pearl and Erica Payne) of Tax the Rich! and (with John Driscoll and Morris Pearl) of Pay the People! (both from The New Press).