Marilynne Robinson--"Much American unhappiness has arisen from the cordoning-off of low-income workers from the hope that they & their children will be fairly compensated for their work..." https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/06/11/what-kind-of-country-do-we-want/ @nybooks

"Their earnings should be sufficient to allow them to be adequate providers & to shape some part of their lives around their interests. Yet workers’ real wages have fallen for decades in America. This is rationalized by the notion that their wages are a burden on the economy...

a burden in our supposed competition with China...The terrible joke is American workers have been competing against expatriated American capital [to China]...The message communicated to our workers is we need poverty to compete w/ countries for whom poverty is a competitive asset

"The minimum wage has become the amount an employer can get away with paying. It is neither the amount a worker needs to sustain a reasonable life nor, crucially, to be important enough as a consumer for his or her interests to align with other interests...

"Because workers are underpaid, they are often treated as dependents, as a burden on the “safety net,” which is actually a public subsidy of the practice of underpayment....