Review of “You’re Paid What You’re Worth And Other Myths of the Modern Economy”

Abstract

In December of 2022, one of the largest strikes in US history was resolved after 48,000 academic workers represented by the United Auto Workers (UAW) signed new agreements with the University of California (UC) system. The academic workers argued for large increases in pay by comparing their current stipends and salaries with the pay of highly educated workers outside of academia, the pay of academic workers in peer universities, the cost of living near the UC campuses, the price of other high-ticket items in the UC budget, and the value of the workers’ contributions to research and teaching missions. Negotiators for the UC system pointed to budget constraints and tradeoffs, including the specter of cuts to the number of academic workers (a disemployment argument) and large revenue shortfalls that would require raising tuition. In the end, academic workers’ pay increased, but not by as much as they requested. The UAW strike and the claims of each party illustrate the rhetoric often deployed in contests surrounding pay and “merit” in the US labor market. Jake Rosenfeld’s meticulously researched “You’re Paid What You are Worth, and Other Myths about the Modern Economy” (YPWYW) unpacks the pay-setting processes behind this rhetoric. His core argument is that worker pay is not the result of a careful, systematic, or accurate measurement of an individual worker’s productivity or contributions to their organization. Rather, it is the outcome of the interplay of power, norms of fairness, equity, and legal and institutional arrangements under capitalism. Indeed, the notion that you are paid “what you are worth” becomes a cultural trope that justifies large disparities in pay among workers, even those doing similar jobs, and makes them seem natural and inevitable.