JUST ECONOMICS from Page 7
Physical: 3 Intellectual: 4 Emotional: 4 Creative: 2 Entrepreneurial/Leadership: 2 Bank Teller Score: 15 Given the five domains with scores from one to 10, the greatest number of points possible is 50. Which occupation would only score a five? Which would score a 50? If you are old enough to recall the commercials with the Maytag repairman, you might agree that this particular repairman’s occupation could be scored as a five. The famous Maytag repairman never had to work. His days were filled with wishing for an appliance to breakdown, but because Maytag made such excellent products, or so the commercial purported, our repairman sat at a lonely desk with his playing cards for games of solitaire to pass the time. Physical: 1 Intellectual: 1 Emotional: 1 Creative: 1 Entrepreneurial/Leadership: 1 Maytag Repairman Score: 5 At the other end of the spectrum there are astronauts. Theirs is a profession that calls upon each domain to its highest degree. They must be in excellent physical condition, have a keen intellect, be emotionally strong enough to work in dangerous and isolated environments, and to accept that they may be killed on the job as many of us witnessed with the 2003 Columbia explosion or the 1986 Challenger disaster. Astronauts need to possess problem-solving creativity to serve them in the event of a mechanical device malfunction, and they must be leaders who can take charge in the event one of their colleagues falls ill or loses their life. For this occupation, a score of 50, 10 points in each category, is appropriate. Physical: 10 Intellectual: 10 Emotional: 10 Creative: 10
Entrepreneurial/Leadership: 10 Astronaut Score: 50 With this scoring system in mind, work as an astronaut would pay the most, and the sort of work comparable to the fictitious Maytag repairman would pay the least. If points were converted into dollars, with a minimum wage of $25 per hours for those 25 years old and above, the lowest paid occupation would be set at $50,000 per year, and the highest paid at $500,000 per year, assuming full-time work. All earnings above $500,000 could be taxed at a percentage between 99% and 100%. If the president of the United States only earns $400,000 annually, how can we justify allowing others to earn more than 125% of that amount? The wealth gap in our society, and many others, is not the result of wages alone. It is comprised also of holdings in the form of properties, businesses and stocks. This exploration is not intended to suggest that a change in compensation will rectify the gap, but rather that is part of its solution. Also, it is intended to call to mind the primary purpose of money: a means to exchange goods and services. At present, however, it is serving another purpose for a small percentage of the population. It is enabling some to live as if they were kings, requiring the labors of multitudes. This is how large swaths of the human race have existed throughout recorded history. There were slaves, serfs and now a compensation system that has resulted in a wealth gap not seen in nearly a century. How it is resolved may depend in part in what our society believes to be the purpose of money and how we use it to compensate people for their work. Just Economics is written by members of the Economic Justice Collective of the Rocky Mountain Peace & Justice Center. This opinion column does not necessarily reflect the views of Boulder Weekly.
Presently, the
way we compensate people for their labors often does not reflect the level of difficulty of the work.
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MARCH 25, 2021
On Atlanta and Boulder killings: Abolitionist visions By Nishant Upadhyay
T
he horrific killing of six Asian and Asian American women by a white man in Atlanta last week has brought to light the violence of anti-Asian racism in this country, and how this violence is continued to be denied and disavowed. In the face of the trope of the Asian im/migrant as the model minority, and Asian complicities in anti-Indigenous and anti-Black processes in the U.S., as an Asian American Studies scholar I have been guilty of undermining the continuities and specificities of anti-Asian racism. While the trope of the model minority is shaped through white supremacy, and some Asian communities have acquired many privileges in the U.S., many Asians and Asian Americans are left out of the American dream through their varying experiences of racialization, colonization and imperialism. There is a long history to their oppression in the U.S. and beyond the borders of the U.S., including: the exploitation of Chinese railroad workers, race riots targeting Asians (including the attack on Denver’s Chintatown in 1880 and the mob killing of one Chinese man), illegal occupation of the Philippines, anti-Asian immigration laws from the late 19th I
century until the 1960s (and into the present, including Trump’s Muslim ban), incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, multiple and endless U.S. imperialist wars across Asia, U.S. economic exploitation and expansion across Asia, to the ever increasing Islamophobic violence against Muslim communities since 9/11. All these processes continue to render Asians and Asian Americans as perpetual outsiders whose labor can always be exploited. As we remember the lives of the killed Asian and Asian American women, we must remember how anti-Asian racism continues to reproduce itself primarily through racialimperial heteropatriarchal violences on the bodies of Asian, Asian American and Pacific Islander women, queer and gender non-conforming peoples. In the last year, over the pandemic, 68% of the cases of at least 3,800 reported anti-Asian incidents of violence were directed against women. The first ever anti-immigration and xenophobic law was targeted against Chinese women in 1875. The Page Act prohibited the entry of Chinese and other Asian women as see GUEST COLUMN Page 10
BOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE