The Tax They Didn't Pay

Evidence They Can’t Defend — Essay 12 of 13

I ran a plant in Ohio, in a manufacturing town, competing for labour against employers who had been there for generations and could pay more than we could. What we could offer was close to the local minimum. Turnover ran about 50 percent a year, and a meaningful share of the floor was staffed by temporary workers.

Two of those temps were living in the local United Way shelter.

They came to me for work and I took them gladly. What happened next was the most satisfying thing I have watched in years. They learned. They got good. And then the ordinary furniture of a life began arriving: an apartment. New clothes. A set of wheels. I have run plants on three continents and held titles that sounded important, and watching a man walk in wearing a jacket he bought himself is a different order of thing. It felt close to missionary.

Then I caught one of them stealing from the self-dispense food pantry on the floor. Not subtly. Blatantly.

And the other — the day I gave him permanent employment, with the certainty and benefits that come with it, was the day he parlayed that status into a job somewhere else for a few dollars more.

Missionary without satisfaction.

I have turned that over for a long time, and the easy reading — that two poor men let me down — is wrong.

Here is what it proves. I could form those men. I could not hold them. The one thing genuinely mine to give — the teaching, the standard, the chance to become capable — I gave, and it worked, and it was worth about two dollars an hour less than the thing across town. The formation was real. The wage was the binding constraint, and no plant sets the wage in a vacuum.

Underneath it sits a prior question I could not stop asking. Why were those men temps at all? Why does a person arrive at thirty with no credential, a thin or damaged early record, sometimes a petty conviction, and a settled expectation of living paycheck to paycheck — and why is the category built to receive him called temporary?

I went looking at the research. The answer is worse than I expected.

They are not temporary

More than a third of American temp workers — 35 percent — report their current assignment has already lasted over a year. Nearly one in five say over two.

Read that again. For a large share of the people in it, temping is not a bridge to permanent work. It is the destination. The category exists so that a permanent worker can be classified as something else.

The consequences are not incidental. In production and manufacturing, temps earn roughly 72 to 80 percent of what directly hired workers earn for the same work. A quarter report wage theft. Seventy-one percent report retaliation for raising an issue with a supervisor.

And the safety figures should stop anyone who runs a floor. A study of 1.3 million workers’ compensation claims in Ohio found temp agency workers injured at 11.6 per 100 workers against 4.9 for permanent workers— more than double. Injured temps were about five years younger and had been on site a shorter time before it happened. Research across five other states found injury incidence 36 to 72 percent higher, with temps 68 percent more likely to be working in the most dangerous fifth of all occupations.

That study is Ohio, and Ohio is where I ran temps. The number is about my floor too, and I would rather say so than write an essay pointing at somebody else’s.

Now notice what those properties do to the public balance sheet. A temp is a worker whose employer contributes less to unemployment insurance, whose compensation coverage is contested between agency and host, who receives no health benefit, and who is injured at twice the rate. Every gap there is filled by somebody: the emergency room, Medicaid, the shelter — the same shelter that housed two of my workers before I hired them.

That’s the argument. Extraction does not only move value from workers to shareholders. It moves costs from corporations to communities. And the communities absorbing them are the same ones that educated the workers, built the roads, and kept the lights on in the shelter where my two men were sleeping.

The halving

In 1952, corporate income taxes accounted for roughly 33 percent of federal revenue. By 2023, about 10 percent.

The statutory federal rate fell from 46 percent in the early 1980s to 21 percent after the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, and the effective rate — after deductions, credits, deferrals, offshore profit-shifting, accelerated depreciation — runs lower still. Many of the largest corporations pay single digits. Some pay nothing.

The 2017 cut was sold as a stimulus that would produce investment and wage growth. What followed: S&P 500 buybacks passed $800 billion for the first time the next year. The savings bought stock, which lifted earnings per share, which lifted executive pay.

It did not trickle down. It was extracted up.

Who pays instead

The revenue gap does not vanish. It is filled by other taxpayers or it shows up as deteriorated public services, and both have happened.

Individual income and payroll taxes now supply roughly 85 percent of federal revenue, up from about 60 percent in the 1950s. The burden moved from corporations to workers — the same workers whose wages stagnated and whose pensions were eliminated.

At state and local level it appears as crumbling infrastructure, underfunded schools, reduced public health. The American Society of Civil Engineers grades American infrastructure at C-minus or below, with over $2 trillion needed to reach adequacy — a gap that exists partly because the corporations whose supply chains depend on that infrastructure have systematically reduced what they pay toward it.</