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When it comes to the affordability of medications, a number of our political leaders note that they’re a lot cheaper in Canada. Noted radical Bernie Sanders will sometimes observe that access to health care more generally, as well as things like paid sick leave and affordable (or even free) child care, are available in much of Europe.
Such international comparisons, however, barely scratch the surface. A fuller appreciation of American exceptionalism has now been made available by the folks at Oxfam, who have produced a multifaceted and exhaustive study of the 38 member nations of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). These are countries, to quote the survey, that are “similar to the United States, in that they commit to democracy and free-market economies, and have relatively robust gross domestic products.” They include not only countries in Western Europe and Canada, but also Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, and Australia; former Soviet bloc nations (Poland, Hungary, the Czech and Slovak Republics, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania); and, for good measure, Turkey, Israel, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Mexico.
In each of those nations, Oxfam measured 56 variables in national laws, which it then lumped into three categories. The first was wages and unemployment insurance, including such measures as national minimum-wage standards, whether those standards met livable-income criteria, and the eligibility for minimum-wage payments, along with unemployment insurance standards, and the duration and scope of UI eligibility. Under the heading of worker protections, Oxfam measured the adequacy and scope of nations’ laws on some of the particulars that were in the Biden administration’s Build Back Better bill but not passed, such as paid sick leave and child care support, as well as health care availability, work scheduling rights, and the eligibility of gig workers for any of those particulars. The third category measured workers’ right to organize, both the public and private sector, and the right to sectoral bargaining.
Herewith, then, the mournful numbers.
On wages and unemployment benefits, Belgium, France, and the Netherlands ranked 1-2-3. The U.S. ranked 36th, behind the Czech Republic, but ahead of Denmark and Mexico.
Denmark? The survey notes that neither Denmark nor Sweden ever enacted minimum-wage laws because their wage levels were almost entirely set through the collective bargaining of their labor unions, which in Sweden for decades represented close to 90 percent of the nations’ workers. If the U.S. level of unionization were anywhere close to Sweden’s, rather than its current 10 percent (and just 6 percent in the private sector), we wouldn’t need minimum-wage laws, either.
It’s important to note that these indices measure national minimum-wage laws, not the state laws. So they don’t reflect the fact that, say, California and New York have set minimum wages at a level more than twice that of the national standard ($7.25). Points are awarded, however, for nations that allow for higher state or provincial minimum wages. Otherwise, instead of finishing 36th, we might have come in at 38th.
In our current political discourse, it’s chiefly Bernie, and often only Bernie, who makes the case that we lag all our peers when it comes to many of the basics of life.
The U.S. did hit that magic 38 when it came to the next category: worker protections. There, our failure to provide paid sick leave or affordable care for little kids, not to mention our comprehensive failure to provide affordable health care to our citizenry (much less all our residents), thereby exposing them to a thousand natural and unnatural shocks, has landed us at the bottom of the pile. On this scale, Germany, Finland, and Norway rank 1-2-3; the nation that scooched above us into 37th place is Estonia.
What’s particularly notable here is that, when the 28 different particulars that are measured to produce an aggregate score in this category are totaled up, we come in way below Estonia. On the 1-to-100 scale measuring the adequacy of worker protections, first-place Germany had a score of 72.91, while 37th-place Estonia’s score was 44.41. Then (like something that the cat dragged in) came the U.S., with a mind-bogglingly low score of 25.23.
On worker rights, a sorry tale reflecting at least six decades of America’s waning commitment thereto, we come in 32nd, tied with Turkey, but ahead of Mexico, Colombia, and Costa Rica. Had the National Labor Relations Act not omitted granting collective-bargaining rights to public employees, thereby permitting worker-friendly states to establish it, I suspect we’d be a lot lower than 32. Only by the grace of some animus or ambivalence toward the idea of granting all American workers, including public-sector ones, the right to unionize when Congress passed the NLRA in 1935, then, do we rank as high as number 32.
Prospect readers likely require little in the way of explanation to understand how our nation has become the industrialized world’s bottom-feeder when it comes to the rights and lives of its working people. It’s all about the real American exceptionalism. It’s about our long-standing heterogeneous, multiracial workforce, much of it enslaved. It’s about the dismissal of workers’ concerns and government activity on their behalf that followed from our inability to create a universal working-class movement. It’s about how this made it easier for business to suppress those workers, and yielded the exceptional power of capital over labor that’s still plaguing us today.
It’s worth noting that those Northern European nations with the most generous universal programs and strongest labor movements were racially and in some cases religiously homogenous. In the absence of differences of race, they confronted their differences of class, and their relatively unified working classes were able to mitigate the power of capital—at least, a lot more than we did. Now that a non-European wave of immigrants has settled in many of these countries, some of the racism and xenophobia that has always stunted the growth of an American countervailing power to capital has beset those nations as well.
In our current political discourse, it’s chiefly Bernie, and often only Bernie, who makes the case that we lag all our peers when it comes to many of the basics of life. There are doubtless millions of rank-and-file Democrats who already know this, even if they can’t reel off all the particulars of our exceptionalism. Whether such a litany would persuade any swing voters is, at best, open to question.
But I see no downside if more of the leading figures of the center-left, much less the left, were to give it a try. In 1992, I did extensive coverage of Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign, particularly in the primary elections. One of Clinton’s stock lines in his stump speeches was to cite particular state policies—and even the policies of other nations—that had worked to benefit ordinary workers. He would then say, “If they can do it there, why cannot we do it here?” On a few occasions, believe it or not, he even cited Sweden’s full-employment policies as a possible model for American emulation.
Yes, I know, Clinton’s admiration for the Swedish Active Labor Market was nowhere to be found once he became president, or even once he won the nomination. But the citation of policies that have helped workers there that could help workers here is a way that Democrats can claim a particular policy turf. When done credibly, as Bernie has, this can both provide candidate differentiation and also help do what Bernie has done: educate the party base in a way that moves it closer to the rest of the world.
