The Case for a Maximum Wage with Busboys and Poets Books
Date and Time
Jul 19, 2018 6:30 pm
Location
14th & V
2021 14th St NW, Washington, District of Columbia, 20009
Jul 19, 2018 6:30 pm
14th & V
Modern societies set limits, on everything from how fast motorists can drive to how much waste factory owners can dump in our rivers. But we don’t limit incomes. Should we?
Would limiting income address the inequality that ails us more effectively than more conventional approaches to narrowing our vast economic divides? Could a cap on income — a “maximum wage” — ever become politically practical?
Don’t miss your opportunity to explore these questions and more with Institute for Policy Studies analyst Sam Pizzigati, the author of an engaging new book — The Case for a Maximum Wage — that details promising new strategies for challenging a world where top corporate executives routinely make more in a morning than their workers can earn in an entire year.
Sam’s multimedia presentation about his new book digs deep into past failures to narrow our economic divides and details how activists in the United States — and across the world — are leveraging the power of the public purse against inequality, fighting to deny government contracts, subsidies, and tax breaks to enterprises that manufacture mega millionaires.
Sam is a veteran labor journalist and Institute for Policy Studies associate fellow Sam Pizzigati co-edits Inequality.org, the Institute’s weekly newsletter on our great divides. He also contributes a regular column to OtherWords, the IPS national nonprofit editorial service. Now retired from the labor movement, Sam also spent two decades directing the publishing program at America’s largest union, the 2.8-million-member National Education Association, and before that edited the national publications of three other U.S. trade unions.
Sam’s writing has revolved around economic inequality since the early 1990s. His op-eds on income and wealth concentration have appeared in periodicals all around the world, from the New York Times to Le Monde Diplomatique. He has authored three books and co-edited two others. His 2004 book, Greed and Good: Understanding the Inequality that Limits Our Lives, won an “outstanding title” honor from the American Library Association’s book review journal. His most recent book, The Rich Don’t Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created the American Middle Class, 1900-1970, appeared in 2012.
A Maryland resident since 1975, Sam served on the founding board of directors of Progressive Maryland, a statewide labor and community coalition for social change.
