Most economists assume that when workers with similar skills earn very different pay, something must be blocking normal competition. But for Howard Botwinick, capitalist competition itself creates those gaps. His book Persistent Inequalities: Wage Disparity under Capitalist Competition, first published in 1993 and reissued in 2017, shows how the everyday workings of capitalism split the working class into better- and worse-paid groups — no monopoly power required.

Botwinick came to economics from organizing. Early on, he helped workers win a union at an electronics plant, only to watch the company shut the plant down rather than deal with them. Looking for a better way to understand what he was up against, he went to the New School for Social Research to study with the economist Anwar Shaikh. Shaikh’s ideas about capitalist competition radically departed from the consensus, shared by many economists on the Left, that giant corporations had largely escaped it.

For Botwinick, this meant that if workers organized the most efficient firms in an industry, the ones whose costs set prices for everyone else, they could raise wages across the whole industry. It was, in other words, good news.