The American middle class isn't the envy of the world
anymore.
Labor had
Its happy day;
Now that time
Has flown away.
Its happy day;
Now that time
Has flown away.
Is the love of
money the root of all evil? OK, so Jesus may have played down bigotry and
megalomania when he said that, but overall his observation holds true 2,000
years later.
Labor relations
are a contemporary battleground for greed. Man's inhumanity takes many forms.
But we all have to work, and that means interactions between owners and toilers
generate a lot of conflict.
Happily, a few
nations have acted to help workers get a fair shake. Western Europe, shaken
today by waves of economic turmoil, got the hang of it a century or so ago. The
United States jumped on the worker bandwagon after the Great Depression. Our
very successful experiment with employee rights, which have been gradually
dismantled for years, ushered in the heyday of the American middle class.
Communism
promised millions some hope for a fair shake, but it relied too heavily on
repression meted out in the name of the people. Japan later picked up the
concept of worker equity, followed by Taiwan and South Korea.
Today, Brazil,
Argentina, and other Latin American nations are reshaping their economic
systems to be more labor-friendly.
Most U.S. leaders
don't worry about worker rights anymore. They believe that government has no
business in business. We're gradually privatizing whatever public services we
can. Across the nation, public schools and prisons are increasingly run by
private companies.
And mercenaries
and other "military contractors" have replaced hundreds of thousands
of U.S. troops in our endless wars.
This
privatization push is a key part of the trend toward exporting jobs and
attracting immigrant workers who will accept conditions that most Americans
thought they had long ago transcended. It's called "the race to the
bottom."
Under our
cherished old system, championed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the
government set standards that all employers had to obey. Minimum wages, safety
conditions, child labor laws, limits on the length of a permissible workday,
and the freedom to form unions and collectively bargain — all these rights were
supposed to be protected by law.
This system once
worked commendably. By the 1960s, the American middle class was the envy of the
world. No more. After big employers transferred millions of industrial and
service jobs overseas, and technological advances rendered millions more jobs
obsolete, we've got a surplus of workers. Wages have plummeted to the point
that many autoworkers aren't middle-class anymore. Unions are a vanishing
breed, especially in the private sector.
Nothing much has
changed, of course, for agricultural workers. They've long enjoyed virtually no
protections at all, lest they drive up the price of food. The same goes for
domestic workers, like caretakers and housekeepers, whose exploitation is a
growing problem as our population ages and more mothers work outside the home.
As much as I'd
like to point to some silver lining to relieve all this despair, I'm just not
seeing any faint glow on the horizon. If anything, things look worse now that
the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling has stripped many
previous limits on the torrent of corporate cash that can flood political
campaigns. As a result, very wealthy companies and individuals are positioned
to tighten their control over Congress, as well as state and federal
governments.
What would Jesus
say?
OtherWords columnist
William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of
Norwalk, Connecticut. otherwords.org
