No fight in politics or culture is ever completely finished. Even the idea that no human should hold another in chattel slavery is still playing out in our society today. This idea of forever struggling for progress should be the core of anyone’s thinking if they want to label themselves progressive. Sadly, the Organized Labor movement and members seems to have lost this idea, if indeed they ever had it.
"Originally posted at Squarestate.net"
It is easy to see how it happened. Labor and Trade Unions were formed first to combat the abuses of the industrialists. This was a fight for their actual lives as working conditions were so horrific we can hardly imagine them today. When that first fight, to be recognized as more than the machines who ran the machines was won, Labor went on to the second fight, wages and benefits.
This fight was won too. The Ozzie and Harriet middle class of the 1950’s and ‘60’s was created, in large part, by the wages and benefits Labor negotiated out with management. This is where the problem started. As these workers raised families they bought into the American dream, they wanted to better for their children. This is no shock, but what the materialistic, possession focused American dream leads to was bad for Labor.
The workers sent their children to college. They did not want them to work in the factories, they wanted them to be professionals, they wanted them to be managers and owners themselves. This is not true of all of workers, but a great many followed this path and taught it to their children.
Long term this lead to where we are today; Labor is depleted and struggling for relevance. The once pervasive unions are now mere shadows of themselves, with their ability to look out for the worker and bolster the middle class vastly diminished. To the Dog, all of this comes from a failure of his generation to understand what Labor has meant for the workers of America and a failure to renew the best bastion of protection from abuse by management and owners.
This must end. We see it in the bail out of the financial system. The bankers who took unreasonable risks are allowed to keep their bonus structures, they are not held to account for the damage their recklessness has caused and the ones who suffer the most are the workers of America, the ones who make things, who actually generate real profits from real products. Why do these folks suffer? It is because we have allowed the balancing power of Labor to wane.
As we fight to fix the system, which allowed corporate entities, whose only measure of, success is counted in mega-bucks, to become "too big to fail", we must not rely only on regulation. Federal regulation is a blunt instrument. It is a wall, which will always be chipped away at and tunneled under if there is a profit on the other side. The only true way to rein in abuses is to have other powerful entities that can prevent the "profit at all costs" mentality from being the culture of our nation.
Organized Labor can be that counter-force, but we must have a large and effective Organized Labor movement to achieve this. We need to rethink our view of factory jobs as well as service industry jobs.
Our society has lost the value of a hard days work. That is not to say we don’t expect people to go in and put in a full day for a full pay, we do. What we have lost sight of is the dignity of all work. There is nothing wrong with being on the housekeeping staff of a hotel, someone has to keep the rooms clean, make sure the beds are made. The only real problem with this job is that it is very hard physically (you try flipping those 100lbs mattresses) and it does not pay very well.
We have come to associate money with the value of the work done. When we had a strong labor movement in this nation that was a reasonable idea; the difference between what the CEO’s and the workers on the floor made was not that far a part. There was a recognition that the workers were important to the company and had to be compensated at a level that would keep them there. In 1965 the difference between a CEO’s average pay and the workers average pay was 35 time That is a big difference, but at least it has relationship to reality as there a lot less CEO positions and more worker positions.
Today the difference is 270 times. This is saying that those who run companies are, on average 270 times more important to a company than the people who do the day to work of cleaning, building, filing, billing, collecting and all of the other activities that actually generate the revenue of a company.
One of the major differences between then and now is the decline of Organized Labor. Without the support to all wages that Union jobs provided it was easy for the owners of businesses to crank down the wages they pay, because were are people going to go to get a better paying job?
All this leads to the Dog’s point. If we want to have a balance against the predations of big business, whether they are banks, manufacturing, or hotels, we must have more Union participation. Our generation must find a way to band together like the founders of the Labor movement. It was only by collective action that the gains they made were achieved. It required more than just self interest, it required an understanding that while a few might get to that level of ownership and wealth most will not, and that they should not suffer for it.
We are living in a time where the separation between the rich and the rest of us is as large as it has been in nearly a century. It is clear that the rich, as a group, will not act to make the balance better. That will only come from the people. There is a way to do this, it is proven to be effective and it is known. It is time for us to turn our attention back to the value of the worker and work and demand that those who generate the profits benefit from them in a fairer manner. There is nothing wrong with having dirty hands at the end of the day, if you can say that it gives you a good home, lets you raise your kids and have a reasonable life.
This is a challenge we will not win by regulation, it will only be bested by banding together and demanding that the work we do compensated fairly. The investors get more than their fair return. It is true that without their money businesses would have a hard time growing. However, without the workers at all levels there would be no business to grow.
If, like the Dog, you have benefited from the lifestyle that unionized work provided, the time to pay that debt has come. Labor needs to be renewed, it will take work, it will take thought, it will take education. These are the legacy of union workers in our past, we should put it to work making the future better.
The floor is yours.