Working Stiffs

“What if we treated racism in the way we treat cancer?” Ibram X. Kendi, How To Be An Antiracist

Labor Day is my favorite national holiday. There’s something right and good about honoring the people who do the work that turn the wheels that make the country function. I’ve always enjoyed work. I remember when I was a kid of nine or ten, doing yard work without being asked, just because it felt good to pull weeds or trim a hedge or turn soil with a shovel. Around the same time I was working on the driving range at Muni, our local public golf course which wasn’t far from our house on Ardilla Drive, picking up range balls. Usually it was me, my brother Mike, and another boy named Jimmy Ley, working sections of the sloping range, picking up balls with a small basket fixed to the end of a golf club shaft as the summer sun went down. Some days we finished in the twilight. We carried large yellow wire baskets until they became too heavy, and then we dumped the balls into a bin on the back of a golf cart. I always tried to pick up as many balls in a single pass as I could. I still remember how the basket banged painfully against my hip and thigh. I also remember how satisfying it felt when the entire range was picked clean, and all the red and blue-striped range balls were washed and stacked, ready for the next day.

That was a long time ago now, another life. 

The decline of organized labor and the rise of income inequality have walked hand in hand. If you’re a capitalist, the first thing you want to do is keep labor costs as low as possible, and it’s much harder to do when workers bargain collectively, speak with a unified voice, and always have the potential to shut down production if you try to take too much and share too little. Eliminate the union and the hand of the capitalist is much freer. And if you can get the legislative arm of the government to help you marginalize organized labor, and the judicial branch to deem it perfectly legal, well, the conditions are ripe for maximizing profit -- or increasing shareholder value -- as it’s euphemistically called in this neoliberal era. It’s profit, pure and simple. 

American capitalists have always fought like cornered wolverines to keep workers from forming unions. Slave labor was the optimum system of course, and as Ibram X. Kendi has noted, “It is impossible to know racism without understanding its intersection with capitalism.” When slavery ended, other means to keep workers in line were used, strikebreakers, private detectives, mercenaries, and state and federal troops. Pitting workers against each other worked well, too, white and black, northern and southern, native born and foreigners. It’s a bloody history, largely forgotten in this time of the “gig” economy, the “sharing” economy, the “flexible” economy. Call it what you will but the end is the same: squeezing the maximum production from the lowest possible labor cost. Why do you think American manufacturers moved to Mexico, Vietnam, Pakistan, and China? 

Organized labor has shrunk so much and been on the slide so long that workers are consigned to the kids’ table, ignored by Republicans and Democrats alike. Want to know the state of Labor in America? Look at the federal minimum wage, the bitter fight for $15 an hour, the JANUS decision; look at public school teachers marching for liveable wages. Look at the bloated salaries of university presidents and the scraps thrown to adjunct faculty and graduate student teaching assistants. 

Capitalism runs on exploitation of people and resources. Capitalists will concede nothing to workers unless and until workers force them to by cutting off their sources of capital. You want to understand America? Look at how we treat our elderly, our young, our infirm, our incarcerated, and our workers. Think about how we treat those among us who have the least. Do we lift them up, or push them down? 

Happy Labor Day.