I
don’t know when, exactly, it became Received Wisdom that anyone whose income is
derived from salary or wages instead of from investments is a chump. Possibly
that started during the Reagan administration, but it certainly has achieved
wide circulation in the past 20 years.
We
see it all the time in the commoditization of labor in all forms, from bus boys
to software engineers, who across the board put in work weeks that would have
sent unions out howling on picket lines just 60 years ago. At the lower end,
they work two or three jobs to earn a subsistence living; at the upper they
risk being replaced by offshored equivalents if they don’t chalk up 60-hour
weeks on a regular basis to meet ludicrous schedules.
And
all along the way they are ridiculed and demonized as being, at heart,
slackers, moochers and unimaginative losers. (If their skin pigmentation
contains higher quantities of melanin, then the opprobrium is proportionately
greater.) Because if they had any gumption at all, we’re told, they’d have
either inherited some wealth, managed hedge funds for obscene fees, or come up
with the Next Great Thing (“the Google/Uber/iPhone of [whatever]”) and sold it
just after some overhyped IPO and moved on to something else.
In
the Valley They Call Silicon, the big dogs all call themselves Serial
Entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists fall all over themselves to throw money
at them for their next big cookie-cutter thing. The people who do the actual
building may or may not make a couple hundred large if they happen to be there
when lightning strikes; but they can equally find themselves looking for
another job if the serial entrepreneur in a neighboring building’s
cookie-cutter thing goes IPO first.
(As
for the people who clean the offices, deliver the snacks in the stocked
kitchens and drive the corporate commuter buses—they’re all contractors,
working for a series of interchangeable vendors with no concern for health,
safety or proper accounting practices. The vendors don’t care who the
contractors are; the client companies don’t care who the vendors are. All that
matters is who’s going to cost the least.)
Because
it’s all about the short-term big payoff, not about long-term growth. Only
slackers, moochers and unimaginative losers think about long-term commitments;
winners aim to take it all. Now.
This
being Labor Day, the serial entrepreneurs, investment bankers and trust fund
babies are doing whatever they do in their substantial cushion of comfort. The
workers are marking the official end of summer, maybe barbecuing or hitting the
retail sales. I’m thinking about the generations of men and women who literally
put their lives, their subsistence (no fortunes for these folks) and their
sacred honor on the line so that workers could receive fair wages for their
labor, so that they could perform that labor under safe working conditions and
so that they could build pension plans that meant they wouldn’t have to work
literally to death.
These
were radical notions 150 years ago—the very idea that sharing
out some of the proceeds of productivity with its producers was just cray-cray.
But those radical notions—and the radical men and women who fought for
them—brought the United States to its zenith of innovation and prosperity. When
the labor tide rose, so did everyone’s boat.
Sadly,
that tide has receded. We are continually being told that American companies
cannot compete in the world economy if they have to think about the welfare of
their employees. In their minds (as always), welfare = unearned largesse, AKA
the dole. No, every penny that doesn’t go to executive compensation must be
pinched to the limit by longer hours, tighter budgets and lower taxes unless
we want all those jobs manufacturing goods and providing remote services to go
overseas. This current administration, comprising as it does Goldman Sachs
execs, CEOs of oil companies and alt-reich racists and misogynists led by the
Grifter-in-Chief screaming about turning back the tide of immigration, is only
marginally more open about this kind of contempt than Republicans have been
since little Newtie’s Contract with America.
.
The
fact that the Business Roundtable of Fortune 500 CEOs recently announced that
it’s possible that corporations might owe the environment, the community
and their employees more than a royal rogering is, so far, only talk. And last month at the Royal Dutch Shell plant in Pennsylvania, union workers were forced to choose between "attending" the Kleptocrat's speech or losing a day's work. A plant manager told reporters the company was treating it as a "training" event with the guest speaker being the orange buffoon. We have so much ground to recover.
I
think we’ve hit a situation where a small percentage (say, one percent) of the
people have been eying that goose that lays such beautiful golden eggs, and
they’re convinced that there’s a simple way to release an immediate gush of
gold shareholder value by applying this cleaver to its neck…
And
I’m probably just being contrary when I say that I perceive something flawed in
that strategy. But I do not see how an economy can grow if you strangle the
buying power of those who actually build it.
Thus,
I am (as always) grateful to the people who fought for the value of labor in
real life-and-death struggles for decades in the 19th and 20th Centuries,
and for those who continue that fight in these gig economy times. Mother Jones,
Wobblies, resisters and all of you—thank you.
