Gratitude Monday: Worthy of their hire

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 30 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.

In the past 18 months, this dynamic has been bruised some, as COVID-19 swept through the economy like hurricane Ida. The food supply chain, in particular, has been upended to the point that even calling supermarket stockers and checkers “essential workers” and tossing a couple of extra hourly dollars onto their wages isn’t quite enough to make them want to put in long days dealing with anti-maskholes and maniac managers. Take that by an order of magnitude and you’ve got the hospitality industry, which has relied from the beginning on ridiculously low wages, inconsistent schedules and management abuse as their business model. There’s a lot of frantic right-wing screeching about lazy workers needing to be dragged by the scruff of their necks into restaurants and set to scrubbing and serving.

This being Labor Day, 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 as factory after factory closes down to be replaced by ones in places with even fewer worker protections than we have here.)

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 19^th and 20^th Centuries, and for those who continue that fight in these gig economy times. All workers are essential; all are valuable. Thank you.