Just when you think your miserable job couldn’t get any worse, along comes someone like Wisconsin’s Koch’ed-up, Tea Partying Governor, Scott Walker, cutting your pay, cutting your benefits, eliminating much of your ability to complain about it, and destroying the last wispy remnants of struggling hope that things will ever improve. Maybe a long commute, a funky refrigerator in the breakroom, and a slow computer in your way all day haven’t been the worst of your worries.
It’s easy to imagine unionized public workers in the Midwest and union teachers in Idaho whose collective bargaining rights either have already been busted or are headed that way as being more concerned about much more trivial things just a few weeks ago than they are now. Most people aren’t completely happy with their jobs, but the problems are usually not the kind of primal grief that it’s handy to have a union around for. The way your boss smells is one thing. The odor of your job composting is another.
Unions have made things pretty decent for an awful lot of workers in America, and not too bad for many who never belonged to a union, as The Folks Who Brought You The Weekend would like to remind us. Collective bargaining has given us the eight hour work day and the forty hour work week it fits into, child labor laws, paid vacation time, and workplace safety standards compelling employers to treat their employees as less fungible than stuff that can be bought at a hardware store. Unions have provided workers with more than the ability to eat themselves fat at the local buffet, it has given them the collective weight required to push entirely reasonable demands on employers who as a class would just as soon their workers were slaves.
Well, maybe not precisely “slaves.” Property like slaves is the kind of stuff that requires maintenance lest its value deteriorates. A sick or underfed slave can be a liability for its owner who needs to carefully consider capital depreciation and amortization periods. On the other hand, without laws to demand otherwise, many workers can be left to fate and replaced if needed with less concern than the equipment they might have been running. Equipment has to last long enough to pay for itself. A person only has to last long enough to make training it worthwhile.
On average, that training period is getting shorter, too. Increasing adoption of computer technology and automation of production is reducing the number of jobs that require skills and education in the midrange between underachievers who didn’t really finish high school and nerdy geeks who don’t miss social lives they never had because they were too busy studying for degrees in things with names the underachievers don’t know how to pronounce. The jobs that made the middle class possible are disappearing faster than the middle class can flip through the 200 channels on their TV sets looking for the latest Charlie Sheen story so they can forget how unbearable their own, increasingly underpaid, non-union work days are.
The US economy may be adding jobs, but it’s not adding jobs like the ones that were lost. The biggest losses during the recession were in the $19 to $31 per hour range, while the biggest gains in the “recovery” are in the $9 to $13 per hour range. The cost of houses has taken a big hit from the financial crisis, but it may have to take an even bigger one if people are going to be expected to buy the houses.
Americans began losing manufacturing jobs to cheaper labor overseas during the 80s. America’s professional work started following it a little over 15 years later. Meanwhile, since a lot of the low-wage jobs in America couldn’t be sent overseas, overseas has been brought to America in an increasing swarm of cheap labor imported from Mexico and Central America. Since a significant fraction of that labor arrives in America by climbing over a fence, wading across the Rio Grande, or riding across the border in the trunk of a car, instead of expecting benefits, the undocumented laborers provide their American employers with the additional benefits of being willing to put up with work and working conditions that regular Americans would never tolerate.
For the labor force, capitalism can often be characterized as a race to the bottom. The most cost effective labor gets the jobs. The more unemployment there is, the more pressure there is on labor to under cut its prices, and the more able employers are to force conditions off on the labor force that workers would never accept if they had as much control over the economy as the employers, which incidentally, is the kind of control that unions make it possible for the workers to have.
Through free trade agreements and other globalization programs American workers are more and more exposed to competition with much cheaper labor overseas. Just how cheap is that labor? What is the rock bottom America workers have to look at? Well, in some places they still have slavery.
One of the reasons labor can be so cheap overseas is because the infrastructure economies run on overseas is dependent on labor even cheaper than the labor American workers are in direct competition with. American workers may not be pitted job for job against slave labor in India, but slave labor in India makes it cheaper for Indian businesses to provide their products and services, so the effect is almost the same.
Thanks to population growth, ever more conflicts, ever more frequent and ever more severe environmental disasters producing ever more refugees, ever more widespread resource depletion, and ever more prevalent capitalistic enterprise, the price of slaves has been coming down. A CNN study has found that while the cost of an American slave in the antebellum South was $40,000 adjusted for inflation in 2010 dollars, slaves today can be had for an average of $90 each.
In Venezuela, America’s arch-foe, Hugo Chavez, has seen to it that by law the poor must be provided for. They are to be insured places to live, food to eat, educations and health care with the most focus given to the most vulnerable: children, seniors, the disabled, and pregnant women. Chavez himself says, “It’s not a question of the government wanting to do this or not. It is now a legal obligation.”
By contrast, America seems determined to be sure its poor are forgotten, and its workers abandoned to fight over scraps of the global economy with the cheapest labor available. Before American workers forget entirely what it was like to be members of unions that could demand fair wages, fair treatment, and an equal voice in government, American workers should consider reaching out to all the other workers in the world and creating vibrant international unions. It was a long way up for American labor, but it could be a really short trip down. One of the amendments to the US Constitution that the Tea Party movement takes exception to is the 14th – the one that abolished slavery.
