The average American’s chances of success are not good. He lives in a country of extreme class division, where the richest fifth of the population controls 85 percent of the wealth. CIA data shows that his nation is subject to greater economic inequality than Kenya, Iran or Nigeria.
“I think the future looks bleak. Many jobs have been lost,” said OU professor Stephen H. Norwood, veteran labor historian and author of “Strikebreaking and Intimidation: Mercenaries and Masculinity in Twentieth-Century America.”
“After World War II, labor was able to look with confidence to a better future and to really develop a program for the betterment of American workers and achieve some very impressive gains,” Norwood said. “But, since the middle of the 1950s, organized labor’s strength has been declining, and that decline has accelerated in recent decades.”
Workers achieved many resounding successes during the early 20th century: securing safety improvements, restricting child labor and obtaining pensions, medical coverage and a 40-hour work week. These advances were made in the face of often violent opposition from the capitalist class.
Even with labor organizations in their current emaciated state, organized workers are still capable of improving their conditions significantly. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the median wage for union members is more than 25 percent higher than the median wage for unaffiliated workers.
Union membership in the U.S. peaked around 35 percent in the mid-1950s. Since then, it has fallen to its present level of 11.9 percent, according to the bureau. Currently, only 5.5 percent of Oklahoman workers belong to a union.
This falling number also represents a near-eradication of workers’ culture. What was once a source of pride to many — that is, engaging in productive labor rather than bourgeois parasitism — is now admitted only sheepishly. “Middle-class” has become the label of choice, even for workers closer to poverty than affluence.
Capitalists have always opposed efforts by workers to self-organize. Initially, this was accomplished through direct suppression. However, in recent decades, employers have also utilized propaganda and subversion to great effect.
“Ford Motor Company had its own private army of strong-arm men who would physically intimidate workers and beat up union organizers, sometimes very savagely,” Norwood said. “Today it’s done more by using lawyers and industrial psychologists to manipulate workers, to turn workers against unions and against each other.”
Employers also use psychological manipulation to pacify employees as their wages and medical benefits are eroded. A euphemistic vocabulary may be used to create the impression that employees experience a higher degree of dignity and status than they actually do. The Target Corp., for instance, refers to its employees as “associates.” Target managers are “team leaders,” as if to imply that they do not enjoy significantly greater privilege and authority than regular employees. Naturally, a “team leader” never disciplines an “associate”; they only give “coaching sessions.”
Of course, in instances where propaganda proves insufficient, employers will revert to more direct methods. The Center for Economic and Policy Research reports that systematic, illegal firing of union supporters has recently “jumped sharply,” and that, over the past decade, union activists have run a 15 to 20 percent chance of being illegally fired.
Norwood, who has observed the decline of organized labor in the U.S. firsthand, also points to the bureaucratization of labor unions.
“[Labor leaders] in the early part of the [20th] century were dynamic,” he said. “They were full of energy. They had a vision of a better life for working people. They themselves had worked in factories and had held working-class jobs.
“Today, you don’t see that. You see people who are essentially satisfied to occupy offices, who don’t have the energy to go out and organize the unorganized.”
Another witness to the decline of American labor is social activist Dr. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, who documented the overthrow of the Sandinista government firsthand in her book “Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War.”
Dunbar-Ortiz recounts how itinerant laborers in the U.S. organized with the help of the Industrial Workers of the World, an international union devoted to the establishment of workplace democracy: “The miners and oil workers and wheat threshers that the I.W.W. organized were basically migrant workers. They lived in camps and they went from place to place and often dragged their families along. They were ‘unorganizable.’ No one was interested in them. Then the I.W.W. showed them how they could organize. I think that’s what we have to look to now. ... I think the energy really needs to go to building workers’ centers and workers’ culture and to restore dignity.”
In recent years, the organization has turned its attention to the “unorganizable” in our own society: service industry workers. In 2004, Starbucks baristas affiliated with the Industrial Workers of the World in New York went public with a list of modest demands: a living wage, regular working hours and an expansion of health care coverage.
Since then, according to organization reports, the Starbucks Workers Union has managed to raise wages for workers in Chicago and New York, improve workplace safety and secure better hours for workers. Most importantly, however, the organization has resisted being crushed or subverted by Starbucks management.
Last year, the Industrial Workers of the World also established a union for workers at Jimmy John’s restaurants. The New York Times remarked that it was “one of the few efforts to organize fast-food workers in American history.”
“Before I joined the I.W.W., I just grinned and beared whatever the boss demanded,” said James Tuttle, 33, of Tulsa. “Afterwards, I knew that I could push back, that I had a say, and with this knowledge I was able to get hours maintained to the schedule and safety conditions increased. These were little victories, but they were accomplished without special pleading to the boss or a politician. They were accomplished by me and my coworkers.”
U.S. workers must rekindle their dormant revolutionary spirit. Only workers themselves can achieve their own freedom; they cannot depend on a corporation or government to bring freedom to them.
“Working-class people say, ‘Yes, those are really good ideas, but I have to put food on the table,’” Dunbar-Ortiz said. “I knew people in the civil rights movement, like this woman in New Orleans. This woman had fifteen kids in a three-room shack and she was a fierce organizer. ... She was happy, and her children were happy. They were happy because they were in the struggle.
“There’s not much in this society that makes people happy. ... So I think those of us who organize have to realize, we’re not asking people to make a sacrifice; we’re asking them to allow themselves to be whole human beings, and to be passionate about the things that make them human.”
Zac Smith is a journalism junior.
zacsmith@iww.org
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Logan 8 months ago
Sgt B,
My great-great grandfather ran in the Oklahoma Land Run. Doesn't mean I know anything about staking a claim to land, so please stop invoking your ancestral line as if it means you’re entitled to their knowledge and experience, because it doesn't. And your idealistic views of “true capitalism”, where the good products succeed and the bad products fail, is symptomatic of the house slave listening to the owner (using Subcomandante46’s analogy). If only the good products succeeded and the bad products fail, then the producers of those products are failing to make as much money as possible. It’s financially more sound to make a crappy VCR that breaks every year, forcing the consumer to buy another one, rather than make a quality product that lasts and lasts. Capitalism wants products to be at the lowest possible level to increase the need to buy another product in the future. Crap is more profitable than quality. But you won’t hear that from a profit-driven news provider, as education isn’t profitable either. Capitalism works best if it’s followers are stupid.
You are advocating for those who bully, belittle and abuse the workers of America. You ignore those who work to put those CEOs in a position where they have an office to sit in. A construction worker, a doctor and a CEO stand in a room. If you’re going to form a society, which one of these people is not needed? If you ask the CEO, it’s the doctor and the construction worker, because they don't make enough money for the burgeoning society. And before we could figure out if the CEO was making sense, he'd hire foreign labor because it's cheaper than the American construction worker, tell the doctor he can't take care of sick patients unless they can afford health care insurance, and then give himself a huge bonus because he made his company so much money. And then he'd tell us that tax hikes on the wealthiest members will cripple the economy, and the best way out of a recession is to cut jobs, like the ones he’s just cut, without increasing revenue. Because it makes financial sense to lay-off workers, which is what happens when you cut spending, rather than actually bring in money from the people who have exploited the system. And the house slaves believe it, because maybe they will get a scrap from the master’s table.
SgtB 8 months, 2 weeks ago
It seems that Zac has been mislead and is currently walking down the path to Hell that has and will continue to be paved with good intentions.
I wish it were as easy as making everyone earn a "living wage" to make it all okay. The truth of the matter though is that by raising any wage rate arbitrarily you are only devaluing the monetary assets of those who made at, less than, or slightly above your newly adopted wage and it will not effect the most wealthy that you apparently are envious or jealous of. They have a word for it and it is called inflation. And thanks to the current system of fiat currency that is not backed by any standard we have seen inflation that borders on stagflation for the last several decades.
I suggest that the writer of this piece and everyone else youtube the late Milton Friedman and watch a few of his videos. He says more about this subject in a better way than I could ever articulate.
By the way, my grandfather was a union lobbyist for the USPS and my father is a small business owner. I can see it from both sides and I have nothing against unionism that ISN'T mandatory, but I also think that you cannot tell a company who it can fire or under what circumstances it can fire a person. To do so eliminates the liberty of the individual who owns the company. To this you might say that "illegal" firing goes against the right of the fired individual to keep his job, I reply by noting that it is not his right or anyone else's to have a job. There is no such right that guarantees employment.
Subcomandante46 8 months, 2 weeks ago
SgtB is right, raising wages doesn't change the fundamental problems of exploitation facing America's working people. After all, they produce the nation's wealth, not the CEOs, and yet 90% of the population lives under $36,000 annually, while .001 percent takes home over $24billion. (See 2009 census) That would be a lot of raises to balance things out, huh?
If we can wade through the sarcasm and patronizing tone of SgtB, we can see that his underlying libertarianism is just a misguided frustration of the exploited working class, coopted into the thinking of the bosses - like a slave that was allowed to sleep in the slave owner's home, but at the price of being used to betray the slaves that were organizing against their "masters".
On the point of rights, Sgt B, no one has the right to anything but what he or she can win by his or her own struggle. Those who are granted rights can have them taken away. American rights came by exploited peoples of England's colonies uniting against their exploiter. Same goes for America's union people. And instead of going to the king and asking for better wages and conditions, Americas revolutionaries abolished monarchism. Maybe the answer isn't to beg for more; maybe the answer is to abolish the bosses.
SgtB 8 months, 2 weeks ago
Subcomandante46,
Your tone was patronizing to say the least. The problem is not bosses or capitalism. It IS a problem caused by government called crony capitalism in which people with money are allowed to lobby for special favors from our Congress, Senate, and President. Like I said, My father is a small businessman and so was his father before him and his father before him. What crony capitalism does is subvert the natural market and incentivize the large corporations with the CEO's that make a ton of money that it appears you despise. If you eliminate the ability of people to lobby for government subsidy or tax advantage you will see a return to true capitalism.
But please don't take this a me saying that someone should never earn a ton of money. A CEO of a company has the sole responsibility of growing the wealth of that company by increasing market share, decreasing product cost, increasing productivity, and finally increasing the stock price of that company for the real owners, the investors. If a man is able to do all of these things, who are you or I to tell him or his board of directors made up of top shareholders how much he has earned? If we would just let the market operate, those companies that pay CEO's rates of which they aren't deserving will lose money and fail. Those who pay employees crap wages will produce crap products and fail. Those who provide a good product or service at a reasonable price will succeed and grow. This is not a slave vs. master mentality, it is common sense and in today's world it is complete nonsense to say that the wealth business owners incur is ill-got. Businessmen start businesses not to provide jobs or get people off the streets, it is to make money pure and simple. That is why my father started his company and through his hard work he has been able to enjoy a comfortable living. His greed and desire for money created the jobs that employ his 100+ employees and it is their greed for money that makes them work hard which makes their labor worth more and drives up their wage over time.
If you want to talk about wealth that is stolen you need to move your focus from business and into the federal reserve. For every dollar bill they print, they spend about $.14 to print it. They then loan it to the US government at face value and collect interest. This has been going on ever since the American dollar was taken off the gold standard in the 70's.
In 1971 the price of an ounce of gold was $38. If you keep up with the news you will notice that today the price of gold is $1,831. That is a devaluation of the dollar by 59 times. In other words, if your grandparents had a dollar in a retirement account in 1971, in order for that amount to have the same purchasing power they would need $59 dollars today. This is how wealth is really stolen and it is also the reason that so many see the social security Ponzi scheme as necessary.