Think Humanely

Today this country celebrates labor for the 127th consecutive year. One might think that such consistent, national recognition would help to legitimize and support the American labor movement. This has not been the case. Labor is still demonized, scapegoated, and taken advantage of in this society.

This is, of course, nothing new. Labor has never been rightfully valued in a society that increasingly trends toward legacy wealth and an oligarchic structure. See this 2008 list of the wealthiest Americans. It is no coincidence that members of the Walton family, owners of Wal-Mart, occupy the 4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th positions. The Koch brothers, who inherited their father’s business, come in at #9 and #10. And lets not forget the Trumps, Hiltons, Whitneys, Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, and Johnsons, just to name a few. To see political dynasties at work, see this excellent post by Glenn Greenwald.

Contrast this startling success with that of laborers, whom we pretend to honor and celebrate. There was the Bay View Massacre in 1886. Workers were on strike, demanding an eight-hour work day. 250 National Guardsman were ordered to shoot to kill by Governor Rusk. In 1934, textile workers decided to strike, hoping to improve working conditions and compensation. The owners of the company personally called the National Guard and once again the Guard opened fire. The Ludlow Massacre involved striking coal miners. The workers, as Howard Zinn notes, “were living in a kind of serfdom in the main towns where Rockefeller collected their rent, sold them their necessities, hired the police, and watched them carefully for any sign of unionization.” They too were fired upon. “The National Guard was innocently welcomed to town by miners and their families, waving American flags, thinking the men in the uniform of the United States would protect them.” Four women and eleven children were murdered. The examples, tragically, are endless.

Businesses, with the assistance of government, continue to do everything they can to oppress their workforce. The federal minimum wage is a paltry $7.25/hour. For a full-time worker this amounts to a staggeringly insufficient annual income of $15,080, barely above the poverty level for a one-person household. Unbelievably, this is actually a $2.10 increase that began in 2007. Prior to this the minimum wage had remained stagnant for a decade as every proposal to raise it was defeated. Even still it is grossly disproportionate to inflation. In 2006, legislation was introduced by the GOP to actually cut the minimum wage for workers who earn tips. As of today, if one makes $30 in tips a month, the minimum wage is only $2.13. Meanwhile, Congress has consistently awarded itself a raise from 1934 onwards. As Gateway Pundit notes, “they now make $174,000 a year for their 3 day work week.”

Consider the findings of this report by Human Rights Watch:

When it comes to worker’s rights to form unions, loop-hole ridden laws, paralyzing delays and feeble enforcement have created a culture of impunity in many areas of U.S. labor law and practice […] In the 1950s, workers who suffered reprisals for exercising the right to freedom of association numbered in the hundreds each year. In 1969 the number was more than 6,000. By the 1990s more than 20,000 workers each year suffered a reprisal.

So we have to ask ourselves: what exactly are we celebrating today in this culture of oligarchic nepotism where the labor class is considered less deserving than the “elites?” The success of the labor movement? Or its oppression?

UPDATE: A reader pointed me to another disturbing example of the dehumanization of laborers, The Triangle Shirtwaist fire. The following is from Gale Cengage Learning:
Located on the ninth floor of a building that overlooked Washington Place on one side and Greene Street on the other, Triangle’s workrooms had inadequate fire escapes and no sprinklers — conditions the workers had been protesting. Worse, supervisors locked the doors to the workplace from the outside to prevent the women and girls, crowded next to each other on benches, from taking breaks during working hours or removing materials. Only one stairway led to the roof.

On March 25, 1911, a fire broke out on the eighth floor, rising to the ninth through the Greene Street stairwell. As smoke and flames filled the air, the women rushed to the Washington Place exit. It was locked. About 500 women were trapped; many clung to the breaking fire escapes. Firefighters tried to reach them, but their ladders stopped at the sixth floor. Women jumped hand-in-hand from the windows, crashing through the nets, and smashing on the sidewalk. Other women, caught inside, died of burns or suffocation. That night, the Twenty-sixth Street pier held 146 corpses. Two thousand people searched for their loved ones’ bodies