Welcome to Labor Day, the holiday America forgot. We still take the three-day weekend; it’s considered the official end of summer and the traditional (ha!) beginning of election season, but we don’t take a moment and think about the working people of this country, the way we think of soldiers on Memorial Day or thank our moms on Mother’s Day.
Why would we? All our holiday cues are force-fed to us by merchandisers and retailers and there’s no money to be made reminding customers about the unhappy people who sew the jeans and glue the sneakers together. (It’s also while the anti-materialist Kwanzaa will never be widely celebrated.)
Labor Day might be a fitting time to discuss the undocumented immigrant issue, since those folks all come here looking for opportunities to labor, but since it’s the (see above) traditional (ha!) beginning of the campaign season and since people seem so divided on the issue, most politicians would just as soon not bring it up and spend the long weekend kissing babies.
We should talk about labor, however, because this silence is hurting us. On Tuesday, the Census Bureau reported that people earned less in 2004 and 2005 than they did in 2003. Household income is up – but only because people are taking second jobs or working overtime hours at their primary jobs.
Over a five-year period, household income is down. The bureau reports that the median U.S. household income (meaning that half of U.S. households earned more, half less) was $49,133 in 2000 and $46,242 in 2005. (BTW, the average price of a gallon of gas on Labor Day 2000 was $1.55.)
Before Congress ran off to campaign, the Republican leadership finally allowed a vote on raising the minimum wage, but only if inheritance taxes for the very richest among us was repealed forever. It didn’t pass. Some fun, huh?
None of this should come as a surprise. Much as people like George W. Bush deny it, class warfare has been raging in the country since the end of the Second World War and the working class has been losing.
They (“they” being the owners and managers) started with labor – hiring scabs, busting unions, restricting the rights of workers to bargain collectively, moving factories to low-wage, union-free southern states. It was a mini version of globalization. Times were still good; the tide was lifting boats, who needed unions anyhow? Few people complained.
The next battle was waged against customers. Factories shut down, jobs moved to off-shore sweatshops and the market was flooded with shoddy, cut-rate products. Wages might have been stagnating, but women, newly “empowered” (but not economically empowered), entered the workforce in large numbers, helping keep wages down, but raising household incomes. Besides, the new big-box stores sold the sweatshop gewgaws cheaper than ever.
In the last 20 years, the battle has been taken to the shareholders. People speak of an “ownership society,” but the reality is that people own stock through their retirement funds and IRAs and have no say in controlling the corporations they “own.” The power of stock ownership is wielded by fund managers who enjoy the same runaway salaries and bonuses as corporate CEOs. Those people have become a self-sustaining oligarchy, whose fantastic remuneration has come completely unhinged from their job performance or any other rational standard of measurement.
In Wednesday’s Boston Globe, columnist Derrick Jackson noted that before 9-11, the average CEO made about 190 times as much as an army private, but today, the CEO makes 308 times as much as the private (CEO average – $7.7 million/year; private – $25,000/year). Also, very few CEOs get blown up, but we lose several hundred privates each year. They leave behind widows and orphans with what’s left of their $25,000.
So maybe this year we should celebrate Labor Day with more than just a hot dog and a beer. Maybe we should ponder George Bush’s real “decades-long global war.” It’s not against terrorists; it’s against us.
It Ain’t Just Labor
Welcome to Labor Day, the holiday America forgot. We still take the three-day weekend; it’s considered the official end of summer and the traditional (ha!) beginning of election season, but we don’t take a moment and think about the working people of this country, the way we think of soldiers on Memorial Day or thank our moms on Mother’s Day.
Why would we? All our holiday cues are force-fed to us by merchandisers and retailers and there’s no money to be made reminding customers about the unhappy people who sew the jeans and glue the sneakers together. (It’s also while the anti-materialist Kwanzaa will never be widely celebrated.)
Labor Day might be a fitting time to discuss the undocumented immigrant issue, since those folks all come here looking for opportunities to labor, but since it’s the (see above) traditional (ha!) beginning of the campaign season and since people seem so divided on the issue, most politicians would just as soon not bring it up and spend the long weekend kissing babies.
We should talk about labor, however, because this silence is hurting us. On Tuesday, the Census Bureau reported that people earned less in 2004 and 2005 than they did in 2003. Household income is up – but only because people are taking second jobs or working overtime hours at their primary jobs.
Over a five-year period, household income is down. The bureau reports that the median U.S. household income (meaning that half of U.S. households earned more, half less) was $49,133 in 2000 and $46,242 in 2005. (BTW, the average price of a gallon of gas on Labor Day 2000 was $1.55.)
Before Congress ran off to campaign, the Republican leadership finally allowed a vote on raising the minimum wage, but only if inheritance taxes for the very richest among us was repealed forever. It didn’t pass. Some fun, huh?
None of this should come as a surprise. Much as people like George W. Bush deny it, class warfare has been raging in the country since the end of the Second World War and the working class has been losing.
They (“they” being the owners and managers) started with labor – hiring scabs, busting unions, restricting the rights of workers to bargain collectively, moving factories to low-wage, union-free southern states. It was a mini version of globalization. Times were still good; the tide was lifting boats, who needed unions anyhow? Few people complained.
The next battle was waged against customers. Factories shut down, jobs moved to off-shore sweatshops and the market was flooded with shoddy, cut-rate products. Wages might have been stagnating, but women, newly “empowered” (but not economically empowered), entered the workforce in large numbers, helping keep wages down, but raising household incomes. Besides, the new big-box stores sold the sweatshop gewgaws cheaper than ever.
In the last 20 years, the battle has been taken to the shareholders. People speak of an “ownership society,” but the reality is that people own stock through their retirement funds and IRAs and have no say in controlling the corporations they “own.” The power of stock ownership is wielded by fund managers who enjoy the same runaway salaries and bonuses as corporate CEOs. Those people have become a self-sustaining oligarchy, whose fantastic remuneration has come completely unhinged from their job performance or any other rational standard of measurement.
In Wednesday’s Boston Globe, columnist Derrick Jackson noted that before 9-11, the average CEO made about 190 times as much as an army private, but today, the CEO makes 308 times as much as the private (CEO average – $7.7 million/year; private – $25,000/year). Also, very few CEOs get blown up, but we lose several hundred privates each year. They leave behind widows and orphans with what’s left of their $25,000.
So maybe this year we should celebrate Labor Day with more than just a hot dog and a beer. Maybe we should ponder George Bush’s real “decades-long global war.” It’s not against terrorists; it’s against us.
© Mark Floegel, 2006