PERSPECTIVE ON LABOR DAY : Workers, Chiefs Are in It Together : The gap grows between fortunes of the few and needs of the many. But greed will eventually drag all down.
Maybe you’re at the beach, or having a family barbecue this Labor Day, so enjoy. Working stiffs of America, it’s your day.
Editorialists and politicians usually take the occasion to pay homage to the character-building virtues of hard labor and call for a rededication to the great American work ethic.
Well, how do you really feel about that and about your job--the pay, the way you’re treated, the satisfaction, the stress and your future there?
Consider the top executive who blew up at an employee, screaming: “I’ll have your job for that!” The worker’s reply? “Great, you deserve it.”
More and more workaday people--white-collar, blue-collar, pink-collar and no-collar--are feeling like that these days, because they’re finding little reward and even less respect in their daily grind. While our culture continues to preach the value of hard work, our economy increasingly devalues workers.
Labor Day is a fine time for speeches, but corporations and government alike are doing all they can the other 364 days to cut the wages of working families, cut back on our health care and pensions, cut corners on job safety and, ultimately, cut out on us all together. Even a dog knows the difference between being stumbled over and being kicked, and people know they’re being kicked.
What the economic elites really are cutting into is the powerful, American idea that we’re all in this together--that if you work hard, are loyal and creative, if you help raise productivity, then you’ll share in the gain.
So where’s the sharing? Our economy is expanding, worker productivity is the highest in the world, corporate profits and executive salaries are soaring and stock prices have gone through the roof.
Yet most working stiffs--and that’s about 80% of the work force--are falling behind, losing income, jobs, hope and faith.
Despite the claim of economists that we’re enjoying a “recovery,” pink slips are being mass-produced and handed to an astonishing 50,000 workers a month this year--4,000 more each month than in 1991, when economists admitted there was a recession. These are not layoffs (a gentler concept that holds open the possibility of return to the company)--these are terminations: Adios, chump.
And the few jobs that are being created are mostly poor jobs, literally employing people to work full-time for poverty wages. The Administration hailed the creation of 162,000 new jobs in July. But nearly all of those were in restaurants, hotels, nursing homes and other service-sector industries where employment tends to be poor, nasty, brutish and short. American manufacturing--where the good-paying work is--lost 13,000 more jobs in July.
This is a trend that companies and government alike seem willing to accept, conceding that it will continue well into the new century. And they wonder why “consumer confidence” is down in the dumps? Think about it: They’re throwing out the whole middle chunk of America’s job opportunities--the $9- to $15-an-hour family-wage jobs that hold our society together.
Yet, while working families see their wages and benefits knocked down by corporate chieftains arguing that “global competitiveness” demands such harshness, they watched these same executives jack up their own pay by more than half last year, hauling off an average of nearly $4 million. In Japan, only eight corporate executives take as much as $1 million in yearly compensation. If global competitiveness demands cheaper workers, why not get some cheaper executives, too?
I suspect that all this has more to do with global greed than competitiveness. And, as Lily Tomlin says, “Even if you win the rat race, you’re still a rat.”
Labor Day is also a time when a lot of families recall workers who won’t be at the picnic this year, since their job killed them. While chief executives are notorious for using company funds to pamper themselves with everything from chauffeured limousines to golden parachutes, they routinely ignore the fact that the American workplace has become the most dangerous in the industrialized world.
Each year, hundreds of thousands of Americans are seriously injured or die on the job. That’s about 30 people a day--buried alive in trench cave-ins, blown up in refinery explosions, scalded to death by pipe ruptures, asphyxiated in factory fires and otherwise unpleasantly terminated.
You don’t have to be in Who’s Who to know what’s what, and working families clearly see that the fortunes of the few are growing more and more distinct from the interests of the many. No Labor Day appeal to the “work ethic” can disguise the fact that the few at the top are gleefully and unilaterally shredding the social contract that binds us together in one economy, decoupling American prosperity from the majority of American people.
That might make a fortune for the few, but it doesn’t make a damned bit of sense for our country. They can’t knock down so many without finally dragging themselves down, too.
Let’s make this Labor Day not just a celebration of work, but a rededication to the long struggle by workaday Americans to find justice--and to share in the gains of a job well done.
