Laborious, according to the Oxford English dictionary, means
requiring much work, exertion, or perseverance: a laborious undertaking or characterized by or requiring extreme care and much attention to detail or characterized by or exhibiting excessive effort or
given to or diligent in work.
At this point, our relationship to labor must be laborious. Here we are on Labor Day, a day that the US Department of Labor says happens on
the first Monday in September, is a creation of the labor movement and is dedicated to the social and economic achievements of American workers. It constitutes a yearly national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country.
And yet, as we know now, things have never been worse for labor. The actual number of unemployed Americans is about 25.3 MILLION. Corporate profits as a share of GDP have never been higher while wages are at a 10-year low. And what is the cause of high unemployment and falling wages alongside rising income inequality? If we are to believe the mainstream media, unions are to blame.
In fact, todays’ New York Times goes out of its way to paint the collapse of the U.S. Postal Service as a result of union demands.
At the same time, decades of contractual promises made to unionized workers, including no-layoff clauses, are increasing the post office’s costs. Labor represents 80 percent of the agency’s expenses, compared with 53 percent at United Parcel Service and 32 percent at FedEx, its two biggest private competitors. Postal workers also receive more generous health benefits than most other federal employees.
No where does the article talk about Congress not funding the postal service or ask why the U.S. government sees Lehman Brothers as worthy of a bailout, but does not see affordable mail service as in need of support.
The truth is that a corporate-controlled Congress and news media will continue to paint labor as “the problem” when more serious consideration shows the opposite to be true. In fact, a recent study from Harvard sociologist Bruce Western and Jake Rosenfeld of the University of Washington argues that a full third of the growth of income inequality in the U.S. can be explained by the demise of unions.
Focusing on full-time, private sector workers, Western and Rosenfeld find that deunionization—the decline in the percentage of the labor force that is unionized—and educational stratification each explain about 33 percent of the rise in within-group wage inequality among men. Among women, deunionization explains about 20 percent of the increase in wage inequality, whereas education explains more than 40 percent.
In other words, it’s not just a coincidence that the rich got richer and the poor poorer as unions disappeared. De-unionization is in fact one of the major causes of rising income inequality. Another effect of de-unionization is that this rising income inequality is seen as more acceptable since there is no longer an active movement against paying CEO’s so much more than workers.
Which is why preserving labor is now a laborious task that requires extreme care and diligence. We must refuse the corporate propaganda that the bosses “deserve” their ridiculous salaries. We must refuse the corporate propaganda that unions hurt the economy since de-unionization hasn’t helped us one bit and has in fact resulted in the worst economy in over half a century. And we must laboriously protect the right of labor to organize against corporate greed.
Otherwise, we are doomed to future Labor Days even more depressing than this one.
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