If you don’t support the teachers striking in Chicago, go pick up a history book, and flip to the pages about the working conditions at the US at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Here are the highlights: child labor, company scrip, insane working hours, unconscionably low wages, and unsafe working conditions. What’s that got to do with teachers striking today? Everything.
This country desperately needs a new labor movement. In the battle of employers versus employees, employees have been getting trounced for more than 20 years. Between crippling debt, high unemployment, wide-spread underemployment, outsourcing, education costs and low wages, the middle class is in danger of extinction. The only cure is for workers to unite and forge a new deal with employers- a deal where wealth generated by the working class isn’t sent oversees, or stuffed into the pockets of the already insanely rich.
Do you ever wonder why most jobs give you weekends off; or why the 40-hour work week was the norm (until recently); or why your office building has safety precautions like fire escapes, railings where they’re needed, and sprinklers overhead? Do you ever wonder why there is a legal limit to how low an hourly wage can be? Do you ever wonder why children aren’t in the workforce in the US?
Did you assume that our modern and (relatively) humane working conditions were just something that spontaneously evolved as the US grew up?
Well, it didn’t happen that way. Not at all.
All these things that we take for granted had to be fought for- and it was no short skirmish. It took decades and the efforts of several generations of workers to turn an exploitative economic machine into a system where workers could share in the benefits of their labor, and where they didn’t have to choose between spending time with their children or feeding them.
And how exactly did the working class achieve all this? Organized labor. Unions.
One worker has no power against an employer. Workers are replaceable and interchangeable. It’s only when workers band together that they have any influence at all. This is all as true today as it was a hundred years ago.
It was only when workers stood together and said, ‘Treat us fairly, or we’re shutting the whole system down,’ that employers stopped behaving barbarically, and that the government was forced to enact worker protections.
…but time passed, and the people who remembered what the world was like before unions have all died off. And all that remain are the people who remember the end of the union era- when the unions were bloated and sometimes too powerful, and sometimes corrupt.
Corporate power grew, and grew, and launched relentless campaigns to crush unions. With their biggest battles won, all attention was on the unions’ short-comings, and the problems they caused. Two generations of happy, healthy workers let the unions die a slow and quiet death.
The anti-union mentality of corporations is as strong as ever. Just google ‘walmart and unions’ for a perfect example of the tactics that corporate America are using today. If what you read there doesn’t scare you, then keep reading.
That corporations are anti-union isn’t surprising. That’s the way it’s always been. What’s surprising is how much of the middle class (an economic class that wouldn’t even exist today without unions) is anti-union.
In the meantime, the 40-hour work week is fading away, replaced by the “silicon valley work ethic” which is the principle that if you are at home eating dinner with your family, you obviously don’t care about your job. And even with longer hours, record high rates of worker productivity, and astounding corporate profit margins, our wages have pretty much stagnated over the past two decades.
You see, what people didn’t realize about unions was this: The job of the unions is never done. As long as corporations exist, they will be motivated to lower their labor costs, while maximizing their labor output. This means that there will be constant pressure to erode workers rights and to lower wages. To counteract this unceasing trend, we need a force pushing in the opposite direction. The only force that can do that is organized labor.
The sad thing is that even as the need for worker protections is becoming obvious, Americans are turning to the government to help them, while happily vilifying unions. Had they any sense of history, Americans would realize that the government doesn’t protect labor unless labor movements can apply enough political force to outweigh corporate influence.
In 2005 during the New York City transit strike, New York’s BILLIONAIRE mayor accused the transit workers of being greedy for wanting a fair wage for working exhausting and dangerous jobs in one of the most expensive cities on the planet. 41% of New Yorkers thought that the union workers were responsible for the strike.
I was in New York during that strike, and among those who opposed the transit workers, the reasoning most commonly given was something like this: ‘The transit workers are greedy because *I* don’t make that much, and my job is harder.’ You see, when people calculate what wage they consider to be fair, they are comparing that wage to wages of other people in the community.
But what happens when EVERYONE’S wages are artificially low? Is that not the case now, with 2 decades of increased economic growth, and 2 decades of essentially stagnant wages? Everyone knows that workers are getting a smaller piece of a bigger pie that they helped to bake. Few people in New York actually stopped to wonder if maybe a fair wage has nothing to do with an average wage. This is what labor unions are good for- they can say to employers, ‘It doesn’t matter that everyone else in town is underpaid. We know our worth, and want our fair share.’
Unions are the only force in the US that can push back against exploitation of the working class, but right now they have only a fraction of the power and influence they once wielded. THIS is the reason you should be supporting the Teachers Union in Chicago, and every other union brave enough to strike. We should be supporting labor unions wherever and however we can. Because we need them to be strong. We need them to grow, and to multiply, and to rise up against relentless onslaught which threatens our quality of life, and our children’s future.
We need the Chicago Teachers Union to win their contract battle, and win the war for public support- not for the good of the teachers, the school system, or the children, but for the good of workers everywhere.
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