You don't get paid what you are worth.
You get paid what you can insist you get paid.
A Guest Post about the value of unions.
Herb Rothschild is writing in response to my blog post Tuesday about the problem Democrats have winning the votes of White non-college voters, the largest single demographic group in America.
Rothschild writes that there is a practical solution for increasing worker pay; worker power. Workers need to organize into unions. Unions, not higher education, are the key to access to the middle class. Herb Rothschild is a retired professor of English. During his working years he was a political activist on behalf of world peace and civil rights for Black Americans. He is still doing that work, advocating for peace and justice. He lives in Talent, Oregon.
Guest Post by Herb Rothschild
Herb Rothschild, Jr. |
A large number of jobs will always be unskilled or semi-skilled. In 2012, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projected that the five occupations that would add the most workers between then and 2022 are personal care aides, registered nurses, retail salespeople, home health aides, and food service workers. Only the second category requires a higher education. Unorganized and thus with no power in the workplace, the millions of workers who filled those positions had to rely on the federal hourly minimum wage ($7.25). At one point Wal-Mart ran an ad showing the company helping its workers apply for food stamps before it realized that it was an indictment of the corporation. Further, level of education is not a reliable determinant of wages and benefits. Jobs in mining and manufacturing tend to be high-paying and well-benefited, and our switch to a service economy has contributed in a major way to the growing woes of the working class. But we need to realize that there was nothing about jobs in mining and manufacturing jobs that commanded high pay. Indeed, during the 19th century and well into the 20th, they paid subsistence wages, demanded long hours, offered no benefits, and often were dangerous. Only labor union organizing combined with government intervention changed those conditions in the U.S. and Europe. They still prevail in much of the world.
Rothschild, on behalf of First Nation |
Conversely, a higher education doesn’t guarantee good wages. Take school teaching and nursing. Historically, their pay was low because those were the only professions significantly open to women before Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act forbid gender bias in employment, and because teachers and nurses hadn’t organized themselves. Thanks to their unionizing and becoming a political force in most states, their wages improved dramatically. And now, there is a large underclass of college teachers—usually called adjuncts—that have MAs and even PhDs who are working for poor pay and without job security. Only where they have unionized have they risen from poverty.
To understand why some work is well rewarded and other work isn’t, we mustn’t focus exclusively on level of education. Power is a major determinant. When workers, through their unions, had political power, they were able to secure government help in protecting and enhancing their power in the workplace. Currently, workers are, for the most part, politically unorganized and volatile in their behavior at the ballot box. Given how hostile Republican policies are to workers, it should be an easy task for Democrats to win them over. But that will mean a willingness—as Sanders and Warren have shown—to part company with Wall Street and the economic elites that the Clinton-Obama wing of the party served so faithfully.
Management is organized to resist wage demands and divide employees seeking to keep their job. The challenge for workers remains within their own ranks. Economic insecurity resulting from low pay, lack of universal health care, pressures of raising your children - all fit in management's tool box. These facts of American life for most workers make the call to join a union a direct threat to the workers very existence. Without a secure stream of income the basics of life in our society are put at risk, making intimidation and threats of termination real and in some case lethal to the very lives of the worker and their family. Management use of these tools and tactics have created a "race to the bottom" wage scale when workers are forced to compete not just with each other but with all the other workers in the world. This reasoning is not used to adjust and determine what management pays itself where you see hyper compensation is the rule. The only tool workers have is to organize and collectively bargain!
ReplyDelete“Under Clinton and Obama especially, it (Democratic Party) was complicit in exacerbating our nation’s huge economic inequality.”
ReplyDeleteJust saying this does not make it so. Since Nixon, the Republican Party has used racist dog whistles and red herring issues like abortion and gay rights to drive a wedge between (white) working people and the Democratic Party. Obama’s ability to do anything legislatively after ACA was stymied by working class voters turning against him and electing Republican Senators and Representatives in 2010, 2012, 2014. Trump’s pulling us out of “unfair” trade agreements did not bring factory jobs back from China. Factories use robots now, so do farms and grocery stores. The world is changing and although Trump’s Luddite economic ideas carry emotional resonance, they carried no economic promise. The Republican tax bill, which redistributed wealth away from the working class to the already wealthy, did nothing to dissuade these voters from voting Republican.
It will be interesting to see when Senate Republicans stop Biden’s 3 trillion dollar infrastructure jobs bill, if even that pries White working class voters away from the Republicans.
I've been waiting to hear such a clear, cogent, and down-to-earth statement for a long time! Bravo, Brother Rothschild.
ReplyDeletePublic employee unions are a two-edged sword. On the one hand, it’s good for public workers to have protection from arbitrary actions by management. On the other, public employee unions and their management can team up against the taxpayers, who have no representation in the negotiation. That’s how you end up with financial disasters like PERS.
ReplyDelete