Labor Day - Is That Anything Like Arbor Day?

Mark has a sizzling collection of Labor Day pieces and editorials that even on a day devoted to workers can't seem to remember what they are or what they do. Maybe that's because movement conservatives, as Salon's Michael Lind notes, have just about convinced everybody that workers, especially unionized workers, are the enemy.

According to many free-market conservatives, economic growth is almost exclusively the result of investment decisions by a small number of rich individuals – the "wealth creators." The wealth creators, according to the conservative press, are constantly being threatened from above by government, which seeks to destroy wealth by taxation, and from below by workers, particularly those organized into unions, who threaten to destroy wealth by insisting that capitalists share a decent amount of their profits with employees. The entire basis of conservative "trickle-down" economics is the idea that the economy will grow faster if the supposed wealth creators keep more of the profits of private enterprise, with less going to taxes and worker compensation.

If you believe this theory, then Labor Day should be a cause for national mourning. We should all pause to mourn the loss of capital that might have gone to a fifth or a sixth mansion or a private jet, but instead was conscripted against its will to pay for a public school or higher wages in a factory.

We should weep for the capital that might have given its life for high-end caterers but instead was forced by government to be spent on public hospital nurses. And we should grieve for the dollars that were wasted on public police protection, when they might have gone instead to private security guards in a gated community.

But there was one Labor Day editorial worth reading because it laid out, in print, finally, the awful secret of the Chicago Boys School of Economics, Milton Friedman, Founder.

LABOR DAY traditionally celebrates pride in work and the solidarity of workers, but this year there is fear instead of pride, lonely anxiety instead of solidarity. Half a million new jobless claims were filed last week, and unemployment reached 9.7 percent in August, with 10 percent almost certainly coming soon. Three million jobs in manufacturing and construction have simply disappeared. The majority of people over 50 expect to postpone retirement because of 401k losses, making it all the harder for younger people to find jobs, or to advance in careers. The new economy has pulled the rug out from under recent graduates. Those who still have jobs carry heavier workloads, while forever keeping one eye peeled for the coming pink slip. Management has been as devastated as labor, and professions that once defined genteel security, like journalism and publishing, are themselves in danger of disappearing. Teachers, for God’s sake, are being laid off!

What is going on here? Tested categories of economic analysis have all been applied. Depression. Recession. Business cycle. Soft landing. Money supply. Credit crisis. Catastrophic deficits. Statistics. Data. Globalization. Mumbo jumbo. Are we to be consoled that every society on earth is at the mercy of such disorder, or that the one reliable social law - impoverished groups and individuals always take the hardest hit - is holding true? After two years of expert predictions being shown up as wild guesses, and mathematical projections as stabs in the dark, a mask has been ripped from the face of the science of economics, exposing primitive superstition. The debunking of the academic study of the structure of wealth is equivalent to astronomy being shown up as nothing more than astrology after all. “I saw the best minds of my generation,’’ to take off from Allen Ginsberg, destroyed by the smug assumption that they knew what the hell they were talking about.

Workers have been decimated by 30 years of an economic theory so flawed it is sometimes hard to connect to the real world except with long ropes. In a sense, the phrase "jobless recovery" encapsulates everything that is eerily unworldly about Friedman-school economics. If there are no jobs being created, how is that a "recovery"? Either the phrase is an oxymoron or no one any longer cares about anyone except the rich.

But maybe instead of mourning we should celebrate. Maybe Labor Day should be replaced by a new holiday to celebrate the tiny number of brilliant investors who, more or less single-handedly, are responsible for long-term economic progress. We should abolish Labor Day and replace it with Capital Day – a festive time when we, the majority of parasitic wealth destroyers whose income comes from wages rather than investments, can give our collective thanks to the small number of people who have most of the money.

How else can you explain the acceptability in our conservative-run society of a "recovery" that creates no jobs? the acceptability in the richest country in the world of growing poverty? the acceptability of homeless children and endless unemployment? the ignorance of our Labor past that allows conservatives to badmouth workers? 

We shouldn't be surprised if the reigning economic theory of our times creates paper millionaires and real-life paupers when the theory itself is based on doing that very thing. Friedman's Chicago School was never interested in ordinary people but in the conditions that would create more wealth for the already wealthy. It was understood but very understated that if you concentrated on making the wealthy wealthier, that extra wealth would have to come from the pockets of the middle class - workers, in Friedman's day, many if not most of them unionized. Thus the conservative concentration on selling the "everybody can be rich" myth while they attacked middle class workers' competence and made every attempt to destroy union cohesion.

It's important for us to realize that NOTHING about the antecedents of the recent near-destruction of our economy was accidental. It was brought about quite deliberately be anti-Keynesians who were angry about the tilt of the economy away from the rich as it was in the Robber Baron days and toward the common man. They wanted to reverse that trend and they used the GOP to do it. David Stockman may have invented the phrase "trickle-down" but the concept was there from the beginning. The parlous state of the middle and lower classes is a direct result of the Friedmanesque focus in shifting our nation's wealth to the top of the pyramid - an apt metaphor since Pyramid Schemes turned out to be the engine that drove the shift.

[H]ow is this possible? The economic pie is getting bigger — how can it be true that most Americans are getting smaller slices? The answer, of course, is that a few people are getting much, much bigger slices. Although wages have stagnated since Bush took office, corporate profits have doubled. The gap between the nation’s CEOs and average workers is now ten times greater than it was a generation ago. And while Bush’s tax cuts shaved only a few hundred dollars off the tax bills of most Americans, they saved the richest one percent more than $44,000 on average. In fact, once all of Bush’s tax cuts take effect, it is estimated that those with incomes of more than $200,000 a year — the richest five percent of the population — will pocket almost half of the money. Those who make less than $75,000 a year — eighty percent of America — will receive barely a quarter of the cuts. In the Bush era, economic inequality is on the rise.

Now, several years after that was written, it is not just on the rise: it has peaked and seems to have become a permanent feature of our landscape. There are the rich, and then there are the rest of us, sort of like pre-Revolutionary France. Some of the parallels are eerie. When Marie Antoinette was told that people were rioting because they didn't have enough bread to eat, she is supposed to have replied, "Let them eat cake." Nowadays, when liberals point out that homelessness and hunger are worsening every year, conservatives, as clueless and unconcerned as Marie, exclaim, "Let them get a job."

On this Labor Day let us say this clearly, once and for all:

A "recovery" that doesn't include jobs is called a "depression", NOT a "recovery".

(This was mostly written before Labor Day but due first to computer crashes that day and then to a closed library on the holiday itself and finally to more computer crashes the day after, it couldn't be published until today. Oh, well. Better late than never, I guess.)

ADDENDUM: Just as I was finishing this, I saw this post by doloresflores_d at Open Salon that tries to bring a bit of not-so-well-known Labor history to life.

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn:  I saw so many deaths and so much violence.  Frank Little, an I.W.W. worker was lynched in Butte, Montana in 1917.  John Rami was bayoneted in Lawrence in 1912.  Modestino Valentino was shot in the back at Paterson in 1913.  Fifteen women and children were suffocated by a fire set by the militia working for corporate interests at Ludlow, Colorado.  In 1917, 164 men died in a mine disaster when their escape hatches were cemented shut so the company could save costs in maintenance.  When you see all that, you become an enemy of the system that takes so many lives.

Do yourself a favor and go read the whole thing.

Comments

[OSR]

Relocating to the third world is actually a pain in the ass. It's far easier to bring the third world here.

[mick]

Well, not easier, actually, but certainly more preferable. If it was easier, they would have done it quicker and there would never have been any need for globalization and outsourcing and off-shoring and all that crap. But they're getting there and when they do, all that junk will end.