Opinion - Have labor unions failed Labor Day?

Can labor unions have their cake and eat it, too? By Michael Monasky Labor Day 2012 Labor is suffering desperately in its own recess...


Can labor unions have their cake and eat it, too?

By Michael Monasky
Labor Day 2012


Labor is suffering desperately in its own recession, a labor depression. Sure, Wall Street continues to accrue value in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. But Main Street is hurting and we should wonder, Why?

Think of labor in our society as a cake missing many layers.

On top, the most labor-intensive and repugnant jobs should be the highest paid. Instead, they are passed on to immigrants paid the lowest wages.

There should be coordination with international labor groups; but, instead, while the rest of the world celebrates its labor and flexes its muscle on May Day, we dilly-dally until the end of summer for a pathetic picnic at which unions whimper.

There is no political labor party in the United States.

There is no labor reporting in the major media. There's plenty to read in the business pages, but nothing from a labor perspective. There is no Nightly Labor Report on PBS. There is no LaborPlace on NPR.

Labor sweats, lives, and dies. It can be incarcerated and thrown out of work. It can be injured and made lame and unproductive. It can be forced into the street and denied judicial access to bankruptcy. Labor can be starved out of existence. It can be laid off and impoverished. Workers can lose benefits at the whim of their employers. They can be fired at any time. And the few proprietary rights workers do have to life, limb, property, and employment are virtually impossible to defend in a court of law.

Compared to labor, corporations never die, never get sick, never get lame. They don't need vacations or sick leave. For business, sweating and bleeding require no indemnification. The legislature, judiciary, and executive administration at all levels of public government find repellent the thought of revoking corporate charters. Unlike workers, corporations have expansive proprietary rights that include their speech, ideas, and existence; as if an institution could be a person with a face, a mind, and a soul.

The icing on this virtual labor cake (with multiple missing layers) is the perverse elevation of business profits over the suppression of human needs. Everything in this inverted political economy is a commodity: the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, the work we do, our bodies, our personal relationships. Absolutely everything has an artificial price imposed upon it. You can buy speech and healthcare. But you have no right to either if you haven't the money.

The butter in this foul icing is the power of money. It isn't the greed but the power held by banks and financial institutions in this monetized environment. The short argument is that money is debt. That debt is made worse by interest and inflation. Workers can never pay back the growing monetized leviathan. It's ironic that the greatest debt in consumer credit cards was recently surpassed by student loans. This combined debt crushes the student, the consumer, the worker, and labor.

There is $30 trillion in offshore deposits at the Grand Cayman Island. It is untaxed. At 20%, $6 trillion would become available. The Federal Reserve has a holding of nearly $2 trillion with US banks, for which it pays those banks a rate of 0.25%. The banks get paid $5 billion to do nothing but hold onto this reserve, which they have no incentive to circulate.

Yet nothing exists without labor. Workers make everything we use. Workers grow our food. Workers design and construct the robots and machines that make the goods we buy. Nothing of value exists without labor.

Workers have a choice. Workers can refuse to support the system that perpetuates the escalating financialization of the world's economy. Workers can replace that frustrating system with a resource-based economy that makes the highest social priority meeting the needs of humans and protection of the environment that sustains us. And it seems that labor unions haven't gathered together all the ingredients necessary to make the labor cake properly.


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