Why Labor Matters

A Common Sense Editorial

[Common Sense is a biweekly newsletter distributed by online readers, especially in areas that have little quality media coverage]

 by Jesse Lee

OpEdNews.com

In 1948, Strom Thurmond, the late Republican Senator from South Carolina, ran for president.  Trent Lott recently lost his position as Senate Majority Leader for reminiscing fondly of that campaign, because the platform was explicitly and inflamingly racist.  The campaign sought to portray the black man as a sexual monster (think of King Kong), and argued that equal rights would allow the beast to run rampant.

But the portrayal of Strom Thurmond’s campaign in the media at the time of Lott’s slip vastly oversimplified the issues.  The South was a land of desperate poverty.  Blacks were exploited at every turn, including being convicted of fictional crimes and being sent to privatized prison workcamps by the thousands.  But most whites were little better off.  Over 70% lived in poverty, and many worked tirelessly year-round only to end up in debt to the handful of rich whites that owned the land.

It was these rich whites which founded and ran on the Dixiecrat platform.  The South had been dominated by the Democrats, including Strom Thurmond and the Dixiecrats, and their campaigns were run as a protest against the gradual commitment of the national Democratic Party to civil rights.  When Thurmond and the Dixiecrats split and joined the Republican party after their failed presidential campaign, the GOP as we know it was born.

What has been missed in popular conception of the Dixiecrats, though, is that they were not moved to action simply because they could not cope with desgregated schools.  These rich land-owners were moved by the possibility that their brutal grip on labor might soon be coming to an end.

Whites were beginning to realize that their wages and employment were being drastically undercut by the exploitation of blacks.  Why hire a white man at a reasonable wage when you could have a captive black worker for virtutally free, who could literally be worked to death because another one could quickly be arrested on bogus charges to replace him?  White workers were beginning to realize that their only hope of escaping poverty was to unite labor, and this meant uniting across color lines.  Multi-racial unions were becoming more common, and were increasingly capable of standing up to the vicious landowners.  The Dixiecrats were terrified.

And so they adopted a textbook strategy of divide and conquer.  They portrayed the black man as a predator, and invoked the idea of white pride to turn white workers on black workers, thus disbanning the unions that were forming.  The Dixiecrats even convinced poor whites to vote for poll taxes to keep blacks away from the voting booths, even though most whites could not afford the poll taxes themselves.  Only rich white men were left to vote, and it would take decades for poor workers to make up the ground.

Today American workers face a parallel plight.  But instead of the exploitation of captive black labor, it is the exploitation of third-world labor that is devastating the wages and employment of American workers.  The question for the corporate class has now become, Why pay an American worker a reasonable wage when I can get workers in China for pennies a day?

The “Free Market” chorus tries to convince us that if other countries just allow open markets, their wages will gradually get better as a matter of course, and gradually the wages of the rest of the world will catch up with our own.  Just look at what it did for America, they say.

But this take does an incredible disservice to those who gave their blood, sweat, and tears to the American labor movement, which deserves at least as much credit for America’s success as does the “free market”.  The free market brought the horror that was the industrial revolution, the labor movement took us from there.

Why?  Because as Henry Ford said, you have to pay youir workers enough to buy your products.  This is an indispensible fact of a functional economy, and the free market does not account for it at all.  Workers will never make enough to buy the products they make unless there is a labor movement.

But workers overseas are finding that virtually impossible.  Often, as is the case in China, workers’ organizations are forbidden.  And if a smaller country attempts to begin a labor movement, or grant their citizens labor rights, corporations are agile enough to just pick up and exploit another country.

Of course this is what is happening to American workers.  Under Bush alone, millions of jobs have been lost to sweatshops overseas, and economists predict that they will never return.  The only way to stop this bleeding of jobs is to establish decent wages and working conditions for other countries.  And the only power that has the ability to promote and sustain such standards in the US government.  No third-world nation can raise wages on its own, or corporate investment will simply go elsewhere.  But if the American government is willing to require workers’ rights in our trade agreements, the “race to the botton” might be turned around into a progress for mankind, including American workers.  If this could be accomplished it would undercut terrorism much more efficiently than wars which play into terrorist propaganda.

But make no mistake, under this administration that will never happen.  It should be clear that the interests of employers and employees are very often divergent, just as this issue of labor rights proves.  And there should also be no doubt as to which side this administration is on, as evidenced by their recent attempt to cut overtime wages for millions of American workers.  Could any governmental action more clearly favor corporate America over working America than a bill that provides “longer hours for less pay”, as Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa put it?

The abuse of foreign labor goes something like this: a country is granted aid on the condition that it “open it’s markets”, meaning that American corporations can come in, buy up the land, and put local entrepreneurs out of business.  Locals then have no choice but to work for American corporations no matter how little they pay.  American workers are then forced to compete with these obscenely low wages, and find their jobs “outsourced” overseas.  Everybody loses… except the corporations.

For the first time, major presidential candidates are speaking up about this problem.  Led by Dick Gephart and Howard Dean, the Democrats have won solid support from the unions, who see the current administration as the most powerful enemy of workers both here and around the world (this is also how the rest of the world sees it, by the way).  These Democrats have risked a great deal of money from special interests and corporations in taking this position, and they deserve our support on this issue.  If we are to support President Bush as our leader, he too must address this issue with more than lip service.  We at Common Sense are not holding our breath.

Common Sense is a newsletter containing a bulleted news summary of the most damning mainstream news stories and one opinion piece, chosen or written to be poignant but not strident in tone.  Common Sense is operated by Jesse Lee in conjunction with Rob Kall of www.opednews.com . To receive Common Sense in your inbox every two weeks, email Jesse at commonsense@opednews.com. He co-operates the blog www.moneyjungle.org and is a founding contributor to the platform of 2020 Democrats. This article is copyright by Jesse Lee,published by OpEdNews.com, but permission is granted for reprint in print, email, blog, or web media so long as this entire credit paragraph is attached