Every
commentator of every stripe concedes that US workers have been
battered over the last five years since the onset of the global
economic crisis. What most fail to concede is that the battering was
the direct result of a one-sided class war.
From
every perspective, measured by every economic indicator, all US
workers-- those organized into trade unions and those not-- have been
hammered relentlessly. Unemployment, measured by the government's
least telling index, remains unconscionably high. Labor force
participation, a better measure of the job picture, continues to
decline. And the jobs that do become available are unprecedentedly
part-time, low-paying, or temporary.
Wages
are stagnant or declining in every sector and labor's share of
national wealth continues to atrophy. Benefits are under attack with
workers’ contributions to existing benefits growing and employers’
share shrinking.
The
oft-cited road to success for working class youth-- a college
education-- has proven fool's gold. The average student is saddled
with $25,000 in student debt and a marginal job that retards getting
out of debt and capturing meaningful savings.
At
the same time, a “recovery” has occurred: production and
national wealth have rebounded to and surpassed their pre-crisis
levels. Profits and profit growth are well above historic levels and
trends. And the stock market has revived energetically.
The
widely heralded “recovery” has only been a recovery for the very
wealthiest. A recent study by the formidable economic research
team of Saez and Piketty shows that 95% of the income benefits of
this one-sided recovery have accrued to the top 1% of income
recipients. The other 99% must settle for a tiny share of the meager
remaining 5% gain in income!
That
US workers’ fate and the fate of their employers and their minions
are on two separate, divergent tracks is undeniable. That these
two tracks are sustainable is entirely a different matter, a matter
to be settled when workers embrace a fight back in the struggle
between classes.
While
pundits from across the political spectrum acknowledge the huge and
growing chasm between the rich and working people (see, for example,
Paul Krugman's Rich Man's Recovery, The New York Times),
they offer little by way of explanation and even less toward
addressing and correcting the condition.
Instead,
they deplore and regret, condemn and rue
the sorry plight of working people in the face of burgeoning wealth
channeled to the privileged. They trot out a host of tired,
ineffective nostrums that consistently evade changing the dynamics
that invariably generate growing inequality. Slogans like “tax the
rich” warm the blood, but get no political traction. And on the
rare occasion when tax increases and the like survive political mine
fields, the rich find ways to evade them. Given the political power
that inequality confers to the wealthy, it should be no wonder that
even modest reformist proposals are decisively aborted by the best
“public servants” that monopoly corporations and their wealthy
owners can buy.
What,
then, are the dynamics that generate inequality? What really
accounts for the ever widening income and wealth game between a tiny
minority and the vast majority of US citizens?
No
understanding of economic inequality in a global capitalist economy
can begin without an acknowledgment of class.
The existence of social classes is the unwelcome analytic tool that
capitalist apologists devote careers to denying. Media savants and
academic authorities choke on the word “class.” To them, class
division is a distant memory of hereditary aristocrats and
down-trodden peasants. Surely, they affirm, the rise of
representative government has eradicated class distinctions.
To
avoid the obvious, liberals and so-called “progressives” have
created a class that simply hangs in the air, absent any supporting
structures: the middle class! A favored idea embraced by politicians,
top labor leaders, and social workers, the middle class is said to
shrink, decline, or disappear; yet no one tells us where the lost
members go!
This
slick trick hopes to mask the simple fact that the US is not a
classless society.
Contrary
to popular mythology, social life in the US is not all harmony and
bliss. Instead, it is one of conflicting and incompatible interests.
Moreover, the sharpest differences, the differences that determine
material well-being, are differences of social class. The great
contribution of Marxism is to reveal exactly how class is best
understood-- not as social position, profession, or subjective
perception, but as a material relation between employer and employee.
That is, the most useful discrete divide is between those who engage
the labor of others and those who provide that labor. The former
constitutes a class of employers and their minions; the latter-- a
much larger group-- constitutes the working class.
Even
a casual reflection on the relation between the two classes in
capitalist society exposes a sharp and irreconcilable difference of
interest. Those who employ labor share no other goal than
maximizing the profit of their enterprises. Put simply, from the Mom
and Pop store to the largest monopoly corporation, owners are in
business to make money. While small enterprises are limited in scope
and intensity, larger enterprises, especially those with investors
and shareholders, are driven relentlessly to achieve greater and
greater rates of profit and sums of profit.
It
is the logic of capitalism to reduce the costs of economic activity
and command a greater share of that activity for the owners,
investors, and shareholders. From the perspective of the worker,
“reducing costs” translates into a relentless attack on the wages
and benefits of the working class. The less that must be shared with
the worker, the more that can go toward profit.
Since
the dawn of capitalism, workers have recognized the divergence of
interest between profit maximization and realizing their desire to
improve their economic standing. They have understood the necessity
of fighting to both maintain and expand their share of the fruits of
economic activity. The history of labor is a history of the
development of the instruments (unions, political parties),
techniques (unity, strikes, demonstrations), and ideology (class,
class consciousness, class struggle) necessary to secure a greater
share of the surplus generated by the labor process. And among the
most advanced, visionary workers, a world entirely free of the
employer/employee relationship, a world without exploitation, a world
of common, social ownership, is the goal.
Thus,
we can and should measure the success or failure of the working
class movement by how well it has fared in the battle with employers
for a greater share of that surplus.
And
by that measure, or any other, not only the last five years have been
a disaster, but the previous three decades as well. Income and wealth
distribution has shifted dramatically in favor of the employer class
and its attendants. The rich are winning a class war for the lion's
share of socially produced wealth. The working class is losing even
the gains of the past.
How
does this happen?
While
the employers have mounted an aggressive assault on workers' wages
and benefits, ostensible workers' organizations have failed workers.
The
Democratic Party enjoyed the support of the working class thanks to
both real and imagined gains won through the New Deal of the 1930s.
In the ensuing years, that high point of labor-friendliness
dissipated, with its last echoes embodied in the 1976 Democratic
Party platform. Of course that platform was betrayed by the Democrat
President-elect, James Carter. Never again did the Democratic Party
embrace labor's cause, despite Don Quixote-like efforts by Jesse
Jackson in subsequent years. While establishment Democrats mocked
Reagan's lame “trickle down” economics, a decade later they
celebrated the same idea with their absurd slogan that “a rising
tide lifts all boats.”
Obama,
the latest political “friend” of labor, has so far failed to
deliver anything of significance to workers in the five years of his
administration, nothing that might have reversed the grinding,
painful decline of working class standards of living.
Certainly
the top leaders of the trade union movement have served workers no
better. Accordingly, they have been punished for their failure by a
sharp decline in union membership, a decline that has lead them to
panic before their own fate.
Of
course their concerns, born of self-preservation, are nothing
compared to the devastation of the working class inflicted over the
last four decades. Their failure to use the available tools of class
struggle, their reliance on cozy arrangements with bosses, and their
identification with the health and flourishing of corporations are
policies that have proven severely injurious to the working class.
Collaboration
that links the fate of the working class to the fate of the
corporations has paid off handsomely... for the corporations. A
recent study summarized in The Wall Street Journal submits
that by the end of this decade, “Adjusted for productivity, average
labor costs will beat Japan by 18%, Germany 34%, and France 35%.”
The study doesn't bother to mention what this will mean for US
workers, of course. Their losses to the gods of competitiveness are
capitalists' gains!
To
take an example, US auto sales have soared to levels unseen since
before the economic crisis first struck. Corporate profits are
growing at a record pace.
How
do they do it?
First,
the US auto industry received massive tax-payer bailouts from the
Obama administration, but only on the condition that they close
plants and lay off workers! So much for the Democratic Party
friends of labor.
Secondly,
the industry produces the same amount of vehicles with less than 80%
of the former workers, a forced-march increase in productivity.
And
thirdly, at United Auto Worker unionized plants, the union submitted
to deep concessions. Entry level UAW workers now make $15.78 an hour,
a rate commensurate with an annual wage a mere 12% above the level
defined by the Federal government as “living in or near poverty.”
Once, the UAW wage and benefit package was the gold standard of
industrial unionism!
Because
of their total capitulation to the auto industry bosses, the leaders
of the once proud UAW have resorted to pursuing the organization of
the Chattanooga, Tennessee Volkswagen plant by sneaking through the
back door. They hope to use a European Union regulation and their
cozy relation with the company to secure recognition. How else to
“win” a non-union shop when union and non-union wages are
virtually equal? (Actually, when relative costs-of-living are
factored, they are sometimes better in non-union plants).
Indeed,
there is no class war when one side is always in retreat. The rout
can only be reversed if workers shed their blind support for the
Democratic Party and vigorously exercise their independence. The rout
can only be reversed when workers transform their unions into
class-struggle weapons and launch a counter-offensive.
The
future doesn't have to continue with the past.
Zoltan
Zigedy
zoltanzigedy@gmail.com
