Recently I was reading a comment thread somewhere in which people were lambasting unions. Now, there are many problems with unions, the most egregious of which I would say is that they can be remarkably short-sighted. But the lambasting which was going on was the sort of vilification which only comes from a great ignorance of history and a conception of the world carefully shaped by a corporate media which has been steadily and ceaselessly painting unions in a bad light for decades.
Unions are good things. Without unions, people who actually work for a living have nothing which allows them to bargain with their employers. This is, obviously, less true for skilled workers than for unskilled workers. But without a union, the negotiation is between an entity who will have the pain of having to find someone else to do a certain job and an entity who won't be able to feed his children. Now that's a level playing field.
People fought and died for the right to organize. That's no exaggeration. And yet, somehow, we have reached a point in popular culture where the best interests of a corporation and the wealthy few who own and run it are seen as not only on a par with, but superior to the best interests of the hundreds or thousands of individual human beings who actually make the corporation work. Which is a different frame of mind, different to that of most of the rest of the world and different to the general consensus in this country for most of its history.
The wealthy and the elite have always felt that their interests were superior to the interests of the working class. But until fairly recently, the working class did not generally share this view. And I think one of the key differences is this: Americans now see ourselves as consumers. Not workers. We no longer define ourselves by what we make or do. We define ourselves by what we buy, and own.
Because that's the compelling argument put forward on behalf of the working class against unions. That unions raise prices. That, by increasing wages and benefits - which is, I must observe, their purpose - unions raise the cost of the products we buy. And thus, unions are in fact bad for the little guy. For the person who doesn't actually make much money. Poor people need Wal-Mart, you see, they need those low prices, because they can't afford to pay more.
And once we've been convinced by that logic, well... off goes the manufacturing to China, because it's cheaper. And cheaper products are better for Americans. Freeze those minimum wages. Drop those regulatory standards. Cheap, cheap, cheap. Everything has to be cheaper because we are consumers and what makes things cheaper makes us better off.
Weren't we workers, once? Wasn't the goal to make an honest living making honest products and selling them to each other?
But I know who benefits the most when we race to the absolute bottom wages. People who don't work for a living at all. If you're rich, having the cheapest possible products is an unmitigated benefit.
I think I can see who's been shaping this cultural image.
Sometimes things are worth paying for. Maybe our cars and our flashlights and our plastic toys ought to cost a little more, and maybe we should all be able to afford them. Maybe Henry Ford was right about that. Do we really need all of our products made in China? Time was, we could make them ourselves.
A lot of money has gone into making us forget that.
- Sun Ra