Today's robber barons have little
interest in long-term, full-time employees.
Here I am
In working prime,
But all the jobs
Are just part-time.
In working prime,
But all the jobs
Are just part-time.
The ancestors of many Americans came here to escape mingy monarchs, oppressive priests, and baleful barons who controlled all aspects of communal life back in their countries. They bravely left everything they knew behind in a quest for freedom.
OK, so slaves didn’t exactly come here in search of their freedom and nor did migrant farm workers. But this freedom business is something of a religious creed for what Bill O’Reilly likes to call “traditional America.”
And
the truth is that we do have freedom today. We’re free to be poor, uninsured,
and exploited. Not surprisingly, any mass of immigrants contains a number of
up-and-coming new barons, and ours soon climbed the ladder of avarice, just
like back home. Compare that to what happened in Europe, where the repressed,
close-knit working classes, upon finally achieving political power, generally
took much better care of their own.
Sure,
there have been inspiring exceptions, such as the advent of the New Deal and
the several decades of declining economic inequality that followed it. But in America you’re
basically on your own and our homegrown barons once again hold all the cards.
They buy enough influence in Congress and state legislatures so that they
needn’t pay you or Uncle Sam very much. And they can beat you down
in the courts if you organize
to fight back.
Republican
filibusters have prevented filling vacancies on that brilliant legacy of the
New Deal, the National Labor
Relations Board.
Budget cuts there had already stymied the panel’s actions, before a recent
court ruling that jeopardizes all of the NLRB’s work during the past year.
One
of the better things about the Affordable Care Act is its requirement that
employers of firms with at least 50 workers provide their employees with health insurance. However, our lax labor laws are too
toothless to prevent employers from using this as an excuse to cut their
workers back to 29 hours per week. That’s what Darden
Restaurants, which owns the Olive
Garden, Red Lobster, and LongHorn Steakhouse chains has threatened to do.
Plus,
many states have now passed so-called right-to-work laws that gut the power of
unions to operate. Not coincidentally, wages are 3.2
percent lower in those states than the rest of the country, according to the Economic
Policy Institute.
Washington
even exports this corporate crusade against labor rights. The World Bank
and the International Monetary Fund spread the “race to the bottom” to every nation where they
operate.
Today’s
barons have little interest in long-term, full-time employees. Even in traditionally
labor-friendly France, 82 percent of new hires are on temporary contracts, The
New York Times reports. In our own country, part-time work is also the
new normal, paired with low-wage jobs and hours subject to change without much
notice.
The
solution to an individual worker in these dire straits might be finding a new
job. Unfortunately, the big job growth is mostly in fields dominated by
low-income opportunities.
Home health aides, nursing home workers, fast food servers, store clerks, hotel maids, farm hands, food processors, and security guards are all promising career paths if you want to be sure you’ll have a job tomorrow. It just might not be a good job.
Home health aides, nursing home workers, fast food servers, store clerks, hotel maids, farm hands, food processors, and security guards are all promising career paths if you want to be sure you’ll have a job tomorrow. It just might not be a good job.
At
least in America you’re quite free to start your own business. That way you can
go hungry at your own pace. As Mitt Romney says, this is easy if you just borrow the
start-up costs from your
parents.
OtherWords columnist
William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of
Norwalk, Connecticut. OtherWords.org
