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Wake Up!

It’s not a Class War if one side refuses to fight. 

Professor Bill Mitchell wrote a very insightful story about the economic situation leading up to the Global Financial Crisis and the Great Recession - When will the Workers Wake Up?.  Professor Mitchell asks the right question and I will try to provide an answer. 

It used to be that productivity growth and wage growth would grow together - meaning that workers would benefit from their hard work and share these gains with shareholders.  But a new economic ideology took over in the 1970’s which I will call Trickle Down Economics.  Trickle down economics meant a de-regulation and globalization of labor markets and systematic destruction of unions in the U.S.  This resulted in weakening/crippling of the overall bargaining power of workers.  So as a result we got this:

Starting in the 1970’s the link between wage growth and productivity gains started to break.  This had a significant economic impact on working class Americans.  This meant that in order to just maintain a certain standard of living something had to fill the void left by lack of wage growth.  Guess what that was?  More debt.  And as we are finding out today - economic growth that depends on more and more debt is not sustainable. 

So when will workers wake up?  When workers start organizing into a force for real change.  Right now the only entity capable of doing mass organizing of workers is organized labor (ie. AFL-CIO) but they won’t do it.  They won’t do it because their leadership is complacent and fatten with nice salaries and cushy pensions plus a strange (abusive) marriage to the Democratic Party.  Ralph Nader said it best in this interview with Chris Hedges:

Every major movement starts with field organizers, the farmers, unions, and the civil rights movement,” Nader said. “But there is nothing out there. We need to start learning from what was done in the past. All over the country people are pissed off. They hate Wall Street. They know they are being gouged. They know they are slipping behind. They know their kids will not be as well off as they were, and they were not that well off. But no one is putting it together. Who could put a thousand organizers in the field, besides George Soros? The labor unions. They have the money. They have a lot of cash. These idiots are going down. The UAW is a paradigm of a suicidal, supplicant labor union. It is disgusting. They are a puppy dog of GM, Ford and Chrysler. They have huge reserves. The labor unions could organize the country, but they are into their own emoluments and high salaries. The union leadership has so distanced itself from the rank and file that it is ashamed to do anything controversial. These union leaders will not go on TV on Labor Day because they do not want someone saying ‘Why are you making $500,000 a year with a pension that is six times your rank and file?’ There is corruption at the top. The only way the union leaders can continue is to be in the shadows. And you don’t build a strong movement in the shadows.

So what was done in the past?  Any significant changes in this country were a result of mass civil disobedience including the New Deal and Civil Rights Movement of 60’s.  The New Deal was not a result of FDR’s good will.  New Deal was a response to significant civil disobedience that was growing more violent.  Civil rights laws were a result of massive peaceful civil disobedience.  There were movements behind these two historical examples of civil disobedience. Workers will not wake up from their deep and potentially fatal slumber until someone or some entity comes along to organize workers into a movement.

Good luck.