Labor’s day is drawing near
In 1966, when Donald Trump would have been 20 years old and Jeff Bezos all of 2, the presidential National Commission on Technology, Automation and Economic Progress issued a report containing a few modest proposals.
Distinguished by such luminaries as United Auto Workers head Walter Reuther and IBM CEO Thomas J. Watson Jr., and containing no politicians, the commission recommended that the federal government guarantee every American family a minimum annual income of $3,000 (roughly $23,000 in today’s dollars), that it provide free education through the junior college level, and that bluecollar workers be paid annual salaries instead of by the hour.
There were also recommendations for creating 500,000 new jobs for the “hard-core unemployed” in “useful community enterprises” such as hospitals, schools and police departments.
A skeptical New York Times columnist feared that these initiatives would supplant “the American form of government” with a “socialist system.” Nevertheless, the Times writer went on to say, if any of the proposals were adopted, “it is to be hoped Norman Thomas will still be around to administer them” as “the only citizen in sight who is both learned in the philosophy of socialism and who knows the responsible limits to enforcing it in the American society.” (Thomas was a Presbyterian minister who led the Socialist movement in America for four decades.)
The proposals and the column were cited at the time by veteran labor activist A.J. Muste as an example of how far American society and workers in particular had advanced since the 1930s, when any group advocating “proposals remotely resembling those of the WatsonReuther commission ... would have been denounced, not in polite or even printable language, as utopian dreamers and Bolsheviks.” A former Trotskyist and part of the group that founded the shortlived American Workers Party, Muste knew what he was talking about. He was “left gasping at the contrast between then and now.”
At this moment you may be gasping too, and for quite a different reason. What Muste recalled as the bad old days of the 1930s seems like a stark depiction of our present. “Utopian dreamers” in 2018 dare dream no further than paid family leave and a livable minimum wage. Income inequality is at its highest level since the Great Depression. Union membership is about 11 percent of the workforce.
In May, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that low-wage workers coerced into signing arbitration agreements cannot pursue their grievances through class-action lawsuits. A month later, the court ruled that public-sector unions cannot collect “agency fees” from workers who choose not to join the unions that represent them. Compulsory payment of such fees is a violation of free speech under the First Amendment, the court said, a violation that apparently doesn’t exempt taxpayers like me from having to buy cell phone batteries for the nation’s tweeter-in-chief.
Not only organized labor but labor itself seems under threat. An Oxford University study predicts that nearly half of American jobs will be replaced by automation in the next two decades. The exploited worker has become the expendable worker.
None of this is to suggest that Muste was prematurely sanguine or that the proposals of the commission can safely be consigned to a display case at the Smithsonian. In fact, conditions have never been riper for their adoption — certainly much riper than they were in 1966. But the changes won’t come from a presidential blue ribbon commission or even from a Congress flipped blue.
They will come when the expendable worker turns into the implacable worker. They will come when the unchecked power of predatory capitalism has hunted itself to the point of extinction. Like the New Deal, they will come because the alternative is more devastating than most of us can accept.
This Labor Day will find me thinking of those cynical functionaries who reportedly leaned out the windows of the Chicago Board of Trade building to shower McDonald’s applications on the Occupy protesters gathered below. As in, “Get a job, bums.” It may require a Norman Thomas to determine the “responsible limits” of socialism in America. But it takes no more than a basic knowledge of history to predict how far privileged arrogance can lean from an upper-story window before its sneer hits cement.