TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/090991/0909640.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.2 KB | 126 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 72

Honor to the Working Stiffs


By Barbara Ehrenreich


    Put another wienie on the fire for the working class.
It's time for the annual barbecue in honor of the people who
slaughtered the pigs, and made the hot dog, and trucked it to
market and bagged it for you. The little guy and gal, that is,
the working stiffs. They need all the honor they can get these
days. At the rate blue-collar wages are falling, the U.S. is
going to reinvent slavery in the next few decades, only without
any of its nice, redeeming features, such as room and board.

    A job is supposed to be a ticket to self-respect and
social betterment -- at least that's what the pols tell us when
the poor start clamoring for their welfare checks. But
conditions in the low-wage end of the work force are beginning
to look like what Friedrich Engels found in 19th century
Manchester and described as immiserization. Within 10 miles of
my suburban home, for example, there is a factory where (until
they got a union contract a year ago) the workers slept in their
cars and bathed in the restroom -- because, at the minimum
wage, housing was not an option. A few miles in the other
direction, Salvadoran refugees get $125 in cash for 60-hour
weeks of heavy outdoor labor. For them, upward mobility would
be a busboy's job at $2.90 an hour plus a cut of the tips.

    Or I think of Jean-Paul, a Haitian-born janitor in one of
the local schools. He's a janitor only at night. By day he
works an eight-hour factory shift. That leaves eight hours a
day, on average, for sleeping, eating, commuting, washing and
brooding, as Jean-Paul often does, on the meaning of his life.

    These are not isolated, exotic cases. Nationwide, the
fraction of the work force earning wages that are inadequate to
lift a family out of poverty rose from 25.7% in 1979 to 31.5%
in 1987. During the '80s, the average hourly compensation of
all blue-collar workers, computed in constant dollars, fell
$1.68, according to the Economic Policy Institute, and those who
were earning the least tended to lose the most. In what some
sociologists call the "new working class" -- which is
disproportionately made up of minorities and the young and
female of all races -- work may be a fine ingredient for an
ethic. But it doesn't really pay.

    Ask a tweed-suited member of the better-paid classes
what's gone wrong, and you'll get a lot of chin stroking about
vast, impersonal forces such as declining productivity and
global competition. But real wages fell faster in the '80s than
in the '70s, while productivity rose faster in the '80s.
Besides, executive salaries have soared in the past 10 years,
and it's the executives who decide whether to invest in junk
bonds or modern equipment and technology. Theories of the global
economy may explain a lot of things, but they don't make it any
easier for a U.S. worker to live on Third World wages.

    Or go to Washington, and you'll find an Administration
that loves the working class -- as a concept anyway. George
Bush favors pork cracklings, and was probably munching on that
well-known proletarian treat as he nixed the bill that would
have extended unemployment benefits. Labor is like motherhood
to most of our political leaders -- a calling so fine and noble
that it would be sullied by talk of vulgar, mundane things like
pay.

    Even unions aren't much help anymore. Union workers earn
30% more, on average, than their nonunion counterparts, but
there aren't many union workers left. Only 16.1% of the work
force is organized, and that number is falling fast. Union
leaders complain that it's hard to organize under a government
that doesn't adequately enforce the rights of workers (to join
a union, for example, without risking being fired). But the
unions haven't exactly been exerting themselves. According to
the Labor Research Association, the number of organizing drives
keeps declining from year to year, and when unions do go to war,
it's too often with one another. In 1990, for example, four
major unions spent an estimated $40 million to $50 million
battling one another to represent Indiana state employees -- as
if they were the last nonunion workers left on earth.

    This isn't just a labor problem. It hurts us all when hard
work doesn't pay, and I'm talking about insidious, creeping,
moral damage. Conservatives like to cite that ancient Puritan
teaching: "He who does not work, neither should he eat." But the
flip side of that stern motto should be written in the social
contract too: "He who does work, does deserve a decent break."
No footnotes about productivity, no disclaimers about global
competition, no fine print about the rights of stockholders and
CEOs -- just a guarantee that hard work will be rewarded with
some base line of comfort and dignity. This was the principle
behind the minimum wage, even if it's much too low: that
survival cannot be left to market forces or employer whim.

    Take that guarantee away and despair sets in, followed
swiftly by cynicism and eventually maybe rage. For a man like
Jean-Paul, it's the despair of knowing that his work, his
energy, his very life, are valued at five dollars and change an
hour, less than it costs him to pay for lunch. For his children,
the response may be cynicism. The message from the Bureau of
Labor Statistics is clear: Don't bother with a job. Go on
welfare if you can. Rob a convenience store. Open up a cocaine
dealership. Jobs are for chumps.

    We need a little less talk about the work ethic and a
little more ethics in relation to work. The President could set
an example by supporting, instead of threatening to veto, the
bill that would prohibit the use of strikebreakers and give
workers a fighting chance. Employers might think twice about
spending more on union-busting "consultants" than a pay raise
would cost. Unions ought to lead the way, not just with a few
scattered organizing drives here and there, but with something
far more evangelical -- a national crusade, let's say, drawing
on churches, communities and campus idealists. And what could
be more American? The way to honor work, which we all claim to
do, is first of all to pay for it.