Workers of the World Unite!

Throughout our lives, the nature of work has evolved. Comparing the US in 1920 to 2020 provides some interesting contrasts as people leave the farm and move to more urban areas. (How you gonna keep 'em down on the farm once they've seen gay Paree?)

The 1920s is the decade when America's economy grew 42%. Mass production spread new consumer goods into every household. The modern auto and airline industries were born. The U.S. victory in World War I gave the country its first experience of being a global power. Soldiers returning home from Europe brought with them a new perspective, energy, and skills. Everyone became an investor thanks to easy access to credit. That hidden weakness helped cause the Great Depression.
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Farming declined from 18% to 12.4% of the economy. Taxes per acre rose 40%, while farm income fell 21%. At the same time, new inventions sent the manufacturing of consumer goods soaring. https://www.thebalance.com/roaring-twenties-4060511

As people moved, so did their employment options and it hasn't stopped, nor has inequality...in fact it is as high as ever. Stagnant wages for most, alongside soaring profits and wages for those at the top, will continue to mean that the 0.1 to 1 percent accumulate more and more income and wealth.

Rick Wolff talks about the economic impact of forcing millions of undocumented, hard-working immigrants to leave the US. As he suggests, the undocumented face the worst of the US labor market. (8 min)

He got the history on the Haymarket link to Labor Day correct, and I do think we should consider joining the rest of the world celebrating Labor on May 1. However, the September date was determined a couple of years before the Haymarket revolt... June 28, 1894, Congress passed an act making the first Monday in September of each year a legal holiday.
https://www.dol.gov/general/laborday/history
In the US, Labor Day has been celebrated in September since the 1880s. Efforts have been made to move the day to May to align with the international celebration, but TPTB are not interested in people understanding labor history and unity.

On May 1, 1886, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, which later changed its name to the American Federation of Labor, called on its members to strike for an eight-hour workday. In Chicago, workers at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company participated in a strike to encourage leadership to implement the workday change. More than four hundred police officers guarded the factory to prevent the entrance of the workers on strike. On the third day of the strike, a few protestors tried to break through the police line to confront the strikebreakers, and they were shot upon. Local anarchist groups quickly released a pamphlet detailing the event and encouraged workers to join a rally at Haymarket Square the following day... Towards the end of the day, police moved into the area to disburse the protestors, and before they reached the crowd, a bomb was thrown in the direction of the police. The officers quickly began shooting, creating a stampede and chaos that left six officers dead and sixty wounded. As for the protestors, two deaths were confirmed, but the total death and injury count was never released.

The very nature of labor has been in flux throughout the century. The size and nature of various businesses are displayed below.

In 1954, 11.6 percent of the population lived on farms. Today less than 2 percent does. The amount of land devoted to agriculture has also declined, from 1.16 billion acres in 1954 to 941 million in 2001. In 1954, 82 million acres were planted in corn; in 2002 the number was down to 79 million. Yet corn production went from close to 3 billion bushels to 9 billion. Wheat acreage has held steady at about 60 million, but production has gone from 984 million bushels in 1954 to 1.6 billion in 2002.

None of the biggest changes in business in the last 50 years would have been possible—or would have evolved as they did- had it not been for the computer.

Among the ten largest employers in 1955 were GM, Chrysler, US Steel (NYSE: X), Standard Oil of New Jersey, Amoco, Goodyear (NYSE: GT), and Firestone. ...
Today, four of the ten largest companies by total employees are Walmart (NYSE: WMT), Target (NYSE: TGT), Sears (NASDAQ: SHLD), and Kroger (NYSE: KR). Americans are drawn in huge numbers to retailers with low prices. The industry is dominated by companies which can source cheap goods, run them though efficient supply chains, and market them at low prices. Two of companies on the list from this year are IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Hewlett Packard (NYSE: HPQ). They are the tip of an iceberg comprised of dozens of large tech companies with high margins, rapidly growing sales, and well-paid work forces. This group includes Dell (NASDAQ: DELL), Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO, and Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL). With almost no exceptions, these companies did not exist five decades ago.

https://247wallst.com/investing/2010/09/21/americas-biggest-companies-th...

The Internet is a communications medium and very much part of the communications revolution. ... As the railroad was to the steam engine, so the Internet is to the microprocessor, the most important spinoff of the basic technology. What is perhaps most impressive about it is that it erupted into existence almost spontaneously.

Globalization is another change...

Automobile companies no longer have nationalities, except perhaps in terms of the locations of their corporate headquarters and greatest concentration of stockholders. Ford now owns Sweden’s Volvo and Britain’s Land Rover; GM owns Saab; Chrysler is part of the German Daimler. Every major automobile company manufactures parts or assembles vehicles in many countries. General Motors, with 15 percent of the global vehicle market, manufactures in 32 countries and sells in 192. The other great auto companies are equally dispersed.

That is increasingly true of companies in other lines of business, such as electronics and computers. It is also becoming true of retail companies. Wal-Mart, the world’s largest company in terms of gross revenues (if it were a sovereign nation, it would have the world’s thirtieth-largest economy), sells in 10 countries and buys products in many more. McDonald’s and KFC peddle their wares from Bangor to Bangalore, from Peoria to Paraguay, while American shopping malls are full of foreign products and foreign companies selling them.

Really it is corporatization of the world. I was trained as a soil scientist and really appreciate the perspective of Clifford D. Conner who is author of the new book "The Tragedy of American Science: From Truman to Trump". He affirms my observations as a young scientist. Chris Hedges discusses the corporatization and corruption of American science with the author Clifford D. Conner. (26 min)

Science in the United States almost exclusively serves the interest of corporate and military power. Science historian Clifford Conner writes that the corruption of science exploded with the 1942-1945 Manhattan Project, the first “big science” project in which the government spent massively on developing the atom bomb. Science, from this point forward, became big business. Scientists are employed in “hypothesis-driven” research to promote the interests of the food industry, the tobacco industry, and the fossil fuel industry, attacking or silencing scientific studies that cast doubt on the claims of these industries. The result is a society awash in lies, many of them buttressed by bogus scientific studies carried out to reach the conclusion demanded by those who pay for the studies. This corruption is now endemic in think tanks, scientific institutes, and universities, which accept corporate money to do corporate bidding. The public is provided with industry-sponsored hype rather than truth. Objective scientific research has all but vanished. The consequences for our health and our planet are catastrophic. ExxonMobile and Koch Industries fund climate-change denial studies. Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds produce findings minimizing the link between smoking and lung cancer. Purdue Pharma and Pfizer peddle highly addictive opioids as routine pain killers, triggering an opioid epidemic that since 1999 has seen 500,000 Americans die from an overdose involving an opioid. Coca-Cola and Kellogg hire nutrition scientists to tout the benefits of junk food. Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft pump billions into creating “machine intelligence.” This artificial intelligence is designed to serve private and military interests, not those of the public.

Finance is another factor...

In 1951 a Long Island banker named William Boyle invented the credit card. It was a classic capitalist win-win-win situation: Credit cards allowed merchants to avoid the expense and risk of maintaining charge accounts; they gave banks handsome profits on unpaid balances; and they spread credit, formerly reserved largely to the affluent, to a whole new class of consumers. By the 1960s credit cards were common. Today they are ubiquitous, with 1.2 billion in use in the United States in 2002 by 190 million cardholders. Thanks to credit cards—and their latter-day descendants debit cards—cash is rapidly disappearing from American retailing.

Union changes also had effects...

The loss of unions also contribute to the changing employment sector...In 1954 more than a third of all American workers belonged to unions, mostly of the old-fashioned blue-collar variety. In 2002 only about 14 percent did. But that doesn’t tell the whole story, for nearly half of today’s union members are government employees, such as teachers and hospital workers, virtually none of whom were unionized in 1954.

Meanwhile, the number of strikes has greatly diminished. In 1960 there were 222 work stoppages involving more than 1,000 workers, with 13,260,000 workdays lost. In 2002 there were only 9 such strikes, with 660,000 lost workdays, although the size of the American work force has doubled in the last 50 years.

Part of the reason for the decline of the labor movement is the shift from manufacturing to services as the major source of jobs in the American economy. The United States has not stopped making things (total manufacturing output grew by more than a third between 1990 and 2001) but is becoming ever more efficient at it, thanks to the rapidly increasing use of computers in the process...
Antitrust was one of the big political issues 100 years ago, but it has nearly disappeared in the half-century since. One reason, to be sure, is that mere bigness is no longer perceived as inherently bad, especially as more and more Americans have become stockholders and thus more inclined to see things from the capitalist point of view.

Workforce demographics (Women in the workforce) have also been in flux...

In 1954 the typical American woman was a housewife. That is certainly no longer the case, with more than 60 percent of American women in the work force... In 1967 Muriel Siebert became the first woman to own a seat on that ultimate male bastion the New York Stock Exchange. All major corporations now have female executives, half the Forbes 500 companies have female corporate officers, and eight have female CEOs

And of course there's been increasing inequality...

Charles E. Wilson, the chief executive of General Motors before becoming Secretary of Defense in 1953, was paid $652,000 a year, plus some stock options (he took a $580,000 pay cut when he left GM to head the Pentagon). That was a tidy sum in the economic universe of the early 1950s, even though 91 percent of it was taxed away by the federal government. In 2002 the CEO of General Motors was paid more than $12 million in total compensation. He gave over a maximum of 35 percent in taxes, but because much of that compensation came in the form of stock options, he actually paid far less tax than that. Many CEOs did a lot better.

https://www.americanheritage.com/50-biggest-changes-last-50-years

In a nation of increasing inequality, the most extreme wage disparities are between the heads of large American corporations and typical workers. This figure tracks the ratio of pay of CEOs at the 350 largest public U.S. firms to the pay of typical workers in those firms’ industries. In 1965, these CEOs made 20 times what typical workers made. As of 2013, they make just under 300 times typical workers’ pay. This higher pay for CEOs does not reflect any increased contribution to corporate output: Other data show that CEO pay grew three times faster than the pay of the top 0.1 percent of wage earners and twice as fast as corporate profits. Moreover, the rising pay of executives was the largest factor in the doubling of the top 0.1 percent and top 1.0 percent share of overall household income growth. CEO pay gains help explain the growing divergence between pay and productivity.

https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/

When taking into account stocks, which now make up more than 80% of the average CEO’s compensation package, the report found that chief-executive pay has risen by an astounding 1,322% since 1978. That’s more than six times more than the top 0.1% of wage earners and more than 73 times higher than the growth of the typical worker’s pay, which grew by only 18% in the same time period. Most remarkable, however, is the 18.9% increase in CEO compensation between 2019 and 2020 alone.

American CEOs make 351 times more than workers. In 1965 it was 15 to one

The ability of those at the very top to claim an ever-larger share of overall wages is evident in this figure. Two things stand out. First is the extraordinarily rapid growth of annual wages for the top 1 percent compared with everybody else: Top 1 percent wages grew 138 percent, while wages of the bottom 90 percent grew just 15 percent. If the wages of the bottom 90 percent had grown at the average pace over this period—meaning that wages grew equally across-the-board—then the bottom 90 percent’s wages would have grown by 32 percent, more than double the actual growth.

Workers have increased productivity as their wages have declined.

As the figure shows, pay for these workers climbed together with productivity from 1948 until the late 1970s. But that didn’t happen by accident. It happened because specific policies were adopted with the intentional goal of spreading the benefits of growth broadly across income classes. When this intentional policy target was abandoned in the late 1970s and afterward, pay and productivity diverged. Relinking pay and productivity so that workers share in the fruits of their labor will require another pronounced shift in policy.

https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

At least on labor day perhaps we should reward labor? Ya think? But no the new mantra is:
"You will have nothing and be happy".

Workers are spied upon, tracked, and not allowed to organize. It is neofuedalism. Welcome to the "the great reset" you serfs.

Union busting and automation: workers say “anti-union” practices have remained constant.

The new corporation, GXO Logistics, officially went public on the New York Stock Exchange on Aug. 2 with 94,000 employees at 869 locations around the world.

Even though many have not heard the name before, some of the largest and most high-profile brands outsource their warehouse and logistics needs to GXO, including Amazon, Home Depot, IKEA, Nestle, Peloton, Starbucks, Target, Verizon, and Walmart.

GXO executives claim the new company is leaving behind the “Dickensian warehouse” of the past through a reliance on technology and automation.

We saw the Amazon union failure in Alabama this year. Why? Well, as a teacher I belonged to my union, AEA and NEA (Alabama and National Education Association). I fought for many years for site based school management...schools designed for and by communities...tailored to fit unique needs. My own union sided with school board rather than school based management. They didn't seem to have my interests nor the student interests at heart. At least some of the unions themselves have been captured by personal profit rather than worker interests.

So do workers even have an option to find and hold a satisfying and rewarding occupation? The only avenue I see is cooperatives and worker owned businesses.

Perhaps organizing worker owned business is a better approach than remaining in corrupt corporations determined to maximize the profit from every worker?
There are many corporations than have at least some degree of worker ownership.
https://www.nceo.org/articles/employee-ownership-100

However, true worker owned coops seem to me labors best hope.
https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/directory-worker-cooperatives-worker-ow...

Lots of barriers remain to the growth and advancement of worker cooperatives, including and especially access to finance. Many small business lenders still balk at the thought of lending to worker cooperatives.

Back before retirement, we would gather Friday nights after work and play music. This was a common song in those days.

The pandemic and now its delta variant have put the hurt on these music gatherings. But I'm sure we'll be back with weekly sessions at some point.

I hope you're all having a great holiday weekend, and are able to cook something good, and enjoy a meal with your family and friends. As described, the world has changed in our lifetime and is destined to continue to change even more rapidly as we pass through time. Those of you still in the workplace, I hope you have a meaningful and rewarding job and are able to enjoy the production you create (whatever that might be).

Please feel free to chime in with whatever is on your mind today...