BY GEORGE HOPKINS
The late Texas oil billionaire Sid Richardson (1891-1959) famously said: “Money is like manure—unless it’s spread around it stinks!” Which brings up the current hot topic in contemporary politics: the rich getting richer; the poor getting poorer.
This “Wealth Gap” has been a problem in every civilization we know about historically. Maybe it’s inevitable that wealth will accrue at the top of any civilization unless something is done to spread it around. The ancient Hebrews used a mandated “Year of Jubilee” (Leviticus, Ch. 25), to redistribute wealth every 50th year! (“Redistribution of wealth!” Now there’s an idea calculated to give conservatives the vapors!)
Maybe that’s where Old Sid got his charitable ideas. After all, he’d gone to Baylor University (ca. 1910, a bastion of “Biblical Literalism,” the notion that Scripture is literally true and ought to be lived-up to in daily life), and he never married or had children. So reason enough to plaster his name all over Ft. Worth on museums and such. Aside from the ego trip, it might have gotten him into heaven, despite Biblical warnings about rich men and camels through eyes-of-needles.
But maybe it’s an idea whose time has come? Here in America, the land of “exceptionalism,” we at least pay lip service to religion and the notion that we care about our fellow Americans, and almost everybody thinks we’d be better off if the economy were more balanced. And we even agree that once-upon-a-time America was, well, better. But when was that, exactly?
Oh yeah, back in the 1950s, when nearly 40 percent of workers were unionized and even those who weren’t got decent pay—a “livable wage.” Ah, those “Happy Days” when Ike was in the White House, “The Fonz” ruled the Malt Shop, and anti-union politics had not yet reduced labor unions to their current weakened state.
Just look at the facts. The drop in middle-class living standards over the last generation runs parallel to the drop in union membership, now down to levels not seen since the early 20th century, barely 10 percent of the workforce. Perhaps it all had something to do with what unions did best—raising wages! Should we put money into the hands of consumers likely to spend it through strong unions, by re-creating an economy based on Leviticus?
Union wages are still, even now, double the pay for the same work in states where unions are weak. For example, according to The New York Times, a union iron worker in Iowa (a “Right-to-Work” state), makes $26 an hour. In Wisconsin, a union ironworker makes $55 an hour doing the same work. In Texas, it’s only $8 an hour for non-union workers (again, for doing the same work.) Yet a mile of highway costs the same in all three states, and since Texas claims to be the model for our future national economy, this means the “Wealth Gap” can only grow.
How did this happen? Surveys show that people would join unions if they could, and Barack Obama was elected promising to make union organizing easier by sweeping away roadblocks erected during the “Reagan Revolution.” But that effort failed owing to relentless Republican opposition. Additionally, some of this failure can be traced directly to fractures in organized labor itself. Roughly one-third of union families habitually vote Republican because of hot-button issues summed up in the acronym GAGGAF (“God, Abortion, Gays, Guns and the Flag”), designed to culturally inflame blue collar voters.
And that’s only one aspect of the issues facing unions today. One fifth of U.S. workers are now working as independent consultants, contractors and freelancers. Those jobs are almost impossible to unionize, says former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich. The National Employment Law Project reports that 42 percent of U.S. workers make less than $15 an hour. They need everything—housing, cars, and lots of other stuff they’d readily buy if they had money.
According to some estimates, if the original 1938 Federal Minimum Wage of 40 cents an hour had simply kept up with inflation and worker productivity, it would today be worth almost $25 per hour (a “living wage,” for a family of four). The law has never been indexed even to inflation (let alone productivity), so it matters less with the passage of time–which suits Republicans fine, since they oppose minimum wage laws on principle.
But how many people know these facts? How can sober analysis of the failure to keep up the minimum wage compete with Right Wing Talk Radio and Fox News scare tactics about that secret Muslim, the Kenyan Obama sending “black helicopters” to confiscate union members’ guns?
(See http://robertreich.org for further discussion and prescriptions that might improve the situation for labor.)
The ultimate solution is political, and with our politics now awash in Big Money (thanks to the Supreme Court’s “Citizen United” decision), things don’t look promising for a revival of organized labor. Wisconsin, once the heartland of unionization, just became a right-to-work state, with its governor, Scott Walker, bragging that he did it by using “divide and conquer” tactics, according to The New York Times. He pitted private sector unions against government unions (now a majority of total union membership), only to come after non-government unions later. Now Walker is running for president, claiming that standing up to unions proves he can stand up to terrorists!
Our future economic prosperity depends on understanding how we got here, and homely analogies (manure spreading) can only carry us so far. They’re useful for getting attention, but regaining the economic balance which characterized the “mixed economy” (which brought us out of the Great Depression, won World War II and was the glory of the post-World War II years) will require hard work, organizational skills and lots of education. But for right now, rebuilding unions and electing pro-labor politicians (and holding them accountable), is a proven prescription.
We can’t depend on the charity of long-dead oligarchs like Sid Richardson to rescue us, though they might have had a little corner of the truth. They weren’t bleeding heart liberals, but practical men of their time who (some of them, anyway), knew that income inequality is as dangerous for the rich as for the poor. Economically unbalanced societies don’t last, as a long line of dead Kings and Czars would so testify, were they able!
George Hopkins is professor emeritus of history at Western Illinois University in Macomb.