WORKING CLASS?
It is the working class that makes the world work each day. We create everything we see and use and buy and sell. We also create all the wealth but keep precious little of it ourselves.
I’ve recently realized that they want us to idolize work as a Puritan virtue of goodness because that’s what drives a whole industrialization of society while robbing us of our humanity.
I saw a tweet recently that said “work hard and you’ll be successful” and replied I guess all those people walking miles each day to collect water and firewood in some nations must be super successful? All those people working a job and still experience homelessness or living on the edge must be too? It’s clear hard work is no guarantee of success, not even close.
What family and postal zip code one is born into has far more to do with success and longevity in America than one’s hard work. People work there tails off today and are making less in adjusted for income dollars than their parents did 50 years ago. While CEO pay has gone up hundreds of percent in the last five years alone in many cases.
I’ve long held that the “working class” is an identity to organize around and be proud of. But it’s occurred to me that we are more than workers or consumers for that matter.
“A job is more than a paycheck, it’s a source of dignity!” we were often told.
But we are born with dignity and our humanity demands it be respected.
A mother or father, a parent and caregiver has dignity.
An artist creating and adding beauty to our world has dignity.
A differently abled person, or sick or injured person that doesn’t work a job has dignity.
How we treat others and live in our community of humankind is what gives us dignity and purpose. A job is a legacy of the industrialization of the world and with it the transfer of massive wealth from the many who used to have trades, cobblers making shoes, seamstresses making clothes, woodworkers building structures, watch makers and repairers keeping time pieces working, these and more were ways people contributed their time and talents to their local communities without trading hours for dollars as a laborer for an owner.
We used to work for ourselves mostly before the Lords of the Feudal age demanded we come within the walls of their estates and put our labor to work for them and allowed us to keep a small portion of our crops for ourselves.
These Lords are now the corporate employers. We even call those who allow us to live in their property for rent “Landlords”.
We’ve been commoditized as hourly workers, now “gig workers” so we can be used up until our minds and bodies snap under the years of the grind of the industrial insatiable hunger for more and more profits for industrialists and their shareholders.
And we are working harder for longer than ever before and making less than our parents did in adjusted for inflation dollars.
How we self-identify is how we constrain ourselves, our rights and our humanity.
Some in the finance world have come to refer to us as “Human Capital” because when all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail.
We are so much more than cogs in the industrial machine of commerce.
Working hard is often rewarding if we choose our work and find meaning and purpose in it.
But there’s so much more to life.
We are not here to work ten hours a day often sitting in a commute for hours a day only to have an hour or two at home and maybe two days a week to live our lives, then sixty or seventy years into our working life have a few years left to retire and live the promise of some better days.
Over half of Americans face retirement with little to no savings at all today.
There must be more to our humanity than this!
A four day work week would be a good start to change things.
For that we need to massively scale up our participation and growth of unions and worker owned cooperatives.
We are not workers. Or consumers. We are human beings.
We are born with dignity and our lives have meaning beyond our ability to earn money for others or for ourselves. They must.
Thank you,
Joseph Segal
#TeamHuman
