I remember well some of the lessons taught in High School. I liked History best. In the middle Ages, a distinction was made between those who were free and worked and those who worked because they were slaves. The medieval church tried to establish rules of fairness based on a “fair day’s work for a fair day’s wage.” Of course, under slavery, fairness was discarded. For the free worker, gradations of work developed. First, you could become an apprentice at age seven. Later, with skills attained you could be a “journeyman” (someone who hired his own labor to someone needing his skill). Eventually, you earned status as a master artisan who hired apprentices to teach them the trade and acted as a contractor who hired out his journeymen on large jobs. There has always been a distinction made between skills and common labor. Slaves had no freedom but if they had skills, they had a greater value. On the other hand, a worker had to be worthy of his hire. The image of the worker cheating his employer by loafing and not giving a day’s work for a day’s pay is ingrained in our racial memory.  Both workers and slaves are pictured as needing bosses over them with constant supervision or whips. Workers could cheat their bosses and bosses could oppress their workers. Owners of businesses or slaves had little to do with workers or slaves for their interests lay in amassing fortunes and distancing themselves from the lives of those who slaved for them.

Jobs in America are lost because they are “outsourced”.  American workers’ jobs go to other countries where production costs are lower. American workers usually have skills that are specialized but in other countries, foreign workers may be just as skilled but life is cheaper than here. The system works against workers for they have no say in how they are treated.  There is something very wrong here. This is how slaves are treated.

I personally think that whips are out of place in trying to get animals to do our bidding. It takes longer, but kindness and patience can get results. I cannot imagine how owners of human slaves could believe that using whips to get their chattels to work would not some day come back to haunt them. Out-sourcing jobs overseas will someday come back to haunt American companies.

My labor was as a teacher and I found that I had no voice in a system where a manager was a principal, often a former teacher. He was several times removed from where the power actually resided in elected and sometimes appointed members of a Board of Education. In its broadest sense the management of the schools where succeeding generations of children are educated is in the hands of the class of people who want these children to be productive to serve its interests.  Seen in one way, the teacher is a public official with great powers over children who have absolutely no say about their treatment. Seen in another way, teachers are chattels of powerful people who, because of riches and family, dictate school policy to favor select children. The outcome has been to create a mass society with no individualism where workers are powerless, with no voice (since unionism has been suppressed) and where class distinctions are hidden in the vast distribution of goods – possession of ubiquitous cheap electronic toys is a good example – that take the place of pride in work.

My labor as a teacher became a different quality and threatened the status quo when I joined a union. School Boards, Boards of Trustees and city governments were forced to bargain collectively to improve the working conditions of teachers and improve the quality of education received by the all the children of that community. This last is forgotten when strikes, marches, signs and disruption of the peaceful operation of the school day become tools of last resort. Parents and other workers have their lives disrupted and their sense of right upset when teachers go on strike. Teachers are not perceived as workers and if they think of themselves as workers, they are often not thought of as professionals. Certainly, the other “professions” have always looked down on teaching as a “profession”. Public School teachers’ jobs are outsourced to private teaching companies and “charter” schools as the canard is accepted that the Public Schools have “failed”.

We think of work as necessary but not something that WE do.  That is for others. It is obvious to all that “mother” must work but the rest of the family does not ordinarily think they have to.  The revolution in the status of “mother” has not yet arrived. This may be due to all the “labor-saving” devices that are mechanical and electronic slaves designed to take the labor out of work. Because of economic realities, mothers of families must also seek work. Out-sourcing jobs has raised workers’ pay in other countries to levels lower than our workers would accept.  Our workers who once thought that their loyalty to a company was rewarded by lifetime security now find that loyalty is meaningless.  Their labor and skills are once again simply means of production whose product is defined in profits.  If the profits are not there, then the job goes away. We only remember workers who shirked work and who needed managers to spy on them. Something is very wrong here. We do not believe that thinking ONLY about profits is wrong when dealing with other human beings.

Consider the animals that work for us (such as horses), have measurable value. Can you conceive that owners do not worry about and provide for them? Animal workers have a worth that human workers seem to lack. Pets do no work at all and are loved and spoiled by their owners. They are cared for and we miss them terribly when they die of old age. That courtesy is missing when workers’ jobs are outsourced and they have no other skills to fall back upon. Management cares not at all for their workers as individuals. Manual labor is no longer available so skilled and educated workers have nowhere to go. Our present government cares little for them. Yet, in our system, the worker (read VOTER) is the employer of government workers.

I think we all need to work. I think work ennobles. Some of us have defined ourselves by the work we do.  Some of us are proud of the labels and titles years of study carry with it. Wearing uniforms sometimes helps and if medals are awarded for heroics, we wear them proudly; our work was recognized. If, however, you have no work, you are thought to be unworthy or a failure.  Something is wrong here. Sometimes a worker must reach or fall to a level that is suitable but putting people out of work here to save their wages while paying people in other countries less money for the same work smells like owning slaves and the slave-master’s whip. In the time when slavery was legal in the United States, masters could break up families and sell their unneeded slaves “down river”.  Today managers are prudent to increase profits by sending jobs to other countries while workers who were good at them, are left without work. They were “sold out”.

Certainly, all of us should help our mothers. Most children object to and shirk their chores and tasks.  They grow up to be the workers who need a lot of supervision.  One day we might see mothers taking to the streets trying to organize a union for better pay and better working conditions. I would be one of those who applauded the audacity and bravery of women who sought parity in working conditions.  Work, either in the home, on the farm, in the factory, in schools or in stores has a built in equality of effort, skill and worth, which will one day be recognized and rewarded. There may come a day when all who work will receive “enough” in order to live productively and no longer fear hunger, age, sickness and hardship while some others live royally. Call it utopianism, socialism or any thing you want – even while we endure “Conservative Compassion” – our intelligence tells us that work is good for it fills us with pride and a reason to live.

(This essay needed to have more than two pages instead of the customary single page. The subject is important and these remarks have by no means gone beyond a bare outline of the problem of “working”.)