Serfing USA: Corporate America is Robbing American Workers

[seafan]

Dave Lindorff tells us what we need to know and what the blow-dried bloviators on our teevees won't.


Serfing USA: Corporate America is Robbing American Workers

By Dave Lindorff
December 29, 2010

.....

The corporate onslaught against trade unions and against the minimum wage, which began with the Nixon administration in 1968, combined with so-called “free-trade” deals that allowed US companies to shift production overseas and then to freely import the products of their overseas production facilities back for sale to Americans at home, by weakening the power of workers to demand higher wages, has led to a situation where companies can just pocket all the profits from productivity gains, leaving wages stagnant, or even driving them down.

.....

What we’re witnessing is a massive national “speed-up” which is enriching the owners of capital, while the workers are getting stiffed. It is the payoff to the ruling class for decades of hammering of trade unions, and also of trade unions cutting deals with the Democratic Party, which in turn has refused to defend workers’ interests. Look at the sell-out of Labor during the first two years of the Obama administration. The union movement’s one big issue--restoring some measure of fairness to the Labor Relations Act, so that it would be at least possible to organize unions and to win contracts and improved wages and working conditions--was dropped without even a fight by the Obama administration and the leadership of the House and Senate. The government, fully in the hands of Democrats, has also continued to sign trade agreements, most recently with Korea, that further shift jobs overseas, thus further weakening the position of workers here at home.

A cynic might speculate that this is also why the Democrats have refused for over three years now to come up with any real public jobs program despite the desperate straits of tens of millions of jobless people who have been without work for more than a year. The Democrats, in thrall to corporate interests, would on the evidence much rather spend $50 billion on a program of extended unemployment benefits that leaves those millions of people hungry for any real job, than spend that same sum on providing them with government jobs, as that would actually reduce unemployment and increase the bargaining power of all workers vis-a-vis employers.

Meanwhile, the national corporate media, itself viciously anti-union, continue to skew news coverage to portray unions as corrupt and greedy, so that the 90 percent of American workers who are not in a union don’t even realize that any pay gains or benefits they get are because employers are trying to avoid unionization of their workforce.

Unless Americans wake up soon to how this process is impoverishing us all, we will see this shifting income and wealth to the top strata of the population continue until most of us are little more than modern-day serfs.

.....

We are reaching a point at which American workers will refuse to relinquish any more of their lives and time for the singular goal of enriching their bosses.

[me b zola]

1. K&R

[lonestarnot]

2. "will refuse to relinquish any more of their lives and time for the singular goal of enriching

their bosses" committed to that.

[Octafish]

3. We're heading for Haiti...

...where 1-percent of the population own 99-percent of the wealth. The 99-percent must make do with one-percent.

That's why the conservative greedhead warmongers have been so busy here creating the illusion of democracy. They know if the people were informed, and their votes counted, they'd be out of power.

What's more, they know, with honest investigators from Justice, they'd be spend the rest of their natural days in prison. Instead, they get away with murder and all manner of treason.

PS: Thank you for posting the OP, seafan. Lindorf nails where we are heading. Happy New Year to You and Yours!

[lonestarnot]

4. .