Devaluing Labor & the Great Upward Redistribution

August 30, 2006 by Mary Wynne-Wynter 

This is the ultimate change story, but sad and hopeless.’ Where’s the defiance?’ How bad will it get before we wake up? Is it just the world of ‘jobs’ going away?’ What will replace ‘jobs’?

Devaluing Labor: “Labor Day is almost upon us, and like some of my fellow graybeards, I can, if I concentrate, actually remember what it was that this holiday once celebrated. Something about America being the land of broadly shared prosperity. Something about America being the first nation in human history that had a middle-class majority, where parents had every reason to think their children would fare even better than they had.
“

For the bottom 90 percent of the American workforce, work just doesn’t pay, or provide security, as it used to.

Devaluing labor is the very essence of our economy. I know that airlines are a particularly embattled industry, but my eye was recently caught by a story on Mesaba Airlines, an affiliate of Northwest, where the starting annual salary for pilots is $21,000 a year, and where the company is seeking a pay cut of 19 percent. Maybe Mesaba’s plan is to have its pilots hit up passengers for tips.

Labor Day is almost upon us. What a joke.

(Via washingtonpost.com – Op-Ed Columns.)

Filed under: Consciousness, career, going solo
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