Do American workers believe the work they do has intrinsic value? That is, if no one bought the products their company made, that their work made, would American workers still expect to be paid? Should they be surprised or shocked that their company would want to cut their wages or their jobs if the company was no longer competitive or making any money selling their products?
Let’s just say that Joe Shmoe does believe that his work has intrinsic value. Say, the guy has a job, and, based on having that job, he gets married, has kids, buys a house, and a car, and proceeds to go into quite a bit of debt. Is Joe being reasonable?
According to Antonio Graceffo there is a distinction between manufacturing or producing a product and selling that product. A company does not make money producing that product. It only makes money if and when it sells that product. So, Graceffo tells us,
…An employee believes that his work, his labor, somehow generates an income. This has been his working experience his whole life. Somehow, punching that clock twice each day caused a check to appear at the end of the week. An owner realizes that work, labor, and manufacturing all cost money. Only sales bring money into the company.
My experience has been that the bulk of people are employees and always will be. They do their job because someone tells them to, and they have no idea where or how their salary is generated. This is the mentality that causes factory workers to protest the closure of a factory whose products no longer have a market,…
The problem with Joe’s life plan is that just working producing things is not what generates income. He will only get paid if the company he works for makes a profit from the selling of his products.
Graceffo tells us that Joe, and others like him, unreasonably complain when they lose their jobs or a company puts pressure on them to accept lower wages or benefits. They are unreasonable, according to Graceffo, because the company does not make money on the work that Joe and others like him do making the company’s product. They are unreasonable because if the company cannot sell its products then it will not be making money. If it continues to pay Joe his established wages and benefits, then, that company will eventually go out of business. At that point Joe and his co-workers would lose their wages and benefits anyway. The unreasonable part, according to Graceffo, is that Joe expects his company to pay him his established wages and benefits regardless of whether the company is making any money.
The question I have here is whether Joe has been swindled. He was lead to believe that his life depended on his paycheck and its attendant benefits. But, in fact, his life depends on whether the companies he works for sell enough of their products to continue providing him a stable and sufficient wage and benefit package. If these companies do not sell product, then, no matter what he may have expected from that company in wages and benefits, he will be disappointed.
Haven’t we all been swindled into thinking that going to school, getting a degree, and after that,m getting a job, will be the basis for a good life. None of this actually matters, come to find out. Instead, our having a life depends on whether companies that we might work for sell enough products that they make money to pay their workers. If they don’t make this money and provide jobs to their workers, then no matter what educations people like Joe might have, their lives will be underfunded, so to speak.
What have we had go on here in these United States over the last 20 to 50 years? We have had companies realize that they could make more money when they sell their products if they had slaves do the work instead of the higher paid people like Joe. Hence, the products you might buy in the store down the street are mostly made by slaves in China. Yes, these items are inexpensive to us, at the moment, because companies can sell them for less here because they pay their workers next to nothing there.
Has Joe been swindled? I believe he has been. He was persuaded to make commitments to people and to go into debt to satisfy those commitments. Yet, the people who encouraged him to do so switched the rules by which they played the game. Once Joe made promises and borrowed money, the companies he was expecting to work for started having their products made by foreign and cheaper workers. Joe no longer has the opportunities available to him to work, to make products, to earn the wages and benefits, that would allow him to pay back his debts.
The swindle is making it likely that Joe, and workers like him, will go bankrupt. He won’t be able to pay back his debts.
When people talk about whether the economy will improve in the near future, they ask about whether the fundamentals are any different. The fundamental idea here is that Joe has been swindled into thinking he has some choices about which companies he could work for that would, if he were so employed, would give him a steady and predictable income. If this principle has not changed, if Joe and his buddies, are still being swindled, then the fundamentals have not changed.
If the economy is going to change as it has in the recent past, then people should not make commitments and go into heavy debt. They would be imprudent to do so. They might find themselves in debt with no way to pay back their debts.
We have discovered that many people now are heavy into debt, and without a stable job, they are going into bankruptcy. Shouldn’t these people have our sympathy? Yes, they were swindled. They were lead to believe that life was peachy keen here in these United States. They were lead to believe that, maybe, with a good education, there would be steady high paying jobs upon which they could build a life. However, engineers who are paid $80,000 here will, in India, they get a comparative $5,000. The work has gone there. This principle is repeated in job after job. And yet, people like Joe were not made to see that this made the United States a risky place to start a family, buy a house, or otherwise go into debt.
Are we still being swindled? Yes, we are still being given the idea that the important thing here is jobs. Will Obama do enough to create jobs?
Here, we have to remember that people have to eat. They have to have a roof over their head. Their kids have to learn about what’s what in the world. They have to get cared for if they get sick. Joe can’t just not get paid, and force him to live on nothing.
We also have to remember that you can’t keep borrowing money from others to pay your bills without having some way to eventually pay back the money you have borrowed.
In considering these two facts, the American people are squeezed between a rock and a hard place. The problem is that we’ve been swindled and the companies that organize the making of products have changed the rules by which they played. They got Joe to go into debt, where he thought he had a future with some company getting a certain wage and benefit package. Then, these companies decided they’d make more money having cheaper slaves in other countries do the work.
We won’t get better here and Joe won’t be able to dig himself out of the hole he’s in until we refuse to tolerate slavery. That’s what we have done to ourselves that makes Joe’s life so impossible. Joe is a slave who can’t compete with cheaper slaves.
We won’t get any better so long as we live on plantations. The companies that own and run the United States insist upon operating the place as a plantation. Their money making from sales is distinct from the work done to make their products. Graceffo’s principle is true, yes work is distinct from money making. And that is the truth which makes us slaves on plantations. And so, they pit one worker against another, pressuring us to work for less and less wages and fewer and more meager benefits.
And why wouldn’t the owners of the plantation beat their workers, and force them to give up their family ties, or their hopes for lives of their own, when it is the sales that are important, and which constitutes the “wealth of a nation” rather than the work.
No wonder Obama thinks it’s more important to give hundreds of billions of dollars to banks so that there will be credit, and sales, instead of undermining plantations states and the work of slaves that makes them run. He is committed to the masters. He does not have, sad to say, an abolitionist bone in his body.
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