Labor Day Message
Unite or Get Globalized

by Ron Ault

Metal Trades Department, AFL-CIO

Vladimir Lenin once boasted, “capitalists will sell us the rope we will use to hang them.” It was Soviet Premier Nikita Kruschev who predicted that communism would “bury” the United States “without ever firing a shot.” Neither of these lessons was lost on the China’s 21st Century Communist leaders who have quietly, but effectively, schemed to exploit America’s wild west corporate landscape to hollow out our economy to further China’s expansionist goals .

China’s leaders—exercising a collective patience beyond the recognition of western civilization—are intent on leading the world in every economic and strategic industry. Economists predict that within a decade, Red China will become the dominant supplier of autos and auto parts, aircraft, ship building, appliances, tractors, lawn and garden equipment, optics, ball bearings, iron, steel, pipe, building supplies, consumer electronics, cameras, computers (remember, IBM now builds its computers in China), guns, fishing tackle, recreational vehicles, outboard motors, and electrical motors and controls. The key to assuming this dominance is the development of China’s military super power. That’s why they are upgrading all their military hardware with the latest technology and weapons, and have built the world’s largest nuclear submarine shipyard and base underground, invisible to satellite surveillance.

America has become the most important “enabler” in China’s pursuit of world leadership. Over the past decade America has plunged into debt to the Chinese, permitting our trade deficit with China to spiral out of control with imports of billions of dollars worth of plastics, apparel, food, toys, tools, electronics and chemicals. Last year the deficit was $232 billion. This year it will grow even larger.

Academics blame us and our “insatiable appetite” for cheap consumer goods for this situation, but the real culprits are the super-powerful corporations of the world that answer to no national power—entities that created the myth of “free trade” to free themselves of regulation, taxation and government restraint.

Think about how corporations have evolved over the past two and one-half centuries. Once upon a time, in America’s earliest days, corporations were chartered only to perform a public good: building turnpikes or canals, for instance. Once the project was completed, the corporation was dissolved. Not anymore.

Corporate America as we know it today was born in the Industrial Revolution when just about everyone agreed that corporations were necessary to assemble sufficient capital to make steel, build railroads and ships, mine coal and make textiles. In the process, America was transformed from an agrarian society into a great industrial power. That change came with a price for most Americans who found that, instead of working sunrise to sunset in farm fields, they would work sunrise to sunset in dark, dangerous and dirty factories.

As corporate wealth became more concentrated, some of it was directed toward protecting itself by promoting legislation and court challenges to give corporations permanent life and greater power over the decisions of the state and the nation. Several Supreme Court decisions followed through the 19th Century, including those that gave corporations the status of “persons” under the law. Aside from a few setbacks following the Depression when public opinion rose up to protest the excesses of corporate power, the corporations and their wealth continued to grow at the expense of ordinary citizens. Today, thanks in large part to free trade and massive tax breaks, corporations have become “super-persons” under the law—able to ignore and flout regulation by any and all national controls.

Meanwhile the legal status of labor organizations has grown all the more precarious as labor laws have grown weak and powerless, and we are hobbled even further today by a hostile Department of Labor in our efforts to assert the rights of working families.

I’m not a conspiracy theorist. There may not be an “Illuminati Society” rigging the future in the interest of sinister corporations. But it really doesn’t matter whether corporate dominance over government is the result of some back room criminal collaboration or the inevitable result of some Darwin-like economic evolution. The fact is that unchecked growth of corporate power exacts a heavy toll on ordinary citizens like us. We pick up the taxes that corporations refuse to pay, it is left up to us to assume the responsibilities that corporations refuse to acknowledge. Today’s world corporations have truly grown into the 17th Century definition they were given by the philosopher Thomas Hobbes who called them: “worms on the body politic.”

Meanwhile, our security, health and safety and the wellbeing of future generations are seriously compromised by unchecked corporate power, the unfettered concentration of wealth into fewer hands and the dominance of corporate power in the halls of government. Maybe it’s too late to retrieve the millions of good paying jobs that have been outsourced to China and elsewhere, but that doesn’t mean we should simply roll over and let the pattern continue unchallenged.

Today, workers and their unions stand at a crossroad, facing declining wages and diminishing quality of life. But, take hope and consider the words of a great visionary: “At the banquet table of nature, there are no reserved seats. You get what you can take, and keep what you can hold. If you can’t take anything, you won’t get anything. And, if you can’t hold anything, you won’t keep anything. And, you can’t take anything without organization.”—A. Philip Randolph

As Brother Randolph said, there is no other solution than for workers to organize. And not just in America. Workers have to form confederations with workers worldwide, into a single counter balancing power to combat the unchecked power of corporations. Until that happens, workers will take less, and hold on to even less than we take—working longer for less.

Enjoy your Labor Day holiday.  Congress created it, back when workers actually had a voice and were listened to in politics, at the behest of the labor movement to set a special day aside, just once a year, to observe the dignity of work and honor America’s workers.

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