Just down the road from the Ford plant in Hamburg, local members of the United Auto Workers were “practice picketing” – just in case they have to go on strike for a new contract.
And outside what was supposed to be D’Youville University’s opening assembly last week, faculty members were engaged in a real picket after almost three years of fruitless negotiations. Faced with the prospect of facing down picketers, D’Youville administrators switched the meeting to a video call.
As another Labor Day approaches, reminding us who’s actually responsible for the goods and services we depend on, the local signs of worker unrest should also make us think about how inequitably the spoils of what we produce have been shared, especially recently.
The Economic Policy Institute reported last year that CEOs at the nation’s top 350 public firms made 399 times what the typical worker got in compensation, up from 366-to-1 the year before. The ratio was 59-1 in 1989, and just 20-1 in 1965.
Such a widening gap is what passes for progress in today’s United States.
No wonder the head of the local autoworkers said of his Western New York members, “They want equality. Their labor produces these massive profits. They want a piece of that, their fair share. That’s all.”
Which brings to mind the fact that this Labor Day – and the labor unrest accompanying it – also comes just two weeks after Republicans kicked off their presidential primary debates. The juxtaposition is either a wake-up call or a cruel joke, depending on how much or how little one has been indoctrinated into the GOP’s trickle-down economics.
By one measure – the closeness of 2024 presidential polls pitting Joe Biden against Donald Trump – the brainwashing has been a huge success.
Exhibit A is the 2017 tax cuts pushed through by Trump and a Republican-led Congress. As Trump himself bragged when signing the bill, “Corporations are literally going wild over…
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