Servant Economy

One of my favorite quotes, from Voltaire, is that " the comfort of the rich requires an abundant supply of the poor".  I'm afraid this is the future of American workers in this country.  Maybe a few people will remember President H W Bush making the statement that America is evolving into a service economy.  Approximately 20 years later I think I can safely say that instead of evolving in to a service economy, we are devolving into a servant economy.

Remember when we thought advances in technology would make life easier for everyone.  How robots would perform arduous and repetitious tasks so efficiently that goods would become abundant and cheap for us all.  How we would work less hours, and yet have a better life style.  So, what happened?  The technology is here, America produces more manufactured goods than ever before in our history, yet American manufacturing jobs have decreased from around 36% of all jobs in America to only about 16% today.  At the same time, the American middle class has been on a steady decline since at least the early eighties, except for a brief expansion during President Clinton's tenure.  ( I'm not praising Clinton here, he was just the beneficiary of happy circumstance)

Here's what I think happened, and here's where I think we are going.  Simply put, the wealthy kept the profits made from our increased productivity, and passed none of it along to the rest of us.  On the contrary, because we've seen a surplus of American labor caused by increased productivity, and an influx of cheap foreign labor and goods,  corporate  America has viewed the American worker as just one more commodity to be purchased at the lowest possible price.  At the same time, the American labor union movement has been vilified as socialist, communist, or worse, even though that same labor movement brought to Americans almost every advance in worker rights that still exist today.  This is true no matter that you belong to a labor union or not.  I'm talking about the forty hour week, overtime pay, vacation pay, sick leave, child labor laws, equal pay for women, the minimum wage, employer provided health care, all of these things can trace their origins back to the American labor movement, certainly not to the largess of the employers.  I don't hesitate to add that each and every one of these worker rights are under assault by corporate America, and largely the republican party.

And where are we going?  Unless unchecked, the American worker will find himself,  increasing desperate for work, and increasingly the only work available will be servant work for the wealthy.  Our pay, benefits, and our jobs will be at the mercy of the royalty we serve.  We will have voted ourselves right into a nation of royals and serfs.

If even a small minority of republicans would simply forget the side issues that the party panders to, abortion, gay rights, gun laws, religion, repeal of "Obama care", welfare, and race, and a larger number of apathetic democrats would get out and vote for their best interests, that is, an America that is not dominated by the wealthiest 1%,  we could truly take this country back.