Quote:
Originally Posted by rogead
Corporate America and its political allies have always sought to downplay the contributory value of labor. The reason why service workers are considered to be unskilled is because their employers choose to define them that way. Those employer definitions go unchallenged because of the lack of power held by employees in the service industry.
The reason Wal-Mart (and most other retail employers) spends so much time and money on resisting the organizing efforts of its workers comes down to one basic concept: power. An organized workforce develops some degree of power within the employer/employee relationship. Part of that power involves the definition of value, which translates into increased wages and respect.
In the Nineteenth Century, mining was considered to be a menial and unskilled job. It had the same perceived relative value as today's service sector positions. That changed in the early Twentieth Century when The Western Federation of Miners (WFM) was formed. The WFM organized those mine workers, and forced the cultural recognition of their true value. This in turn, led mining to become a high paying job, perceived as being a highly-skilled form of labor.
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Well said.
While Americans have historically "talked the talk" about the value of labor, they certainly haven't "walked the walk". Labor in this country, whether skilled or unskilled, has largely been looked down upon from the very beginning. It has
always been the business owners who have been lionized. Off-hand, I can't think of 1 Founding Father of this country who was simply a skilled worker or an ordinary farmer. All of them were either businessmen or plantation owners. Ol' Tom Jefferson, although he extolled the virtues of the so-called "yeoman farmer", had slaves to plow and till his fields and cut his wood and clean his house.
All through the 19th century and even into the 20th and 21st century, there have been "dirt farmers" (or "small" ranchers out West) who have struggled to make their livings on smaller acreages with only the labor from themselves and their families who have frequently been looked down upon or as examples of failures by the people of their time, and the more successful farmers/planters/ranchers who built agricultural businesses using much more capital and labor were the ones applauded.
Labor cost is always the first cost businesses attempt to cut, never exec compensation even when it's poor executive decisions that put the business in jeopardy in the first place. Except for the relatively brief period of time from the beginning of WW II into the early 1970s, about thirty years, labor has always been dissed, used, and abused, and whether it was skilled or unskilled didn't make a lot of difference. When in doubt, cut wages and demand more from workers has long been the mantra in the US. That was as true in 1808 as in 1908 as in 2008.
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