BY THE SWEAT OF WHOSE BROW? (PART I)

BY THE SWEAT OF WHOSE BROW? (PART I)

Per Jewish scripture, we are told that man was cast out of the Garden of Eden and required forever after to earn his bread “by the sweat of his brow.” (“Man” as a generic term presumably included females as well.) This and succeeding human experience gave rise to what has come to be known as the “Protestant work ethic,” a view that everyone must work for his/her living with its inevitable corollary that those who do not and expect to live off the public’s largesse are to be vilified as bums, lazy, welfare cheats, slackers et al.

Reagan (the guy who agreed to join the armed forces in WW II with the understanding that he would not go overseas to fight fascists but instead remain in Hollywood to make war propaganda movies, speaking of slackers) even made up the phrase “welfare queen,” a putdown based on the Protestant work ethic that all must work and be economically productive or go without. This view dovetails nicely into the myth of man’s forced departure from Eden and today’s capitalist scheme of things, assuring the rich and corporate class a religiously chastened workforce to do their bidding and fatten their bottom lines.

The “ethic” has enjoyed great popularity as applied in every society since the end of our hunting and gathering economy that was concluded with the advent of the agricultural surpluses of the Fertile Crescent. Workers since then need bread and those who employ them need to profit off of such workers’ efforts, but I propose that we look more closely at today’s actors in this admixture of religion and economic production. Who are they? Who really works and who doesn’t, and why doesn’t the “ethic” apply to the superrich, such as Sam Walton’s heirs, whose Wal-Mart venture into capitalism has made them more money than that possessed by the lower 40% of all Americans? How hard are they working? Why is the “ethic” only applicable to those who for one reason or another cannot work, are undereducated for the tasks needed in our digital economy, or work multiple jobs but still cannot earn enough to pay their bills, much less educate their children and lay something aside for the future?

Speaker Boehner, following the vilifying tactics of Ronald Reagan, had this to say about such people: “I really don’t have to work. I don’t really want to do this. I think I’d rather just sit around.” This commonly held view of the rich as set forth by their pandering political toadies is that the nation’s poor deserve their fate because they are lazy and that the rich deserve their wealth because they work harder than others. This is a false view on both counts.

The truth is that there is a large and growing share of the nation’s poor who work full time, sometimes 60 hours a week or more, but still do not earn enough to lift themselves and their families out of poverty. This is not in keeping with the ethic that says you must work to earn your bread and will earn a fair return on your labor if you do. These working poor are working long hours and are still on the verge of bankruptcy while being insulted by the rich and their pandering politicians like Boehner as they live from paycheck to paycheck while a growing portion of the superrich have never broken a sweat because their wealth has been handed to them (as noted by Piketty at some length in his great opus, Capitalism in the Twenty First Century). Thus Sam Walton’s heirs are rich not because they conform to some old ethic of earning one’s bread, but simply because they are Sam Walton’s heirs and rich beyond belief.

So how did this Protestant work ethic become so irrelevant in the real world today, where those who work are not rewarded and those who don’t work are? The chief culprit is, of course, wage inequality, and there is a direct connection between paying cheap wages (which keep the poor poor however much and however hard they work) and Wal-Mart’s bottom line. It’s a very simple economic proposition and it is this:  Sam’s heirs make more money when they pay their workers less. It’s all about more money for Sam’s heirs; the Protestant work ethic is only involved in beating on their workers to work harder and produce more at slave wages so that Wal-Mart’s bottom line is fattened and Sam’s heirs rake in more, more, more.

One of the core assumptions of Americana now ignored was that workers are to be paid what they’re worth and that work is to be justly rewarded. Thanks to corporate greed, that is not the case now and even with increasing employment numbers, take a look at the jobs coming on line. They are low-paying jobs in retail, hotels, childcare and other such minimum or near-minimum wage scales, all of which guarantee that the ranks of the working poor are growing and that aggregate demand in our marketplace is hardly moving the needle upward for lack of money in such workers’ pockets. Wage inequality thus translates into economic standstill.

Proof of this wage atrocity foisted on us by the rich and corporate class is the fact that the inflation-adjusted federal minimum wage is lower today than it was 25 years ago, so those who labor at or near such a wage level today are poorer than the poor were 25 years ago. We are thus left with measurably worsening wage inequality while the Dow has soared to historic highs (which means that corporate America has ample resources to pay their workers for what their workers bring to the table but instead hijack such worker productivity and hand workers’ efforts over to bottom lines of such as Wal-Mart and the ultimate clutches of Sam’s progeny).

I hold that policies that allow this are bad for workers, our economic future and (per Piketty) even Sam’s heirs, since, as Piketty notes, this arrangement cannot go on indefinitely since the whole system will come crashing down “unless attended to.” We are not “attending” to it and are left in the peculiar position of trying to save capitalism from the ravages of the capitalists!

I will write in Part II of the danger to our democracy posed by the toxic mixture of widening wage inequality and dynastic accumulation of wealth. Stay tuned.    GERALD    E