Low prices come with low wages
What'd you pay for that grill? As you enjoy a long weekend and Labor Day barbeques, Robert Reich suggests you think about how we as a nation traded in a unionized workforce with the bargaining clout to get higher wages for cheap goods and services.
Robert Reich was Labor Secretary under President Clinton.
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TEXT OF COMMENTARY
Scott Jagow: Can you believe it's almost Labor Day? Man the summer's going by fast. But with Labor Day coming up, commentator Robert Reich has these thoughts:
Robert Reich: A young person asked me not long ago, I think only half in jest, whether Labor Day was named in honor of natural childbirth.
Most young people today have no memory of a time when Walter Reuther of the UAW and John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers were household names, when presidents jawboned labor to prevent agreements from causing wage-price inflation as productivity pushed those wages up, and when more than a third of the American workforce was unionized.
Now fewer than 8 percent of America's private sector workers are in unions, median wage gains have fallen far behind productivity gains and for most of us Labor Day means a long weekend.
What happened?
Some say it started in the early '80s after Ronald Reagan fired the nation's air-traffic controllers for striking, something they had no legal right to do, and thereby legitimized a wave of corporate union busting.
Others blame it on a more pervasive "greed is good" aggressiveness that engulfed corporate suites starting right about then.
There's no question that ever since the 1980s and with ever greater alacrity, companies have fired workers for trying to form unions, even though that's illegal, and have used or threatened to use permanent replacements if workers go on strike, which is legal but was rare back then.
But don't blame Ronald Reagan or corporate greed. Blame us, you and me. You see, starting about 30 years ago and with increasing efficiency, technologies have given us consumers a world of choice: low-priced goods and services that often depend on low wages here and elsewhere.
Long-haul trucks linking non-unionized manufacturers in the South to the rest of us. Big-box retailers using computers to find the best deals anywhere around the world. And now the Internet letting us find the best deals for ourselves, too.
So now, a lot of us get good consumer deals and lousy paychecks. No one trumpeted this choice. It's happened gradually. But is it the right choice? That's what we ought to be asking ourselves, at least once a year, on Labor Day.
Jagow: Robert Reich was Labor Secretary under President Clinton. His new book SUPERCAPITALISM comes out this weekend. In Los Angeles, I'm Scott Jagow. Thanks for listening and enjoy your day.
