The Soul of the Worker (Page 2)

The Iowa AFL-CIO State Convention Wednesday, August 14, 2002

Labor has stood almost alone while corporations have cut wages and benefits, slashed working hours, tried to undermine wage and hour provisions, reneged on contracts, jettisoned retirements through bankruptcy strategies. The current clamor for corporate accountability calls for honesty in stating the numbers, and faithful custody of shareholders' money.

Yet there needs to be equal concern for those who created the wealth through their labor, because the attacks on unions are a means of redistributing the wealth upwards. As union membership has declined, the disparity of wealth has increased. Since 1973 union membership has dropped from 24 percent to 14 percent. And the share of aggregate income of the poor, the middle class and the upper middle class has declined.

It's an old saying that the rich get richer. But it's a new convention in the American political economy that a class of working poor has emerged, including the working homeless. Congress will not pass an increase in the $5.15 minimum wage even though the inflation-adjusted minimum wage is 21 percent lower today than it was in 1979.

Since 1981 the share of income of the richest 5 percent of this country has increased more than 40 percent while that of the lowest fifth has decreased more than 20 percent. An even starker contrast arises. According to Business Week, the average CEO made forty-two times the average worker's pay in 1980, eighty-five times in 1990 and 531 times in 2000. Forbes magazine points out that the number of billionaires increased from thirteen in 1982 to 149 in 1996.

In the past twenty years you sat at the negotiating table, you fought for fair wages and benefits, you were told you were just asking for too much, that your demands would make the company less competitive. And all the while the wealth kept getting accelerated upwards, with the help of NAFTA and other trade agreements that were designed to undermine workers' rights and lower wages worldwide.

I'd like to read a quote to you. "Working men have been surrendered, isolated and helpless, to the hardheartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition.... the hiring of labor and the conduct of trade are concentrated in the hands of comparatively few; so that a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the laboring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself." Pope Leo XIII said this 111 years ago in his encyclical On Capital and Labor.

I quote a great spiritual leader because standing behind the daily efforts to lift up the human condition through improving standards of work is a great moral cause. It is about the intrinsic worth of each and every human being. When both work and workers are valued, when all men and women are given a chance to earn their daily bread, when all are paid a living wage, when hands strong and weak can clasp in common enterprise to seek and to build a newer world, then every day will belong to workers. And every voice will praise the moment when human toil has lifted up the human condition. It is a high cause that brings us together, that causes us to put ourselves on the line.

We need to feel in every cell of our bodies the power that comes from union: the power that confirms our purpose, the power that, when focused and directed, will save our nation by saving the Democratic Party from the clutches of corporate interests. Enlightened self-interest requires labor to make the Democratic Party accountable. Labor must rally the Democrats to the workers' banner. Labor must begin now to build the Democratic Party platform for 2004 to insure that solid principles of economic justice prevail and to inspire millions of Americans, who would otherwise stay home on Election Day, to vote to save our democracy.

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