Among the many lessons learned during the pandemic is that we need each other. We are social beings who need contact with family and friends. We need to come together to celebrate and to offer comfort. Our true essence is to live in social groupings — in a society — for our mutual aid, comfort and ability to survive.
During the COVID shutdown, we designated certain people as being essential workers, and they are. My daughter (a respiratory therapist), my granddaughter (an ICU nurse), and a grandson (a newly commissioned officer in the Navy) are among the thousands, perhaps millions, of workers without whom we would not be able to endure these dark times.
And, I want to extend a special thank you to the retail clerks, public utility workers, truck drivers, tradespeople, civil servants, first responders, agricultural workers and the countless other people we have too often taken for granted, but without whom, we would be in dire straits.
It is intentional that most of the occupations I identified do not absolutely require a college degree, for I believe we too often fail to recognize that all workers are essential inasmuch as no enterprise can succeed without workers, who are far more essential than stockholders and venture capitalists, for example.
Yet, since 1980, the industrialized world has redoubled its historic embrace of economic policies and technologies that seek to eliminate the need for workers, as a means to cut labor costs so that less essential players can make more money. Free-market economists and business leaders have ordained that the role of corporations is to make as much money as possible for stockholders, even at the expense of workers.
American jobs were not lost to China, India, Latin America and to other developing nations. American corporations eagerly and enthusiastically gave American jobs to foreign countries whose workers are severely underpaid, not protected by safety and health regulations, denied the right to organize unions and who are often forced to live in subhuman conditions — all in order to increase profits for stockholders.
Noble Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz reports in his book, “People, Power and Profit,” that since 1980 “ … the average income for the bottom 90 percent of Americans has hardly changed, while that of the top 1 percent has soared.” And, he notes that a rising tide “ … can — and often does — smash smaller vessels.”
Members of the worker class — which included me prior to my retirement — are often our own worst enemies. We identify with the tyrants, hoping that if they recognize that I am a loyal hard worker, they will reward me and help me achieve the American dream of rags to riches. Well, that just ain’t going to happen — the glare of the bottom line blinds corporations from seeing anything but dollar signs.
So, too many of us say we don’t like the Affordable Care Act because it is socialistic. Yet, we see nothing threatening about the government allowing corporations to not pay any taxes, to pollute the environment, to deny workers the right to form unions, and to eliminate workers through technology, without any concern about the well-being of the workers and their families, who will be without incomes and health insurance.
No wonder there is such division among the working class, which I define as small, independent contractors, and merchants; low- to middle-income individuals who get a W-2 form from their employers at the end of the year; gig-workers; and alleged “independent contractors” who should be getting W-2’s, but have been removed from the definition of “employee” as a boon to corporate greed.
As the shroud of the pandemic is lifted, I hope for a reversal of the greed-fired free market, and a turning toward a Keynesian economy, in which government intervention is welcomed — as it was when FDR lead us out of the Great Depression — to regulate monopolistic corporate practices, provide a social safety net for workers who are hardworking and worthy of being recognized as being essential to a just society.
I look to a day when the government will support small businesses, repair our infrastructure, preserve our environment, close the income gap, seek racial justice, reduce rates of incarceration and recognize that every one of us — each person — is essential and worthy of a living wage.
Jim Palermo lives in Southampton.