It's Labor Day weekend: the summer season is ending, vacations or staycations are done, schools are back in session, and plans for cookouts are carefully laid. When I asked our Worship Chair, Kim Roberts, for a service date getting on in August, I hadn't expected to get such a late date. My plan had been to say something about the laws of physics, a subject about which I at least claim to know something. But on this Sunday, the occasion seems to compel me to deal with economics, a subject about which I know nothing—well, almost nothing anyway. As an undergraduate I took the Econ 101 course. The professor was a dynamic speaker, and I can remember him holding forth on the factors of production (land, labor, capital, and the entrepreneur), supply and demand, and Malthus's prediction of massive human starvation. Perhaps the most memorable teaching of all was: human wants and needs are insatiable. I thought I understood about wants and needs in the classroom, but their real meaning didn't come home to me until much later when I had children.
It was in connection with Malthus that I first heard economics described as the "dismal science." It seemed dismal enough to me as a student. But was it science? In the nearly fifty years since I took that course some powerful mathematics has been developed in the service of economics. Still there are areas of economics that are driven by human whims and so remain a bit "squishy" relative to the hard sciences. President Harry Truman, never one to mince words, once expressed his frustration with economics exclaiming: "I'm tired of economists who say, 'On the one hand . . . and then on the other hand.' Send me a one-armed economist."
Even though my plans were to talk about physics, I've spent a lot of time this year thinking about that second factor of production, labor. Every day seems to bring pressing news about work and workers, employment and unemployment—a consequence, I suppose, of our current economic difficulties and an impending election. But more than anything else it was a play, These Shining Lives, which got me thinking about some of these issues. What this play lacked in artistic finesse was offset, in some measure, by a factual portrayal of the lives, and deaths, of the "Radium Girls." Radium girls were women hired early in the twentieth century to coat watch, clock, and instrument dials with radium paint that made the dials glow in the dark. These women were paid by the piece and were encouraged to shape their paint brushes with their lips or tongue in order to speed up the process. Shaping their brushes in this way also speeded up the ingestion of radium, a very dangerous material. The human body treats radium as calcium, so it lodges in bones where it destroys the bone proper and the blood making marrow. As these women began to sicken and die, questions arose about the safety of working with radium. The company denied that radium was dangerous and when pressed smeared the women by saying that they were promiscuous and made ill by syphilis. Company management knew all along about the dangers of radium poisoning and scrupulously avoided personal exposure. Anemia, bone necrosis, cancer, and death were for the workers not for them.
How does one explain such callous, inhuman, and dehumanizing treatment of workers? Is it greed? Avarice? Competition in overdrive? Pressure for profits? Meeting customer demands? Making "the hard decision?" Psychopathic tendencies? Just the situation? Perhaps most frightening of all: Could I do such a thing? I found these questions and others like them unsatisfying in explaining why there are many such incidents in American labor history. I was looking for a more general, overarching explanation—an explanation something like Richard Dawkins's memes, a term used to describe thoughts, ideas, theories, gestures, practices, fashions, and habits that can propagate themselves, and shape societies by spreading from person to person and generation to generation. I'm convinced that there are memes associated with one particular aspect of the American experience that go a long way toward explaining the dehumanizing of workers in America. It's something Americans don't like to talk about, and it can be stated in just one very ugly word. The word is S-L-A-V-E-R-Y, slavery.
Slavery has been more persistent in American history and society than most realize or care to admit. American slavery was born nearly four hundred years ago in colonial Virginia out of a seething cauldron of indentured servitude, social division, armed rebellion, government sponsored racism, and the acquisition of too much land by too few. The historian Edmund Morgan makes the point that American freedom was purchased with the coin of American slavery. This is literally true in the sense that the tobacco and other crops, which to a large extent funded our Revolution, were grown with slave labor. There is a larger truth here too. Virginia was the cradle of American ideas of freedom. It was the enslavement of African Americans in Virginia and the deliberate racial pitting of one class against another that gave a measure of political and economic freedom to the underclass of Euro-Americans. In this sense, we all owe our heritage of freedom in this country to African American slaves. By their stripes we were healed.
American slavery was one of the harshest forms of slavery ever instituted. Enslavement was for life, and children born of slave women were automatically slaves. Perhaps we should reflect just a bit at this point about what it means to enslave someone in such a manner. First, it seems to me, it takes a profound dehumanization of those to be enslaved. You must separate them from their humanity and place them in some less than human category in order to establish the hierarchy of master and slave. And it follows that the work these less than humans do is likewise regarded as lowly and unworthy of the efforts of true humans. This kind of dehumanization was even practiced on close family members. In the families of some of our nation's founders we find half-brothers or half-sisters who were slaves in their households.
Slavery had become widespread in the Southern states by the time our Constitution was written. The Founders placated themselves with the idea that slavery would vanish of its own accord and wrote a Constitution that supported the institution in many ways. The Constitution did permit the Congress to end the importation of slaves, which it did early in the nineteenth century. Slavery did not vanish however; it grew. By the 1850s there were more slaves than ever. Slavery threatened to spread to the American West, and a new use of slave labor developed. Southern mining, manufacturing, and railroading were just beginning during this period; and slaves were employed in these industries. Because agricultural work is seasonal, some plantation owners gained financially by leasing their slaves for industrial work during slack times.
The 1860s brought the Civil War, a northern victory, and the abolition of slavery by the Thirteenth Amendment to our Constitution. After the Civil War, African Americans enjoyed a brief period of freedom; but then things changed. Reconciliation between northern and southern Euro-Americans became more important than the freedom of ex- slaves. This resulted not just in Black Codes, night riders, and lynchings, but in actual re- enslavement of African Americans in southern industries. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the system of illegally arresting blacks and selling them to industrial companies for forced labor was fully developed, as we heard in the case of Green Cottenham in our first reading this morning.
The Federal Government turned a deaf ear to complaints from Southern blacks about re- enslavement, treating such complaints as matters for local law enforcement. The practice of industrial enslavement was not ended until after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. President Franklin Roosevelt instinctively realized that to blunt enemy propaganda and to mobilize African Americans for the war effort industrial enslavement had to be halted. Within days of the Pearl Harbor attack the U.S. Justice Department was notifying Southern authorities that it intended to pursue full enforcement of the Thirteenth Amendment.
While World War II brought an end to industrial slavery in the U.S. South, it also set the stage for more slavery. As a result of the war in the South Pacific the U.S. acquired the Mariana Islands, which were made into a Commonwealth in political union with the U.S. in the 1970s. Residents of the Commonwealth are U.S. Citizens and much of U.S. law applies in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, but there were some important exceptions: immigration law, minimum wages, and labor standards being among them.
In the 1990s Chinese business interests were invited by U.S. authorities to establish clothing factories on Saipan, the largest of the Commonwealth islands. Asian workers, principally women, were brought in to work in these factories. They were told that they would get jobs in the United States. They signed agreements called "Shadow Contracts" to borrow money for their transportation and other costs, which they were to repay from their wages. The costs were exorbitant, and the interest rates usurious.
These workers found themselves putting in long hours, for extremely low wages, and living in totally degrading situations. The factories in which these women worked often flew the American flag, and the clothes they produced were labeled "Made in the U.S.A." With wages so low these workers could just barely meet their living expenses and never had the resources to repay their debt. In effect they were working eighteen hours a day seven days a week as slaves. The clothing these women produced was imported directly to mainland America with no import duty. The list of American manufacturers involved with these factories is so long that it is nearly a certainty that every one of us here this morning is wearing or has worn clothing made right here in America with slave labor.
Highly placed Congressional officials defended these clothing factories in the Marianas as an example of free market capitalism and prevented corrective legislation from coming to a vote in the Congress. Law suits were brought charging the U.S. companies involved with racketeering, peonage, and involuntary servitude. Still Congressional action was stalled. In enlightened twenty-first century America, slavery was alive and well in our nation; and so, I submit to you, were all the dehumanizing attitudes toward workers that make slavery possible. It wasn't until the spring of this year, 2008, that President Bush signed a law to require that the Marianas comply with U.S. labor and immigration standards. Overt slavery in twenty-first century America is admittedly the exception not the rule.
So let's tackle the larger question. How have American workers fared generally in the recent past? The American economy over the past twenty five years has proven to be one of the most productive and bountiful in all of human history; but paradoxically it has not been the best of times for workers. In the twenty five year period from 1980 – 2005, the economic output per hour of labor has risen 70 percent. In the same period the median compensation of workers, wages plus benefits, has advanced a mere 19 percent. Workers are not sharing in full measure in the bounty they are producing. Workers are also finding that their social and economic safety net with regard to jobs, health care, and retirement is shredding rapidly. More and more risk is being shed by companies and government and placed directly on workers, who are just not able to bear it.
Workers, who lose their jobs, are injured, or become ill, often find that getting back on their feet is a monumental struggle. Many never succeed. Workers serve the economy until there's a problem, and then the economy abandons the worker instead of helping him or her. Citing the Mayflower Compact, Peter Gosselin points out in his book, High Wire, that our nation's founding, ". . . rested upon a common understanding: The new society would be dedicated to individual, not collective, dreams, but everyone would nevertheless accept some responsibility for each other and for the common good." At the beginning of the twenty-first century we seem to have all but abandoned the social part of that contract and the search for the common good.
So far, I've talked about economics: that's boring stuff. And I've talked about slavery; that's depressing stuff. Now let me turn to religion. You're probably wondering what I can do to that subject this morning.
America prides itself on being a religious nation—another set of memes at work—but our religious inclinations have not led us away from the demon of a slave holding mentality. What we need, it seems to me, is not that old time religion, but a new twenty-first century approach. In his book, Reason and Reverence, the Unitarian Universalist minister William Murry proposes a religious humanism for the future. Murray maintains the traditional humanist dedication to reason and science which he unites to feelings of respect and awe that he labels reverence. In Murry's view: "Religious humanism affirms the intrinsic value of every human being: it maintains that all persons are ends in themselves and not a means to another's ends. . . . It places a high priority on democracy as a political philosophy and a way of organizing society for the wellbeing of all, and it is committed to justice and equity for every person."
These principles form the basis for a way out of the current morass of failed and failing worker relationships. I think that democracy has a special appeal to the broad spectrum of Americans, and its use in the workplace could be a giant step toward justice and equity for workers. Abraham Lincoln realized the value of democracy in freeing humankind with words that still resonate with truth after a century and a half, "As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy." Perhaps after four hundred years, Lincoln's vision will allow us to throw off the mental shackles that bind us to dehumanizing others for economic gain. This is the great task that we face both as individuals and as a nation on this Labor Day Sunday. May we take it to heart and make it so.
Copyright © 2008 Merrill Milham. All Rights Reserved.