However, I'm beginning to wonder if Marx missed his mark.
In this economy, it is becoming frightfully clear that most of us can't count on big corporations to look out for us anymore, the way our fathers and grandfathers did.
But just as clearly, because of the struggling economy, labor unions have become little more than political organizations, increasingly unable to protect members' jobs.
I'm beginning to wonder if the real power doesn't lie in that growing class of the unemployed.
Think about it: much of the rhetoric of the entire Democractic party and the current president is geared toward taking care of the unemployed: extending unemployment benefits, provide health care, and generally do all those things that unions and/or businesses have traditionally have done for the working class.
The assumption, of course, is that people who are unemployed really want to be employed.
The problem is that the unemployed now have a choice: do they take just any job? Or are they better off being cared for through unemployment? Particularly if unemployment benefits continue to be extended to cover longer and longer periods of time?
Now, please, don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying everyone who is out of work wants to be out of work. I know that's not true. I was out of work (briefly, thankfully), and I wanted to work. Most of my friends who are out of work really want to work, and some are taking the view that any job is better than no job, willing to start over if necessary and try to work their way back "up" - whatever "up" might look like in the limited time many of the middle-to-late-aged unemployed are left with.
On the other hand ... ask people what they'd do if they won the lottery, and the most common answer you get is "quit work.'' Everyone I know talks of hoping to "retire early.'' We're constantly bombarded with ads from financial advisors who are trying to help us figure out how to retire early.
And it doesn't seem to matter how we get to that point. Hard work, creativity, lottery winner, inheritance - it's like a national epidemic: the goal of work seems to have become to get to the point where we don't work anymore.
If the goal is to get to a point where we don't have to work, is it really that far of a leap to say that, once people get used to getting paid for not working by the government they begin to expect and even like it?
Sure, there are limits to how long the unemployed can draw unemployment. But those limits keep getting extended.
The premise that our goal is to get to the point where we don't have to work anymore is wrong. Man was created to work. Hey, even Adam in the Garden was given a job to do. You think naming animals was easy? You know Adam had to be running out of ideas when he came up with "aardvark'' and "duck-billed platypus." I figure it was near the end of a hard work week and he was anxious to get back to the cave and this thing known as "Eve" when he came up with "bee'' and "Yak."
We're supposed to work. Otherwise we run the risk of all becoming a nation of Paris Hiltons.
Now, the difference in those people who have money and don't work and those people who don't have money and don't work seems obvious; but is it really?
Someone once said the difference between men and boys is the size of their toys. Maybe the same could be said of the difference between the unemployed wealthy and the unemployed poor. If you get used to not working and living off whatever benefits you get from the government, well ... I know a guy in California who tells me he expects to draw unemployment for three years, and prefers to do that than take a job that's "beneath'' him where he may not make that much more money.
Again, I'm making sweeping generalizations (which doesn't pay nearly as well as simply sweeping).
I'm all for helping people who have lost their jobs and want to work. Shoot, I have been there. And I have been helped by more people than I can name, people whose generousity I can never repay.
But not the government.
It occured to me one day on my 500th re-reading of the book of Job (a terrific book, by the way; I highly recommend it), that at the end of the book, we get the happy ending: Job's wealth and family is restored.
What gets lost in the ending however, is how Job's wealth and family is restored.
First, his wealth: friends and neighbors came by and gave him gifts to get him back on his feet, which he then used to rebuild his wealth. Somehow, I don't think it happened overnight. I'm betting it took Job years to get back to the status he had before he became the chip in that cosmic poker game between God and Satan.
As for his family: I'm guessing it was restored in the usual way of nine months of labor and delivery. Unless his wife had a litter, I'm guessing this, too, happened over time. Throw in the fact that Job was older and he was having to work twice as hard at perhaps twice the age and I have this feeling it wasn't quite like Job simply won the heavenly lottery (except for the fact that Satan wouldn't mess with him again, which is a pretty nice prize).
Again, the point - and, to quote Ellen Degeneres, I do have one - is that neighbors and friends helped Job get back on his feet, then Job went to work.
With God's help and blessing, of course (and I do not say that lightly).
Which brings me back to where I started.
There is a growing political power in this country: the unemployed. It's becoming a movement.
If the government allows the movement to get comfortable and truly become a political force, well then, capitalism will end through the organized actions of an international non-working class.
And we all know how well that worked out for the USSR.
Or course, this is just a blog. Nobody said I had to be right.
* But then after I wrote this, I came across this story:
Unemployed get another jobless benefit _ free yoga
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hTp5DVv4Qisj9CFdbTFX-j1rBE6Q?docId=4d140ccf08a0495f9f55429d89b5afe6
No comments:
Post a Comment