A 21st-Century Form of
Indentured Servitude Has Already Penetrated Deep into the American Heartland
Corporations want to make sure
that laborers never again have the power to tell big business how to treat
them.
July 17, 2017, 8:32 AM GMT
Indentured servitude is back
in a big way in the United States, and conservative corporatists want to make
sure that labor never, ever again has the power to tell big business how to
treat them.
Idaho, for
example, recently passed a law that recognizes and rigorously enforces
non-compete agreements in employment contracts, which means that if you want to
move to a different, more highly paid, or better job, you can instead get wiped
out financially by lawsuits and legal costs.
In a way,
conservative/corporatists are just completing the circle back to the founding
of this country.
Indentured servitude began in
a big way in the early 1600s, when the British East India Company was
establishing a beachhead in
the (newly stolen from the Indians) state of Virginia (named after the “virgin
queen” Elizabeth I, who signed the charter of the BEIC creating the first
modern corporation in 1601). Jamestown (named after King James, who followed
Elizabeth I to the crown) wanted free labor, and the African slave trade
wouldn’t start to crank up for another decade.
So the company made a deal
with impoverished Europeans: Come to work for typically 4-7 years (some were
lifetime indentures, although those were less common), legally as the property
of the person or company holding your indenture, and we’ll pay for your
transport across the Atlantic.
It was, at least
philosophically, the logical extension of the feudal economic and political
system that had ruled Europe for over 1,000 years. The rich have all the rights
and own all the property; the serfs are purely exploitable free labor who could
be disposed of (indentured
servants, like slaves, were commonly whipped, hanged, imprisoned,
or killed when they rebelled or were not sufficiently obedient).
This type of labor system has
been the dream of conservative/corporatists, particularly since the “Reagan
Revolution” kicked off a major federal war on the right of workers to organize
for their own protection from corporate abuse.
Unions represented almost
a third of American workers when Reagan came into office (and, since
union jobs set local labor standards, for every union job there was typically
an identically-compensated non-union job, meaning about two-thirds of America
had the benefits and pay associated with union jobs pre-Reagan).
Thanks to Reagan’s war on
labor, today unions represent about 6 percent of the non-government workforce.
But that wasn’t enough for the
acolytes of Ayn Rand, Ronald Reagan and Milton Friedman. They didn’t just want
workers to lose their right to collectively bargain; they wanted employers to
functionally own their employees.
Prior to the current
Reaganomics era, non-compete agreements were pretty much limited to senior
executives and scientists/engineers.
If you were a CEO or an
engineer for a giant company, knowing all their processes, secrets and future
plans, that knowledge had significant and consequential value—company value
worth protecting with a contract that said you couldn’t just take that stuff to
a competitor without either a massive payment to the left-behind company or a
flat-out lawsuit.
But should a guy who digs
holes with a shovel or works on a drilling
rig
be forced to sign a non-compete? What about a person who flips burgers or waits
tables in a restaurant? Or the few factory workers we have left, since
neoliberal trade policies have moved the jobs of tens of thousands of companies overseas?
Turns out corporations are
using non-competes to prevent even these types of employees from moving to
newer or better jobs.
America today has the lowest
minimum wage in nearly
50 years, adjusted for inflation. As a result, people are often
looking for better jobs. But according to the New
York Times, about 1 in 5 American workers is now locked in with a
non-compete clause in an employment contract.
Before Reaganomics, employers
didn’t keep their employees by threatening them with lawsuits; instead, they
offered them benefits like insurance, paid vacations and decent wages. Large
swaths of American workers could raise a family and have a decent retirement
with a basic job ranging from manufacturing to construction to service industry
work.
My dad was
one of them; he worked 40 years in a tool-and-die shop, and the machinist’s
union made sure he could raise and put through school four boys, could take 2-3
weeks of paid vacation every year, and had full health insurance and a solid
retirement until the day he died, which continued with my mom until she died
years later. Most boomers (particularly white boomers) can tell you the same
story.
That America has been largely
destroyed by Reaganomics, and Americans know it. It’s why when Donald Trump
told voters that the big corporations and banksters were screwing them, they
voted for him and his party (not realizing that neither Trump nor the GOP had
any intention of doing anything to help working people).
And now the
conservatives/corporatists are going in for the kill, for their top goal: the
final destruction of any remnant of labor rights in America.
Why would they do this? Two
reasons: An impoverished citizenry is a politically impotent citizenry, and in
the process of destroying the former middle class, the 1 percent make
themselves trillions of dollars richer.
The New York Times has done
some great reporting on this problem, with an article last
May and
a more recent
piece about how the state of Idaho has made it nearly
impossible for many workers to escape their servitude.
Historically, indentured
servants had their food, health care, housing, and clothing provided to them by
their “employers.” Today’s new serfs can hardly afford these basics of life,
and when you add in modern necessities like transportation, education and
child-care, the American labor landscape is looking more and more like
old-fashioned servitude.
Nonetheless,
conservatives/corporatists in Congress and state-houses across the nation are
working hard to hold down minimum wages. Missouri’s Republican legislature just
made it illegal for St. Louis to raise their minimum wage to $10/hour, throwing
workers back down to $7.70. More
preemption laws like this are on the books or on their way.
At the same time, these
conservatives/corporatists are working to roll back health care protections for
Americans, roll back environmental protections that keep us and our children
from being poisoned, and even roll back simple workplace, food and toy safety
standards.
The only way these predators
will be stopped is by massive political action leading to the rollback of
Reaganism/neoliberalism.
And the
conservatives/corporatists who largely own the Republican Party know it, which
is why they’re purging
voting lists, fighting to keep in place easily
hacked voting machines, and throwing billions of dollars into
think tanks, right-wing radio, TV, and online media.
If they succeed, America will
revert to a very old form of economy and politics: the one described so well in
Charles Dickens’ books when Britain had "maximum wage laws"
and “Poor Laws” to prevent a strong and politically active middle class from
emerging.
Conservatives/corporatists
know well that this type of neo-feudalism is
actually a very stable political and economic system, and one that’s hard to
challenge. China has put it into place in large part, and other countries from
Turkey to the Philippines to Brazil and Venezuela are falling under the thrall
of the merger of corporate and state power.
So many of our individual
rights have been stripped from
us, so much of America’s middle-class progress in the last century has been torn
from us, while conservatives wage a brutal and oppressive war on
dissenters and people of color under the rubrics of “security,” “tough on
crime,” and the "war on drugs.”
As a result, America has 5
percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of the world’s
prisoners, more than any other nation on earth, all while opiate
epidemics are ravaging our nation. And what to do about it?
Scientists have proven that
the likelihood the desires of the bottom 90 percent of Americans get enacted
into law are now equal to statistical "random
noise." Functionally, most of us no longer have any
real representation in state or federal legislative bodies: they now exist
almost exclusively to serve the very wealthy.
The neo-feudal
corporate/conservative elite are both politically and financially committed to
replacing the last traces of worker power in America with a modern system of
indentured servitude.
Only serious and committed
political action can reverse this; we’re long past the point where complaining
or sitting on the sidelines is an option.
As both Bernie Sanders and
Barack Obama regularly said (and I’ve closed my radio show for 14 years with),
“Democracy is not a spectator sport.”
Tag, you’re it.
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