An Economic Wakeup Call (Labor Day) September 5, 2021
Dr. Roger Ray, pastor
Newsweek, BY EWAN PALMER ON 7/27/21
Restaurant workers in Missouri have been fired after staging a walkout protesting for higher wages and alleged poor working conditions.
At least seven workers from the Aviary Cafe in Springfield were let go after failing to turn up for their shifts on Sunday.
…"They have told us time and again recently that we have broken numerous sales records for the restaurant," Perry Ashlock, who worked in the kitchen at the Aviary Cafe, wrote on Facebook.
"We have all managed to accomplish this with a less than minimal crew. Our staff is working, at times, from 7:30 AM to well past closing hours.
"We could never get new employees to stay with us because they didn't like the level of work, or the hours they were having to put in. Most, if not all, of us were promised raises that were never followed through upon," Ashlock added.
Ericka Loredo, an Aviary sous chef, said that she had been "consistently" working 65 hours over the summer as the café struggled to find staff amid the pandemic.
"I often had 14-hour workdays just because you're trying to get everything ready. From 7:30 in the morning until past closing. But again, we got no breaks. Just in general the place is really toxic. I felt like a slave. We were being overworked like slaves," she told the Springfield News-Ledger.
In an updated Facebook post, Ashlock posted an unconfirmed claim that the Aviary Cafe had given employees who didn't walkout a raise to $20 per hour.
"Just goes to show they could have been doing it the whole time," Ashlock said.
Last month the world was treated to a history making billionaire space race. Perhaps each of them had some business interest, not so much in developing new space worthy ships to service the needs of scientific research, but to begin to make it look like space tourism might one day be a thing, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson each spent more than $5 billion of their corporate wealth to slip the surly bonds of earth to touch the lower edge of what might be called space.
None of them actually orbited the earth but they did more of a sling shot ride up and down again in a few seconds, and yet they are calling themselves astronauts.
I didn’t pay much attention to this contest that was part corporate advertisement and part adolescent adult ego competition. Certainly, there were many who decried the financial waste and talked about what humanitarian project could have been funded rather than this waste of resources, but I didn’t pay attention until I ran across Jeff Bezos’ rather tone-deaf shout out from the post-flight press conference when he said: ‘I want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all this.’
And yes, on the one hand, what he said was obviously true, but it was one of those truths that might be overlooked until it is uttered aloud as if you were proud of it. During these nightmarish months of the pandemic, Branson, Musk, but especially Bezos, have increased their wealth by billions. The employees that Bezos gave a shout-out to reportedly are sometimes forced to work shifts as long as 10 to 14 hours while wearing wrist bands that measure their minute-by-minute productivity.
They are not allowed access to their cell phones, and they can be pat down at any moment by security guards to be sure that they are not stealing anything. Some employees in Great Britain even reported that they worked in warehouses where the closest restroom was down 4 flights of stairs so they reportedly had to pee into empty drink bottles to keep up with their production quotas to keep their $15/hour jobs, while Bezos could blow $5 billion on a 11 minute ride into quasi-space.
Defenders of these billionaires in space say, “It was their money. They can spend it however they want to.” But, hold on a minute, is it really their money or is that just a fluke of the way we structure employment in the western world?
When the ancient Hebrew prophet, Isaiah, spoke of the way the world would be when the children of Israel escaped their bondage in Babylon, he said of them:
Isaiah 65:21 They shall build houses and inhabit them;
they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit.
22 They shall not build and another inhabit;
they shall not plant and another eat;
Can you hear the prophet asking, “How come everybody works in the vineyard but Bezos gets all the fruit?” Sure, it is legal for the owner of a business to set employment standards and salaries, but do you ever wonder who wrote those laws? Did waiters, dish washers, and cooks write those laws, or did business owners and investors write the laws that make exploiting the poor not only legal, but something that the wealthy can brag about. As Bezos basically asks, “How do all of you over-worked and under-paid little people like watching me blast your profit-sharing and pensions into space in my 11-minute joy ride?”
A local hip restaurant about a mile from my home here in Springfield also made national news last month. Several members of the staff at the Aviary walked off the job recently in protest of what some called “slave like working conditions.” Where many restaurants have had to restrict hours and days of business because they couldn’t get enough employees, the managers of the Aviary found a solution, just make your employees work longer hours. Now, these are not ICU nurses in the middle of a pandemic, these are young people making dessert crepes and bringing your bill to you, folded neatly into an antique French children’s book.
They walked off the job, demanding better pay and working conditions and they were, of course, immediately fired because there are no effective labor unions in this area, especially not in the food service arena. Rumor is that once the national media showed up for the demonstrations, everyone who had not walked off the job got a raise, but the employees who were fired for demonstrating were not re-hired. Because, you know, power.
Clearly, if they can afford to pay better now, they could have afforded it before. We do not have a labor shortage in America, we have a problem with wages that are lower than what it costs to live. We have an economic system that allows the rich to control the government and right now we are in a standoff between low waged workers who are refusing to return to slave labor and employers who would rather lose business in the short term than to give in to paying a living wage.
Only organized labor can change this, especially in the food service arena. We have to give collective power to the poor to be able to stand up to the oligarchs who control the economy and the government.
And, yes, though we are rarely conscious of it, we all know, at least in the back of our minds, that those who can make political donations in the millions are not giving to charity, they are buying legislation . . . they are buying tax policy . . . they are buying contracts for military manufacturing and building interstate highways, mass transit, and infrastructure . . . you know that, but this week I need to draw this distinction down to a very specific case of buying off the government because this one should be making every American’s blood boil.
Over the past two decades, about a half a million Americans have died from opioid overdoses. Millions have suffered from addiction. The number one offender in this scenario is Purdue Pharma. They aggressively marketed their opioid pain relievers to doctors, lying repeatedly about the dangers of addiction. Many of the people who were started on OxyContin, when the legal supply ran out, turned to heroin with disastrous results.
I have presided over a funeral for one such person myself, a delightful young woman who had back surgery and was prescribed OxyContin to manage the pain. When she became addicted, her physician cut her off of the legal drug, so she turned to heroin and soon died from an overdose. This story has been repeated hundreds of thousands of times in the USA.
You have probably seen documentaries about the Sackler family and their Purdue Pharma. They clearly, knowingly, pushed sales of this dangerous drug, and found ways to provide absurdly large amounts of the drug to small communities that could not have had a legitimate use for even 10% of the drugs they were selling, but the family became obscenely wealthy as the opioid epidemic grew.
When news began to break about the corruption and deceit behind Purdue’s meteoric profits, the family started moving large amounts of cash into off-shore accounts, hiding their wealth all around the globe. On Wednesday of this week, it was announced that the federal judge in the trial of the Sacklers had signed off on a settlement agreement that has the Sacklers paying about $4.5 billion into a fund designed to help affected families and to operate drug rehabilitation. In exchange for this amount of money, the Sacklers admit to no wrongdoing and are protected from any future liability claims from millions of addicts or the survivors of the more than a half a million people who have died in this crisis.
It reminded me of an old joke that has been mistakenly attributed to Groucho Marx, it was really some British journalist but it sounds better if you imagine Groucho Marx asking a woman, “Would you have sex with me for one million dollars?” The woman replied that she would. Then Groucho asks, “Would you have sex with me for $5?” To which the woman shrieked, “No, what kind of a woman do you think I am?” And he allegedly replied, “We’ve already determined that, now we are just haggling on the price.”
Do we have an actual justice system, or do we have a corrupt legal system that can be bought off? Apparently, we are so corrupt that you can kill a half a million people in the process of illegally making a fortune and then you can buy your way out of trouble for $4.5 billion. We have no way of knowing how many tens of billions of dollars the Sacklers have hidden around the globe, and we will probably never know. They get to keep that money and escape all prosecution.
The United States is not a democracy. We do not have a justice system. We are at best an oligarchy, but we are well on our way to having a fascist government in which the rich and powerful live in a world with no rules and the rest of us can be sent to a prison work camp at the drop of a hat. If that doesn’t make you mad as hell, then you either don’t understand what we are losing, or you are already so defeated that you no longer care.
I keep banging on this drum, but it is very hard to get laborers to wake up to what is being done to them. For the most part, in every wave of immigration in our country, employers have used cheap labor to keep wages down, trying to get workers to blame the immigrant and not the employer.
I love this cartoon that so graphically illustrates how employers trick workers into thinking that their enemy is the poor immigrant who wants to take their job when, even without immigrants, employers are doing everything they can, legally and often illegally, to keep wages down and to keep unions from ever organizing labor.
Let me repeat what this meme says so succinctly and clearly: No immigrant has taken your job. You were laid off by a capitalist who required cheap labor and took advantage of that immigrant to increase his profits, and nothing makes him happier than to hear you blame the immigrant and not him.
You have reason to be angry, but not at the immigrant.
I am not, in the least, sympathetic with the “Make America Great Again” crowd. I don’t think that you can look into America’s past and find an ideal nation. We were born in the throes of slavery, engaged in pathological land theft through genocide of Native Americans and taking farm land from Mexican land owners, all followed with racial segregation and discrimination against women and minorities. America has never been a shining city on a hill, but, I can tell you this:
When I was born in 1956, the tax rate on top income earners was 91%. Eisenhour was president, the construction of our nation’s infrastructure, including interstate highways, was underway, and a person who worked a full time, unskilled job, could buy a house and a car, support a spouse and children, and retire at the age of 65 with financial security and dignity.
The past 40 years have seen massive cuts on taxes levied on the most wealthy people and tax loop holes such that billionaire, Warren Buffett, observed in an interview a few years ago that the taxes he actually pays amounts to a tax rate of 17.7% while his support staff pays an average tax rate of 32.9%, almost twice what Buffett pays. We have corrupted our tax system and our political system so that the tax burden has been shifted onto the shoulders of labor rather than where the real money is, among wealthy capitalists.
America wasn’t great in the 1950’s but, in the post war world of that time, we at least had the tax system worked out so that we spread the wealth around the population in a much more equitable way and while the super wealthy were not taking quick joy rides into space, kids like me got to ride in the back seat of a Ford to school every morning.
There are many issues that concern those of us who hope to see a more just society arising from the current chaos but when it comes to economics, the classic labor union advice still holds: tax the rich, support labor unions, and buy locally whenever you can.
