It’s Time to Revive an Old Rallying Cry: Labor Is Not A Commodity!

[marmar]

from In These Times:




It’s Time to Revive an Old Rallying Cry: Labor Is Not A Commodity!

Tuesday
Apr 26, 2011
4:10 pm

By Joe Burns


For America's labor movement to survive, it must recommit to—and defend—the principles that once defined it


During last year’s strike against Mott's, the apple juice maker, Tim Budd, an employee on the bargaining team, heard a plant manager say across the bargaining table that employees were “a commodity like soybeans and oil, and the price of commodities goes up and down.” Mott’s management quickly disavowed their errant manager’s statement. After all, comparing workers to soybeans is not smooth, even for a unionbusting employer.

The verbal slip-up did, however, reveal a fundamental belief of management which has much to do with the future of the labor movement. To management, human labor is a simply commodity—nothing more, nothing less. A commodity is an object traded in the marketplace without differentiation, such as lumber, oil, or soybeans. In this context, commodities are inputs into the production process. They are things.

To the traditional labor movement— from the 1880s up through the 1960s—the notion that human beings were mere objects to be used up during the production process was highly offensive. As Samuel Gompers, the conservative head of the American Federation of Labor in the first part of the 20th century, melodramatically stated, “You cannot weigh the human soul in the same scales with a piece of pork.”

In fact, labor activists spent decades lobbying Congress, eventually winning inclusion into the 1914 Clayton Act the simple declaration that “The labor of a human being is not a commodity or article of commerce.” While that legislation did not serve its intended purpose of stopping courts from issuing anti-strike injunctions, the ideas underlying labor’s push proved vital in reviving the labor movement during the Great Depression. ..............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/7239/labor_is_not_a_commodity/

[dkf]

1. Actually don't we wish labor compensation was appreciating like commodities.

Then we would be sitting pretty.

[Sirveri]

2. Actually that's the problem. Too much labor that is willing to work for too little.

Commodities work both ways. If there is too much in the market it depreciates in value, too little and it rises in price. Except that labor is basically people. Are people commodities? They used to think they were about 150 years ago. I'd say we need to start respecting ourselves more and demanding more, but we also need to eat. The problem isn't at the bottom, it's at the top, where the rich are simply removing too much wealth from the system for no appreciable purpose. The end result is less wealth for the rest of us and a contraction of the economy since we simply can't buy what we need.

[dkf]

3. Isn't it the opposite way?

Workers don't demand much because if an American won't do it they will get someone else from another country to do it legally or illegally. So the rich get the extras because too much labor creates excess gains that float to the top.

We see the same problem...but I think of it as a product of the situation while you think of it as coerced.

[Hannah Bell]

4. more like, ownership of most commodities is centralized -- which is why the

owners are able to run up the prices.

whilst each worker "owns" only himself & can't get it together to act in concert with others.

[Sirveri]

5. That's basically what I was trying to say.

Is the situation coerced? I don't know, the capi's will always go for the lowest costs they can find, the issue is that they've coerced the governments to allow them to leave the borders to the detriment of the citizens who reside in those countries, and who the government is supposed to represent.

[Scuba]

6. A working class hero....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njG7p6CSbCU

Enjoy John Lennon celebrating the working class.