Your Money Is On the Table

If you don't have a union, you can't have it.

Get your money. (Photo: Getty)

The longshoremen’s strike that has shut down the east coast ports for the past few days has prompted the familiar chorus of gripes from people who never once thought about longshoremen prior to this strike, and never will after. “These manual laborers are making six figures a year, and they’re demanding a 77% raise! These greedy union guys are extorting us all!” the typical complaint goes.

Set aside, for a moment, the fact that the salary figures being tossed around aren’t even right. (Top full time wage for ILA members currently is just over $80K per year, and those making six figures work large amounts of overtime.) The dreary predictability of these objections go to the heart of the success of the American capitalist trick. You can think of the entire project of left wing economics as trying to get regular people to look up at the top of the economy and say, “It’s outrageous how much those rich people are stealing!” Instead, America has quite successfully trained the median person to look down the economic ladder and sneer at those below them. The biggest outrage is not the CEO in the mansion, but rather the working person who is trying to earn as much money as you despite not possessing what you think of as the proper credentials for doing so. If we could simply reorient the direction of everyone’s economic gaze, this would be a very different nation. Activists have been trying to do this for centuries with only very intermittent success.

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The public’s innate sense of what various workers “should” make is usually an impressionistic mishmash of unsupported assumptions resting in a lifelong sea of propaganda. Why do different jobs earn the salaries that they earn? Many people will say, first, that earnings rise according to how hard your job is, but a moment’s thought shows us that’s not true. If it were, sanitation workers and paramedics and soldiers would all be millionaires, and any job that allows you to sit in front of a computer all day would come with an automatic pay cut.

Then people will insist that we are paid based on how rare our skills are. This is, at least, truer: Highly trained neurosurgeons and professional basketball players do in fact make a good living. But this explanation falls short too, because it fails to account for how the really rich people make their money. The most efficient way to earn a lot of money is to start with a lot of money, and get paid interest on it. This is banking, this is finance, this is investing, in a nutshell. If you have a hundred million dollars and you invest it at 10%, you are earning ten million dollars a year without doing any work at all. And this is, in fact, a description of how truly rich people live! The reason charitable billionaires can never manage to give away money fast enough to remove themselves from the list of billionaires is that their money is invested and the money itself makes so much money that it grows faster than they can assemble their lists of proper charities to give it to.

Work makes a little money, but money makes a lot of money. Inequality is a system that perpetuates itself, no matter how well meaning all the nice rich folks are. An economic advantage will compound itself to ever greater economic advantages, which no amount of day to to day wage work will ever catch up with. The wealthiest people in the country generally combine an early advantage (say, being an educated white male in the United States of America who was able to go to Stanford) with the luck of being in the right place at the right time (say, being in Silicon Valley as the tech boom was taking off). Or, like all of the Waltons on the Forbes list, they just inherit the money and watch it grow.

Always been thus.

Anyone who is being honest can easily see that there is very little connection between hard work and wealth, under American capitalism. Every Horatio Alger-style story trotted out to illustrate the possibility of a rags-to-riches rise is mostly just evidence that such stories are rare enough to become legends. Marx is too clunky of a writer to crack the bestseller lists any time soon, but I do think that there is an achievable way to make our warped national attitude towards earnings a little healthier. Rather than thinking of salaries as some figures bestowed upon us by a harsh but just God of The Free Market, think of them instead as shares of what an enterprise produces. If you think of a business as “something that one guy owns,” it naturally paves the way for acceptance of the idea that it is natural that the one guy who owns it will earn most of the money, and all of the rest of us will just earn what he gives us. But if you think of a business as “the collective effort of everyone who works for it,” it makes much more sense for everyone to earn a fair share of the proceeds of that business. Doesn’t mean everyone needs to make an equal share, necessarily. The entry level workers might make less than the veteran workers, and those with more skill and responsibility might make more than those with less. There is nothing wrong with a system of financial incentives to promote better and more efficient work. But in the big picture, the business will make X amount of profits thanks to the work of all of the people there, and then those profits can be divided among the people who do the work in a way that is reasonable.

That is a very mild proposition, yet those who have tried to achieve it in America have been shot and beaten and fired and oppressed and smeared and lied about for more than a century. Unions say: We are the workers, we do the work that makes all of the money here, and we would like our fair share of the proceeds. And in companies with strong unions, this is exactly what happens. Periodically, strikes are necessary to demonstrate that the workers are serious about getting their share. The longshoremen are a vital part of a system of vital ports that move hundreds of billions of dollars worth of cargo. Without their work, the system fails. They will get their fair share. The United Auto Workers do the work that produces every single automobile that the Big Three automakers sell. They went on strike and got their fair share. The Teamsters who load and drive UPS trucks are the single most important people that allow that company to exist. They threatened to strike, and got their fair share. The WGA screenwriters come up with the ideas that make the movies that are what Hollywood sells. They went on strike, and got their fair share. Strikes, for the most part, are caused by employers, not workers. The employers want to check and see if the workers are still willing to fight for their share. Then you have to show them. It’s all part of the process.

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What is less appreciated about this process are all of the gains that go to working people for years and years after each strike. Union contracts, not guns, are the strongest tool that the working class has for seizing back economic power from the rich. Every time an employer is made to understand that its workers will shut it down unless they get their fair share, a union contract is signed that gives the workers an amount of money closer to the actual value that they produce than they would have otherwise gotten. If there is one single fact that I could magically make every working person in America understand, it is this: Without a union, without the ability to negotiate with your employer collectively, you are always leaving money on the table. Always. If you and your coworkers are not united into a single group you cannot negotiate as a single group and you cannot go on strike as a single group and therefore you lack the leverage to force your employer to pay you what you are worth and you enable them to instead pay you a lower amount, which you are forced to accept because you cannot impose a meaningful penalty on them for doing so. You have no union? You get less. This is a law of the workplace.

And where does that money that you leave on the table go? Some of it goes into your boss’s pocket and even more of it goes into the pockets of the really rich people who are rich enough to be the investors in the company. Your inability to take your fair share of the proceeds of your business is their gain. So you do the work but they get the money. Because you have no union, so you can’t make them give it to you.

There are strong moral and ideological reasons for everyone to join a union. But I would be satisfied if everyone joined a union for a much more pragmatic reason: Your money, that you made with your work, is right there on the table in front of you. Do you want to pick it up? You need a union. Or the rich people get it. That’s it. The people telling you that you don’t need a union are the same ones who will take that money off the table, and put it into their own pockets.

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More

• Related reading: We Have a Distribution Problem; Getting Comfortable With Illegal Strikes; Every Pay Bump Is an Admission of Guilt.

• Speaking of longshoremen—my book about the labor movement, “The Hammer,” has a section about the ILA in Charleston, South Carolina, that I have been thinking about a lot this week. They are awesome. Order the book and check it out. Or come talk with me about it: I’ll be speaking at the 38th annual Mother Jones Dinner in Springfield, IL on Saturday, October 12, and I’ll be speaking at the New York Society for Ethical Culture on Sunday, November 3. If you’d like me to come speak somewhere, email me.

• Here is a good thread listing mutual aid groups helping with disaster recovery after Hurricane Helene. I have not seen a listing for an ILA strike fund (please drop it in the comments, if there is one) but here is a place that you can donate to the IAM strike fund, for the Boeing workers on strike.