The Weekly Screed (#547)

It’s all about talking back to The Boss
by David Benjamin

BROOKLYN — This week, when the Supreme Court’s gang of five corpos ruled that 1.6 million longsuffering women employees at Walmart should shut the hell up, go back to work and suffer a little longer, I thought about the Blues, specifically a Luther Dixon classic that goes

Big boss man, don’t you hear me when I call?
You ain’t so big, you just tall, that’s all…

These two elegant lines of verse embody the plight of those Walmart ladies and harken back at least 150 years in the struggle of the American wage-earner. Although composed in the Fifties by Luther Dixon and Al Smith, this couplet recalls the work songs sung by ex-slaves in the early years after Emancipation, songs that were the birth of the Blues. My favorite is a simple, insouciant refrain, dense with innuendo:

Workin’ on the railroad — a dollar and a dime a day.
Give my woman the dollar, and throw the dime away.

From these steel-driving rhythms also came the first legends of post-Civil War black America — stories of workers. Best known was John Henry, who inspired at least 80 different songs. Another was “Stagger Lee,” a mythic cotton-bale stacker on the Mississippi docks, in New Orleans or Memphis — whose real earnings were not that “dollar and a dime a day” but what he could turn that pittance into by gambling and cheating. John Henry was a tragic hero, Stagger Lee a prideful villain, but they were both fathers of the Blues, and godfathers of blue-collar America.

I sometimes think that if you don’t get the Blues, you’ll never grasp, appreciate or respect the American labor movement.

This is because when that singer addresses The Boss with that defiant taunt, “you just tall, that’s all,” he’s not really calling out The Boss. He’s just hummin’ to himself and wishing that he was truly free enough — without fear of losing his dangerous job with its miserable wage — to speak his mind and claim his manhood. That’s the Blues.

Throughout our history, workers have sung that lament, afraid to talk back and bound for the bread line if they dared demand anything as cushy as a six-day workweek. The labor movement, dating back beyond Haymarket Square in 1886, fought some 70 years — against bosses usually backed by the government and often by the U.S. Army — for an idea called “workers rights,” which was not limned by the burgesses and slaveholders who framed the Constitution. It wasn’t ‘til mid-20th century that labor unions became respectable enough to exert genuine impact on the U.S. economy.

The impact was impressive. In three brief decades of labor’s ascendancy, America’s hourly wage-earners formed the largest middle-class in the history of the world. U.S. wealth distribution was more equal than ever before. Prosperity flourished. Capitalists entered into open discussions of “the social responsibility of business.” Employees were kept, willingly, by one company for entire careers. Corporate stability reached unprecedented levels. Employees were loyal, because they got decent wages, regular raises, benefits, pensions and — through the union — the right to talk back to the boss, not just to bitch but to suggest better ways of getting the job done. And management listened. Fairness — one of America’s most cherished and least practiced values — was so rampant that even America’s ex-slave minority got a piece of the action, with the passage in the mid-Sixties of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. For a while, the Civil War was over, all over again. (But now we’ve got it back.)

The backlash of The Boss began in 1980, with the rise of Ronald Reagan, a repentant union leader who declared a war on workers’ rights that’s now entering its fourth decade and nearing total victory. Once almost a third of the private workforce, union members today are less than 7 percent, and shrinking. Union numbers are higher among public employees — which is why, today, Republican apparatchiks like governors Scott Walker (Wisconsin), John Kasich (Ohio) and Rick Scott (Florida) are burning their political capital and risking their careers in a national push to destroy unionism among garbagemen, teachers, social workers, firefighters and cops.

If the war is to be won, these relicts of socialism must be crushed, too. These are the only people left who can still fight for a decent wage, propose a safer workplace, stand up for their co-workers and talk back to The Boss.

You can’t at Walmart. Ask for more money; they’ll fire you. Refuse a transfer to a city 200 miles away; they’ll fire you. Complain that the guys are getting paid more than the gals; they’ll fire you. Decline to work an extra six hours without overtime pay; they’ll fire you. Go to the john twice in one shift; they’ll fire you. And as Security marches you out the door the day you get your pink slip, you can’t even call The Boss a cheap bastard piker; he’ll call the police on you, for inciting a riot.

And the cops will come. They don’t want to be fired either.

Talk to management nowadays and they’ll remind you that there’s a bright side to the death of Big Labor and the dwarfing of a middle-class that has — literally — not gotten a raise in 20 years. You see, there’s been this big uptick in “productivity.”.

Trouble is, anyone who actually works in America, for The Boss, knows the real definition of “productivity.” It’s how much extra work you can make a person do — for fear of losing this crummy job and putting her kids to bed hungry — without having to pay her one extra penny. And the beauty part: she can’t complain. She doesn’t dare.

You got me workin’, Boss man, workin’ round the clock.
I want a drink of water, but you won’t let Jimmy stop.
Justice Thomas, don’t you hear me when I call?…