Robyn E. Blumner
By Robyn E. Blumner
St. Petersburg Times Columnist
“Am a Man” was the slogan of 1,300 striking black sanitation workers in Memphis in 1968. Their grievances were many, but chief among them was that their wages were so meager they lived below the poverty line.
On April 4, 41 years ago last evening, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. He was in town to help the strikers gain recognition of their union, and his epic “I’ve been to the mountaintop” speech was a labor rally.
Dr. King is remembered as America’s greatest civil rights leader, but the man was a towering labor leader as well. He clearly connected the dots between the immorality of racial inequality and the economic injustices inflicted on working men and women of all colors. It was the same struggle: to demand through collective action one’s individual worth and dignity.
One of the great labor speeches in American history is King’s 1961 address to the AFL-CIO. In it, King reflected on the grand work of the labor movement. He said that in response to the “organized misery” of sweatshops and the notion that capital may “act without restraints and without conscience,” the worker unionized and by doing so had “constructed the means by which a fairer sharing of the fruits of his toil had to be given to him.”
How sad that in the intervening years King’s message to workers has been lost. Worker solidarity has given way to an every-man-for-himself ethic that has helped to strip labor of the influence it once had.
No surprise then that America’s prosperity over the past 30 years has not been shared MORE
The column was first published in the on 04/02/2009.
Posted April 8, 2009 at 9:40 am, in From the News
April 8th, 2009 at 6:34 pm
The future of US labor is dim unless we re-industrialize. Free trade of products and commodities means that we must compete internationally based mainly upon price, and labor costs is normally the greatest cost component of most products and commodities. The country with the lowest labor cost then gets the product sale, manufacturing jobs, and the foreign exchange currency to manufacture these products. Free Trade benefits the US importers and US distributors of foreign made products for US average citizen’s consumption with less expensive products, but at the cost of losing jobs in the USA to make these products. If we had innovative products that foreigners did not have, then we could demand higher prices for those products, and pay higher wages to the US employees making those products.
If we cannot compete on lower labor costs, then we need to be competitive internationally through other areas such as superior technology. We could make our educational system create many more medical doctors, scientists and engineers (rather than graduates other degrees) who must also become much better educated, much more intelligent, and otherwise much more superior to any foreign scientist and/or foreign engineer in order to design, create, innovate, and produce new technical products that foreigners do not have, so that the foreigners will then buy these new products from us, in exchange for their gold and currency. Only if our products are superior can we export these products in return for their foreign payment (gold and US dollars) to the USA.
We need to create a demand and provide more financial incentive for our students to major in the medical, technical and scientific subjects that are needed to re-industrialize the USA and improve our economy. We need to return to scientific and technical excellence in our education systems that we essentially destroyed in the past few decades, because we can only export technology if our products and technology services available for export are superior to those available anywhere else in the world, and/or at least superior to the services available in that particular foreign country. According to the National Science Foundation and the National Society of Professional Engineers, only about 5% of the current college students in the USA studying for a degree in science, medicine, mathematics or engineering are US citizens. In the Asia the vast majority of the college students are majoring in science or engineering. We need to increase the percentage of USA citizen college students studying science and engineering from 5% to more than 60%, in order to emulate the economic successes of the Asian countries.
If we had greatly superior engineers, medical doctors, and scientists we could then export scientific and engineering services to foreign nations in return for their currency and gold in order to improve our balance of trade. These services have to be provided by doctors, scientists and engineers who are much superior to any foreign educated doctors, scientists and engineers, or the foreigners will use their home grown medical, scientific and engineering talent and not buy the services of US doctors, scientists and engineers.
Our computer programming technology and expertise (ala Microsoft etc.) has helped our balance of payments considerably in the past, but the lack of technical education in this country today has reduced and will soon totally destroy this export capability. The foreign countries have become better than the USA at creating new computer software programs, since the USA has chosen to de-emphasize technical and scientific education in our universities.
Visit the Texas Medical Center (MD Anderson) and witness the percentage of women wearing Burkas to get a clue as to the percentage of foreign medical service income is received at the Texas Medical Center. I do not believe that any of these women wearing Burkas are US citizens. Foreign currency paid to our US located Medical Doctors, Laboratories and Hospitals improves our foreign trade balance. Most foreigners believe that US educated medical doctors are superior to their own in-country educated medical doctors.
Engineers who are working in Foreign Countries and sending (most of) their dollars home to the USA improves our balance of trade. In the past, foreigners believed that US educated and trained Engineers were superior to their in-country educated Engineers. This advantage has disappeared since the USA stopped emphasizing engineering, science, and technical education in our Universities.