Outsource Labor Day to China

Andy Borowitz hacks honey with a sharp wit. His short tweets that regularly grace our mailbox notes that American labor has been outsourced elsewhere, notably in China so the traditional barbecue this day, he announced, will be in the outskirt of Beijing. He adds that we shall follow it up with Thanksgiving Day in India, and we will celebrate it by phone, so be prepared to see (turkey in curry?) something else on the menu!

This is comedy with a tart taste, which is quite different from the venomous political rant of the right, and the inane liberal whining of the left. There is going to be a lot of ranting and whining this Labor Day as summer comes to an end and the political campaign season intensifies.

Labor’s image in the United States is sanitized from its rough beginnings, particularly the Chicago Haymarket riot/massacre when a bomb blew up at a workers march, catching eight police officers and several civilians down from friendly fire in the melee, ensuing in a highly publicized prosecution of known anarchists, a black eye in U.S. jurisprudence, with the execution of four and the suicide of one. Prosecution conceded that none of the accused had anything to do with the bomb that triggered the mayhem, but no matter.

The Haymarket incident resulted in the International May Day commemoration but Cleveland distanced the nation by getting Congress to pass a law mandating all States to observe the first Monday of September as Labor Day.

The power of labor unions in America flamed during the industrial era when productive manufacturing industries fueled by World War II led the economy, but the financial market subsequently took the other markets into globalization; labor unions shifted out of the factories to public sector employee membership. Neo-cons zero in on the entrenched collective bargaining gains of teachers (but not the police) as the culprit in the failure to balance public sector budgets.

The CNMI labor force is solely in the public sector (except PSS’ phobia of teachers’ union) since workers had no chance to organize during the garment industry days, and a drive to unionize hotel workers failed. Unions do not smell good in Commonwealth fresh airs; the patronage nature of politics will not allow employees, civil service eligible or not, to go against the wishes of patrons.

Thus, only CNMI government employees commemorate Labor Day, if at all. In U.S. mining, farming, manufacturing, et al, labor classes disappeared long ago in the financial system of our current economy. They are employees of corporations creating phantom wealth. Fishing has become recreational, and farming is a gentleman’s preoccupation with docile plantation help from exploited import labor. We do produce half of China’s soybean import but I suspect, that has more to do with balance of trade rather than China’s failure to produce its own. Our limping visitors’ industry survives on the roulette of revolving owners but any earnings fly out faster than it arrives. Local income derives from Uncle Sam’s apron, and no amount of casino investment is going to resuscitate the old guy from its debt-ridden internal hemorrhaging.

The United States’ unemployment rate is high. We outsource labor to where it is cheapest to produce consumer goods for the U.S. market, leave menial labor and demanding farm work to immigrants, ignore untrained workers in the technology and the metaphors of the information age, gamble on jaded stock markets, equate jobs-livelihood-profession-vocation as the same, and have government service as the tolerated unproductive sector. That, or the young join the armed services and are senseless fodder for irrational wars, hang on to scholarships available in the public sector, and when everything else fails, angrily but surreptitiously take on the dole made available by the nation’s social net.

Returning to manufacturing of consumer goods is not cost effective. Failure to innovate left Detroit’s gas-guzzling automobile industry biting the dust behind Japan, Korea and now, China, but American ingenuity in energy conservation and other green industries is patently at the cutting edge, and if we have the humility enough to forego American hegemony and imperialism, we might partner with the two emergent economies of China and India, not for heaping more phantom wealth unto our side of the ledger, but to really deal with a planetary economy of sustainable resource utilization, democratic production schemes, and equitable distribution of goods and services.

A major shift needs to happen if we labor in that direction, getting priorities and decision-making processes out of Wall Street, including, alas, our banking systems that lost sight of their function as a medium of exchange rather than as merciless lords who subjugate the general public with usurious fees for services.

We said a mouthful, but then, it is Labor Day! The rants and whining of politicos this day will not compare to ours. Obama might even have something worth listening to, but half of us can’t get past his name, let alone, the color of his skin. Beijing BBQ, anyone?