What would Plantation owners do without workers? It has never been a mystery that workers create wealth. But in order to give impetus to big business, they call themselves job creators. Technology and automation demand for educated labor has not changed needs for workers.
Big businesses hijacked the credit of small businesses and papa or mama businesses providing essential services. Small businesses usually start from their family before expanding to outside workers; if they can no longer cope with more demand for their goods and services.
However, salaries for workers affect profit. The more money you pay for workers’ welfare, the less profit for business. One of the reasons papa and mama businesses pay family members before they are forced to hire outside workers. Since the wealthy see decent salary as cutting into profit, they attack unionized workers’ demands for better working conditions. It is Unions that fought for higher salaries, profit sharing, working hours and that abolished child labor.
Profit, no matter how excessive, has never been a bad word, President Reagan reminded us when it was revealed that contractors sold a hammer that cost one dollar for hundred dollars to the Government. Infact, Boesky and Milken of Wall Street celebrated that Greed is Good. Wall Street cannot speculate without the production of Workers from plantations and factories that are essential in order to create wealth for the party of conservatives on the Right.
The rise of extremists on the Right and Left of the political spectrum is not by coincidence or accident. While the left became complacent after the election of liberals in Europe and America, the conservatives saw a threat to their hold on Economic Power. The extremists on the Right never left or felt any remorse for the ways their fathers exploited serfs and slaves.
They realize that the most efficient way of putting workers back into their place before Unions’ power is through political means. The heated and sometimes deadly argument between the so-called Progressive and Moderate is nothing short of control and seizing the Political Economy. If you fight for the welfare of workers, you are labeled a liberal and those fighting for big businesses are now called conservative “Moderates”.
Therefore, the easiest ways to riches ever, was the cheapest labor of the serfs and slaves’ services. Since most parts of the world have progressed beyond slave labor that created the greatest wealth on earth; threats of subjugation, force and violence are coming back to assert cheap labor by putting workers in “their place” like the “good old days”.
This was recently demonstrated by the contradictory positions of businesses during COVID-19. When Governments mandated masks in enclosed public places, the fear that people would not patronize small and big businesses made owners oppose it. When they realized that vaccinations and masks assured prevention of infections, encouraged people to go out, work; businesses enforced masks to patronize them more, since folks felt safe.
Nevertheless, the choice between covid-19 mandates to get vaccinated or the risk of death is between those who value their lives and those who prefer their freedom. It has turned political between liberals and conservatives. The poor have little choice than to work so that they don’t starve to death. They are forced to risk their lives to work, even for minimum wage. They are rewarded as “heroes”. Even those that previously refused an increase in wages, pay more.
Desperate labor is also true of people from African and South American countries risking their lives and those of their children to cross into Europe and North America at any cost. African and South American migrants looking for any jobs, underemployed or not, fall into this pool of cheap labor to increase maximum profits for businesses and plantation owners risking lives.
Asian and African nurses, doctors and technicians made up a high disproportionate number of deaths at the height of covid-19 pandemic overseas. Many were educated professionals that understood the risk they faced during the raging pandemic at its worst. Even businesses have come to terms that people are not as desperate as the days when the desperate poor exposed themselves to poisons in the mines and plantations. Youths in poor developing countries would risk anything to get paid anywhere.
The main contention about immigration today between those for and against is not about legal and illegal migrants but about control and movement of labor in the plantations. Migrants are workers used to create wealth but their movement has to be controlled into needed areas and communities to create wealth. Otherwise, oversupply would decrease wages for those immigrants already in place.
Therefore, do not be surprised that businesses and union workers oppose migrants flooding their communities. By keeping migrants Illegal, it allows businesses to pay them starving wages as non-union members. The same businesses that pay them starving wages, would call authorities on them if they make demands on their low pay status on the job.
Taxes are used for infrastructure beyond the means of an individual or business, to build schools and hospitals for educated workers available to all, especially businesses. Production of Immunization from childhood diseases to old age, drugs and equipment usually subsidized by the Government are more accessible to the well informed and wealthy.
While we all realize the importance of Government Taxes for a peaceful and civilized community, for the salaries of teachers, police, firefighters and the Army, that are more useful to the powerful than the poor. The poor have to beg to “serve and protect” them. The wealthy’s problem is when the poor cheat on welfare by taking pennies more than they are entitled to or depend on welfare to take care of their kids at home.
Entitlement by mothers no matter how young their children, are labeled as Welfare Queens. But David Lewis of Canada told us that the real Corporate Bums are the big corporations and the wealthy that refuse to pay their fair share of taxes. They are sheltered by taxes paid by the middle class and others.
Most countries have come to accept the role of women immediately after childbirth giving them family paid leave. Covid-19 has demonstrated that people value their lives more than take the risk of exposure. Yet, you have unscrupulous businesses exploiting poor workers’ desperation at home and abroad.
Farouk Martins Aresa @oomoaresa
