Tapsearch Com EditorWorkers are the core of society (LINK)
July 18th 2008 17:10
By Ray Tapajna, editor and artist at Tapart News and Art that Talks-
Sources include Jacque Maritain, Catholic Worker, Thomas Jefferson and others related to human dignity in the workday.
Here we hope to convey something new related to human dignity to exercise our social conscience. It is about the missing parts in our philosophies and religions related to the world of work.
No matter how free we think individuals should be, there needs to be a creed that governs our actions and especially when we deal with one another in the work day. Labor and workers are the core of society. The U.S. Constitution played a big part in establishing a creed but over the years, revisionists have changed its meaning in many ways.
Today the freedom of individual choice is number one. Supposedly, we can do anything we want as long as we do not hurt another person in the process. The part where the individual exists for the community is left out of the picture. The practical way is to live the Biblical principle of - Doing unto others as you would have them do to you. However, experience tells us that this is a distant second to individual free choice. In our work day nothing is more neglected than what happens to others when we shop for our goods. We know very little about the origin of the product or what sacrifices were made to bring the product to market. We do not think about the workers somewhere who are working for only pennies a day providing our subsistence. We hear about wage slaves and child labor but really do not take it in as being part of our lives.
We have Catholic BIshops who miss the point about the dignity of labor when they defend the illegal immigration in saying - Our economy and communities depend on the illegal migrate workers. The Bishops statement says they bus our dishes, pick our vegetables, clean our offices and homes, and care forour children among other jobs. There is no statements relating to Rerum Novarum that calls for the responsiblities of owners to workers and workers to owners. In essence the Bishops maintain that an underclass can serve an upper class in an unfair working environment. They say nothing about using the underclass for selfish purposes. Nothing is said about the millions of workers in America who have lost their jobs with the bottom line being a working poor class in the USA with the middle class thrashed. Nothing is said about the more than 4,000 U.S. factories that were moved to Mexico in the name of so called Free Trade where workers only averaged 62 cents an hour in the Maquiladora factories sponsored and funded by the U.S. Federal Government since 1956. Nothing is said about Mexican workers refusing to take these jobs as President Bush says , the Mexican workers come here to take jobs U.S. workers will not do. It is obvious, U.S. workers have not adjusted to working jobs that do not balance out with what it takes to exist in our U.S. economy.
In high tech, we hire workers from distant places who come here and work around the clock for six months to a year at wages about one third of what it takes an American worker to survive. Many of the workers send the money they make back to their families in another land or take it with them when they return home. President Clinton even had the White House computer systems redone by workers from India this way.
As consumers we have missed the boat. As long as the price is right we buy it accordingly even though we know we are not only consumers but workers too.
We still shop our way out of our jobs and wonder why our economy is in a mess.
We will go into it more in our next post related to labor and workers being the stepchildren of philosophy and religion with the priority of getting back to real local value added economy and decentralized government. Workers have to be the core of any society. They can not be tools of a distant corporation in a global economic arena. The workday has to be composed for the workers and not for entities like trans national corporation that act as a person. We know there is no such thing.
Sources include Jacque Maritain, Catholic Worker, Thomas Jefferson and others related to human dignity in the workday.
Here we hope to convey something new related to human dignity to exercise our social conscience. It is about the missing parts in our philosophies and religions related to the world of work.
No matter how free we think individuals should be, there needs to be a creed that governs our actions and especially when we deal with one another in the work day. Labor and workers are the core of society. The U.S. Constitution played a big part in establishing a creed but over the years, revisionists have changed its meaning in many ways.
Today the freedom of individual choice is number one. Supposedly, we can do anything we want as long as we do not hurt another person in the process. The part where the individual exists for the community is left out of the picture. The practical way is to live the Biblical principle of - Doing unto others as you would have them do to you. However, experience tells us that this is a distant second to individual free choice. In our work day nothing is more neglected than what happens to others when we shop for our goods. We know very little about the origin of the product or what sacrifices were made to bring the product to market. We do not think about the workers somewhere who are working for only pennies a day providing our subsistence. We hear about wage slaves and child labor but really do not take it in as being part of our lives.
We have Catholic BIshops who miss the point about the dignity of labor when they defend the illegal immigration in saying - Our economy and communities depend on the illegal migrate workers. The Bishops statement says they bus our dishes, pick our vegetables, clean our offices and homes, and care forour children among other jobs. There is no statements relating to Rerum Novarum that calls for the responsiblities of owners to workers and workers to owners. In essence the Bishops maintain that an underclass can serve an upper class in an unfair working environment. They say nothing about using the underclass for selfish purposes. Nothing is said about the millions of workers in America who have lost their jobs with the bottom line being a working poor class in the USA with the middle class thrashed. Nothing is said about the more than 4,000 U.S. factories that were moved to Mexico in the name of so called Free Trade where workers only averaged 62 cents an hour in the Maquiladora factories sponsored and funded by the U.S. Federal Government since 1956. Nothing is said about Mexican workers refusing to take these jobs as President Bush says , the Mexican workers come here to take jobs U.S. workers will not do. It is obvious, U.S. workers have not adjusted to working jobs that do not balance out with what it takes to exist in our U.S. economy.
In high tech, we hire workers from distant places who come here and work around the clock for six months to a year at wages about one third of what it takes an American worker to survive. Many of the workers send the money they make back to their families in another land or take it with them when they return home. President Clinton even had the White House computer systems redone by workers from India this way.
As consumers we have missed the boat. As long as the price is right we buy it accordingly even though we know we are not only consumers but workers too.
We still shop our way out of our jobs and wonder why our economy is in a mess.
We will go into it more in our next post related to labor and workers being the stepchildren of philosophy and religion with the priority of getting back to real local value added economy and decentralized government. Workers have to be the core of any society. They can not be tools of a distant corporation in a global economic arena. The workday has to be composed for the workers and not for entities like trans national corporation that act as a person. We know there is no such thing.
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It also ignores the teaching of Rerum Novarum which has standards for workers and owners.
They also accept the status quo while at the same time ignore the causes behind the situation. They present band-aid solutions for the effects without talking about the real direct causes.
They could have listen to many Catholic Bishops in Central America and Mexico about the conditions related to so called Free Trade. See what ten Mexican Bishops say at Bizarre Politics Com / NAFTA Cultural Death
and What Central American Bishops say about CAFTA and Globalization
In our city, where temporary help offices were once scarce, there are now more than 250 offices and they send out circulars to businesses saying things like
" Eliminate up to 35 percent of company payroll..."
" ... our dispatch offices can have laborers on site as early as requested, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week..."
See out post Getting a job one day at a time at $5.15 an hour in the hope a temporary job will turn permanent some day at Bizarre Politics Com