Marching for a Better Future

It was a rare and exciting sight, an event of historic proportion. On April 15, 2008, California’s beleaguered labor force took to the streets. United for better jobs, some 300,000 unionists, construction workers, longshoremen, and baggage carriers, shot to the offensive to protect the middle class citadel.

This unprecedented ensemble of unions, representing firemen, janitors, and more, called their demonstration “Hollywood to the Docks March for Good Jobs.” The three day trek was the first of its kind in modern times but a centuries-old battle between the interests of employees and employers; uber-capitalists and consumers.

Indeed, as recorded in Howard Zinn’s popular book, A People’s History of the United States (The New Press, 2003):

In 1835, twenty mills went on strike to reduce the workday from thirteen and a half hours to eleven hours; to get cash wages instead of company script, and to end fines for lateness. Fifteen hundred children and parents went on strike (p. 170).

Ultimately, they won twelve-hour workdays, nine on Saturdays. During the next two years there were 140 strikes in the eastern region of the U.S. The strikes helped forge more humane conditions that workers still enjoy today.

It’s more important to note that it wasn’t corporate mercy that brought about change; it was collective opposition by you, the people.

For sure, business wants as much productivity as it can get with the least amount of wages and benefits expended. Workers want as much family time as possible with as much recompense and benefits to care for their families.

Corporate interests and people interests are diametrically opposed. In this scheme of opposites, consumers fall on the side of the worker, for they are the workers, and they want as much for their hard earned cash as possible.

Yet, in today’s world, it’s often hard to discern between one side of the fence and the other. The pockets of some consumers burn hot until they cast all their dough into the troves of the big corps.

There is little of no demand in exchange from them. No requirement that corporations invest locally; repairing infrastructure, building community centers for the kids, and hiring those within the same zip code. Nationally, they don’t demand that their jobs, their neighbors’ jobs, and their friends’ jobs remain in America. They simply fork over their spoils for little in exchange.

The marchers want better job security and benefits that rise along with inflation. They realize that it is their hands and their money that have made the corporation.

The middle class is shrinking with depression-era likeness. Millions are losing their homes due to corporate corruption. The once friendly bank is now a rapacious, multi-national corporation that claws ever closer to the foreclosed home; ever so ready to add to the swelling homeless population, and the prisons they build.

It is the corporations—those voracious beasts—that dispatch armies of lobbyist to the halls of Congress to bump your vote. It is the corporations that pollute the land, threaten the ecology and blatantly renege on pre-paid health care insurance when one is ill stricken.

Yes, this was an historic march, not just for Californians but for the country, for you and yours and me and mine. This was a march for the nation, for the world against a ravenous, diabolical fiend that will eat you out of house and home if you don’t tame him.

Sources:
KNBC, March 15, 2008

California Budget Project Report, March 2008

Realfacts.com (Housing market crash)

To reach Dortell, please e-mail him at dortellwilliams@yahoo.com. Please also leave your e-mail address with any comments so that Dortell may contact you. Thank you for your interest!