WORKER’S PRIDE?

I was never a great one for the idea of the Dignity of Labor. It seemed like one of those patronizing Victorian concepts like the Noble Savage and I wanted nothing to do with it. To be absolutely truthful, I was not especially keen on hard, dirty, manual work in any shape or form. In my youth, I had worked in factories, kitchens, and even dug up the roads for the local council. I saw first hand the disdain with which the fat cats treated their employees and their employees’ pride, and quickly realized that any measure of dignity was not a gift handed down from on-high but a prize fought-for and hard-won at the grass roots by organization and the collective power of trade unions official or otherwise. Why am choosing this moment to state the obvious? Just because, now and again, the obvious needs a bit of stating. Especially at a time when a power elite that has already reduced to wealth to an abstraction and devalues labor as a disposable commodity – and dares to call it necessary austerity – but simultaneously a new seismic class-struggle spreads across Europe, the Middle East, and (I hope) Middle America, and the fight for decency, dignity, and pride, plus a socially acceptable income, healthcare, education – and all that should follow with humanity and civilization – is rejoined.

Click here for hardworking Beefheart and Cooder

The secret word is Unity