by MARGARET KIMBELEY
Director of Air France in Orly Pierre Plissonnier (left) and Air France Human Resources Director Xavier Broseta scale a fence after several hundred angry employees invaded the airline’s offices during a meeting Monday, October 5, 2015. PHOTO/New York Post
“What Americans think of as labor unrest is welcome elsewhere in the world.”
Two Air France executives fled a righteously angry mob at a meeting meant to announce the cut of 2,900 jobs from the airline. The men had their clothes ripped off and climbed a fence to escape workers unwilling to give up their livelihoods without a fight. Aside from the fact that the incident was caught on camera, it was not an uncommon occurrence in France. Workers have kidnapped their bosses, booby trapped factories, and dumped pigs and manure when they want to make it clear they will not accept economic insecurity.
On the other side of the ocean, American workers are barely surviving, in part because they lack the class consciousness which permeates the politics of countries like France. That absence is not accidental, it has been deliberately inculcated into the American mind by the ruling classes and by racist sentiment.
Consider that the rest of the world honors workers on May 1st, May Day, in commemoration of events which took place in Chicago in 1886. Despite having made that contribution to history, Americans celebrate Labor Day. Workers do get a day away from their jobs, but the holiday says nothing about the history of struggle. That is why it was created, to make certain that Americans didn’t connect themselves with their own radicalism.
Anyone who depends on wages for a living is a worker. The collar may be blue or it may be white. Whether a task is carried out on a computer or by hand or with machinery, dependence on the ability to earn a wage is the very definition of a working person.
Instead of accepting this obvious truth, most Americans have fallen prey to identifying themselves as middle class. Those are the two deadliest words in the lexicon. They denote nothing except a desire to conform and feel accepted by people who aren’t at all concerned about the lives of working people. The term middle class is defined however one wants and is consequently meaningless and a stumbling block to solidarity.
Real wages haven’t risen in 40 years. Only the already flush1% of the population have experienced any gains. Wage theft is rampant and the only growth in employment has been among the low wage job sector. Yet any attack on working people is diminished with talk of the amorphous yet ubiquitous middle class.
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