This is before the invention of aerobics: Sally Field leaps atop a
table in the middle of a factory and implores the overworked lady
workers to halt: They do. It is her most noble moment in a succession of
noble moments. Immediately, the angry white hands of men cover her body,
and haul her away, screaming. Can you scream with dignity? She does.
I am watching this movie, “Norma Rae,” on a TV in the back seat of
a limo, stalled in the late afternoon traffic somewhere between the
smokestacks of New York and the mediocrity of Philly. It is my outrage,
but not my limousine. I mean, I’m hitching back from a job, actually an
interviewing gig, my ride a snide gift from the limo’s previous
occupant, this quirky $500-an-hour divorce lawyer who says what America
really needs most right now is a good revolution to screw the gap
between rich and poor.
Too bad he left before the movie. I’m concerned too many folks think
The Gap is just a clothing store for kids. Meanwhile, this is something
of an oxymoronic experience, a Norma Rae video in a limo. Norma Rae
would never ride in a limo, would she? She’d be afraid of being
co-opted. Me, I’m practical. I was worried this gridlock will make me
miss dinner with The Union Guy, someone I really liked, someone I had
traveled to El Salvador with on a workers solidarity mission in my Rosa
Luxembourg progressive speech-writer days a decade ago. And I was also
thinking about transformation and transcendence, how Sally Field could
go from “The Flying Nun” to “Norma Rae” and become positively mythic.
What triumphant progress! I’m a union chick myself. Sixteen and shy,
I worked a supermarket checkout counter, RCIA Local 1242, $1.05 an hour,
to get away from my mom’s breakdown. I marveled at such sights as a
grown man parading through the produce department with string beans
poking from his fly — no lie! I cried when the storeowner, fat old Joe
LoPresti, bellowed at me apoplectically at the cash register in front of
a customer, for nothing.
I had teenage crushes on everybody: My flirty customer Jack Davidson,
the brazen red-haired college student who fell to his death from a
nurse’s dorm window one midnight. Our amazing shop steward Wayland
Goldston, a Southern black man whose Jewish grandfather ran a
plantation. Wayland gave us our first beers when we all rode to Newark
in his car for an election rally. And Phil Mannino, with his tight sandy
curls and his tight sweat-streaked undershirt and his small precise
hands stirring the vat of chocolate icing for eclairs up to his armpits.
And Ginger, the pert/strawberry blonde/freckled part-time cashier who
was a hooker from the army base nearby, the first hooker I had ever
known. And Artie Bruno, dairy manager, 21, all the housewives got to
pretend they seduced him. Well, he’d take me parking by Franklin Park
Lake in his black Chevy Impala … until I cried out in certain ruin,
which had more to do with what we didn’t do than what we HAD done.
Soon they stuck me in the supermarket office, a high glass booth
where I cashed checks and did the daily money report, a bookkeeper like
my mom had been. Some worldlier checker trained me to remember the order
of Over-rings, Bottles, and Coupons, by the phrase, “Older Boys Are
Cuter.” For a long time, they were, too.
Five times I’ve seen Norma Rae. Five times the same table scene makes
me cry. This time when I cry, the limo driver is discreet. He is, after
all, a veteran of odd trips, not only rock stars but apricot French
poodles needing diversion while their financially plush elderly matron
companions get groceries. Consequently, the limo driver doesn’t ask.
Never have I leapt atop a table and screamed, “ENOUGH!” For me,
“ENOUGH!” WAS NEVER ENOUGH. I always stuck around for the cold
hamburger. Who would have foreseen television supplanting vision? When
will we learn actual grievance procedures for our own lives? For Norma
Rae, her union was a path to betterment. For too many of us, though,
Union was just a town in New Jersey, or maybe, just another word for
sex.
I didn’t march in the
Labor Day
Parade this year, although I do belong to the National Writers
Union. I almost didn’t write about Labor Day at
all, but then my Internet friend,
Anita, a politically hip
astrologer in L.A. who also doubles as my advisor in my Queen of the
Moon
campaign,
sent me an e-mail captioned, “MILLENNIUM QUANDARY.” It was hard to
ignore, even if you dismiss it as mere leftist propaganda.
The fact is, many Americans are lulled by false reports of “budget
surpluses” at the federal, state, and local levels. We are deluded by
government boasts of prosperity as never before. How can the USA have a
surplus when there’s a staggering national debt in the gazillions?
Prosperity as never before comes at a price, in budgets balanced on the
backs of the poor. This abundance is true for some, cruelly untrue for
others. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer. Always.
And we have not even mentioned NAFTA. Job loss is massive. “More than
232,375 U.S. workers have been certified as of May 1999 under one
special NAFTA unemployment program, NAFTA Transitional Adjustment
Assistance. These workers represent only a fraction of the total U.S.
job loss due to NAFTA,” according to Public Citizen Global Trade Watch’s
website, which
goes on to make these even more shocking revelations:
- “In a historic reversal, the U.S. has developed a trade deficit
with Mexico since NAFTA. The $1.7 billion U.S. trade surplus with Mexico
in 1993 has been transformed into an annual trade deficit of $17.5
billion in 1996.” - “The U.S. trade deficit with Canada has increased from $10.8 to $22.8
billion over the same period. Three quarters of this NAFTA trade deficit
is in the automotive sector alone.”
As Anita writes, “How can we be blue about the lacks in our own
personal life, when this is the condition of the planet? It’s selfish to
think of ourselves when this is how life is here, how people suffer.
It’s important we AIM ourselves and our life at rectifying this:”
- MARX WAS RIGHT: UN REPORT SHOWS RICH RICHER, POOR POORER
How bad is it? According to a recent study, the 225 richest people in
the world hold wealth equal to that possessed by the poorest 50 percent
of the entire human race.
The three top ultra-rich people, including Bill Gates, own more than
the Gross National Product of the 48 poorest nations combined.
These sordid facts were publicized in a United Nations report on the
world’s growing income gap. They illustrate once more that the world’s
reality is right in line with Marxist concepts that are 150 years old.
The report’s authors in the UN Development Program in The Hague,
Netherlands, certainly didn’t plan to vindicate Marx. But they would
have had to turn reality on its head to show otherwise.
Of the 173 countries in the study, 70 to 80 have lower per-capita
incomes than they did 10 or 30 years ago. People in Africa consume 20
percent less than they did 25 years ago.
So the poor are getting poorer as the rich are getting richer. Or, as
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote in “The Communist Manifesto” in
1848, under capitalism “pauperism develops more rapidly than population
and wealth.”
To illustrate the extent of the poverty, the report states that more
than 1 billion people suffer “human deprivation and stunted lives marked
by illiteracy, inadequate income and exclusion from the social
mainstream.” UN Development Program Administrator James Gustave Speth
wrote in his introduction that “it is scandalous that the poor are
unable to consume enough to meet even their most basic needs.”
WHO’S TO BLAME?
The UN report pointed out that the 20 percent of the world’s
population living in the wealthiest countries — what socialists would
accurately describe as imperialist countries — consume 86 percent of
the world’s goods and services. The poorest 20 percent consume only 1.3
percent. “Not everyone has been invited to the party,” said Speth.
While this last figure broadly illustrates the horrible inequalities
of life in a post-Soviet world dominated by the capitalist market, it
fails to target the criminals who thrive on the exploitation of human
labor. In that sense, the report misses what should be the most
important finding of them all — namely, who’s to blame for all of this?
The big-business media in the United States, to the extent they
covered the report at all, emphasized this “consumption” disparity. In
effect they blamed the entire population of the imperialist countries
for consuming too much, especially items that are not necessities. At
the same time, they quoted “experts” who blamed the government of Third
World countries for “corruption” and “bad policies.”
In truth, the pursuit of ever greater profit by the class of
billionaire owners of the big banks and corporations controlling the
global economy has impoverished such a huge section of humanity. If that
class were removed from power by the working class, it wouldn’t take
very long to begin to bridge the gap.
The report says extending access to basic education to everyone in
the world would cost an estimated $6 billion annually. Universal access
to clean water and sanitation would cost $12 billion, and basic health
and nutrition, $13 billion. Just these basic, no-frills changes would
dramatically improve the lives of a billion people.
The money required is really peanuts.
By contrast, $780 billion is spent on the arms industry — most of it
by the United States or spent for U.S. weapons. And some $435 billion is
spent yearly just on advertising to keep up the consumption of items
like tobacco, alcohol, cosmetics and other non-necessities in the richer
countries.
This money is controlled by the big capitalist enterprises. They rake
in huge profits convincing people to buy things that are not only
wasteful, but deadly to health and well-being.
But even this doesn’t tell the whole story. Consumption is relative
and extremely unequal. Within the richest capitalist countries, at least
37 million workers are unemployed, 100 million people are homeless and
nearly 200 million have a life expectancy of less than 60 years. In the
United States, nearly one-sixth of the population lives in poverty
despite the high per-capita income.
“Imagine,” Anita concludes, “imagine l00 million homeless in the
wealthiest lands. HOME-LESS. NO roof. And we worry because we have no
sweetheart. No cuddling? No cash to ‘eat out?'”
Think about it in between watching the commercials for useless
products clogging each week’s episode of Ally McBeal.
Next month, activists will converge upon Washington, D.C., for the
Great March,
for Dignity and Amnesty, Saturday, Oct. 16, 1999, in support of amnesty
for all undocumented immigrants: “For the last decade,” says the Labor
Notes website, “immigrants have found themselves under constant attack.
Documented immigrants face deportation for minor infractions, along with
constant harassment and deteriorating conditions at work. The situation
is much worse for undocumented immigrants. Lured to the United States by
the promise of high wages, immigrants often find themselves working in
unbearable conditions for very little pay and no recourse to the law.”
The march is being co-sponsored by dozens of organizations including
the American Friends Service Committee, Asociaci — n Tepeyac, FLOC, Labor
Notes, LIUNA, National Council of La Raza, and the UNITE Garment Workers
Justice Center.
In case you haven’t noticed, Corporate America benefits greatly from
the mix of a large undocumented workforce and draconian anti-immigration
laws.
In other words, business as usual.
