History Teachers Undermine Organized Labor

I asked a young friend to read my recent AC article titled "Illegal Immigration: A Simple Solution," and I asked him to tell me what he thought. He objected to my statement in the article that American workers had been on a trajectory toward poverty for thirty-plus years. He said he was an American laborer and he was doing just fine, keeping up with his mortgage payment, two car payments, boat payment, furniture payment, and maxed-out credit cards. The conversation that ensued between us provided the inspiration for this article.

No, I am not going to bore you with the actual conversation, replete with examples from my forty years in the workplace. Nor am I going to relay the growing discomfort that accompanied all those years of watching the numbers on my paychecks increase while the actual value they represented fell at a rate that outpaced those numeric increases. Instead, I am going to place the blame for the American worker's inexorable slide into poverty, while dancing in a heaven of credit and ignorance, where it rightfully belongs-on history teachers!

That's right, those people who bored us to tears with meaningless names, dates, and places to memorize (often representing highly questionable material like "Christopher Columbus discovered America") are to blame for millions of Americans' inability to look back, see what has been going on, and apply that information to now. I call the condition historiophobia. So, when the New York Times publishes an article like "Real Wages Fail to Match a Rise in Productivity" the brain immediately throws up a protective barrier, early in the article, at the mention of the year 1947. The eyes retreat to the previous paragraph to focus on "the median hourly wage for American workers has declined 2 percent since 2003." Comforted by the return to the present, the reader thinks, "Only 2 percent in almost five years, I can live with that." Lost to the ahistorical reader is the reality of the cumulative effect of two-percent drops every few years for decades.

A summary of the New York Times article could be that those cumulative effects amounted to the following: Salaries and wages have shifted from being the largest portion of America's GDP to the smallest portion of the GDP between 1947 and today, in spite of the increased productivity of American workers over that same period of time. In case the message is lost on anyone, this means that we are working harder, for less, than anytime since World War II. If that doesn't equal a trajectory towards poverty, then down must be up.

So, why is organized labor losing ground in America instead of growing stronger in light of these facts? Because only those who remember a time when one paycheck would support a family, and one year's gross wages would buy a house are really aware of what is happening, and they're just walking history to the credit generation. Have it today on credit has replaced save money then buy. Every man for himself has replaced personal sacrifice to uphold the value of labor, and a prosperous American workforce is gradually but certainly slipping into......history.

"Real Wages Fail to Match a Rise in Productivity" by Steven Greenhouse and David Leonhardt, New York Times, August 28, 2006