The New Feudalism

What I get from the recent fight to recall Wisconsin governor Scott Walker (or, in the words of Esquire’s Charles P. Pierce, “the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage its midwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin”) is that the battle may have been over public sector unions but the war is over public services and the kind of society that values them.

In the New Feudalism, it will no longer be possible to work at a job where the work is its own reward, like public safety or education or wildlife management. Everything and everyone is for sale. I can’t tell if Roe v Wade or the federal minim wage will come under attack first. After all, wage regulations kill jobs: let the market decide what a job (as a proxy for an unrepresented fellow citizen) is worth. Politicians and pundits can talk all they want about the Dignity of Labor but they never talk to the laborers themselves.

In the Alastair Sim “Scrooge” of 1951 (based on Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”), a young Scrooge and Marley take over a warehouse business and one of the workers has the temerity to ask if he is to kept on. The response? Not “what’s your name” or “what do you do” but “what’s your present salary?”
“Five shillings a week, sir.”
“You can stay for four shillings a week.”
“Well, yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

This foreshadows the New Feudalism: break the unions, slash the workforce, close the factories, and re-open under new rules. We’re seeing it in the new centralized shipping warehouses, where worker toil under Dickensian conditions for scarce jobs at lousy pay. We see it in WalMart’s hiring practices: keep as many as possible to part-time hours to keep them off insurance, let them go to the ER for care.

I’m recalling a conversation with some local parents, both Chinese doctors, who came to America for a better opportunity for their son. They were no longer sure that was the right bet to have made, that the future they worked for on his behalf wasn’t coming. When did America stop being the Land of Opportunity?

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