You’ve probably heard about the attempt by Seattle to raise money via a tax to help its homeless. The efforts of Seattle’s politicians have met with some support, but even more derision. Amazon, who will have to pay part of this tax, to a tune of 0.5% of its profits, is threatening to leave Seattle, and they aren’t the only ones. But the most interesting part of this conversation, in my opinion, are the comments on the poor who the tax is meant to help. Lazy, worthless, greedy and thieves. These are some of the adjectives I’ve seen used in many blog comments about these people. When I was growing up, things were a bit different. In the Southern Baptist church I attended they were referred to as God’s chosen. The humble who deserved our attention and support. How we let rich and powerful folks, and their politicians, take us to the place where we believe these people want to be poor is an interesting enough story, but I thought instead I would talk about where at least one group of these poor came from.
I grew up in Central Oregon, near a mid-sized town called Roseburg. Roseburg was a timber town and the biggest local employer was Roseburg Lumber. Roseburg Lumber made and still makes plywood and lumber that sold, and still sells, all across the US. The company was unionized. What that meant in the 1980s was that floor employees made between $11 and $13 an hour. Put a different way, the employees made about $25,000 a year, enough to buy a small house, a small RV or boat, and to enjoy their weekends camping or fishing. Some worked a little harder, weekend overtime, and made up to $30,000 a year.
Think about those numbers for a moment. We have been told for the past thirty or forty years that the unions were crooked, that they were stealing from corporations and enriching the working class. $25,000 a year, even in 1985, wasn’t a ton of money. It was enough to have a decent and respectable life, but not much more. The notion that the local union was stealing from Roseburg Lumber is ridiculous.
The guys I grew up with, boys and girls, worked in the timber industry for the most part. When I was getting ready to graduate from high school I looked around at what happened to these people. They would retire at 65 and most were dead by 70. Why the early deaths? The people were litterally worn out. The manual labor jobs they held wore them out over a life time. Instead of resenting this, those people were glad for the jobs and proud of the work they did. Their houses, while small, were well kept and clean. While many would call them red-necks, a term they embraced, they were good people, generous with their neighbors and their communities.
By the 1990s the mill jobs in Central Oregon were drying up. NAFTA and other legislation, pursued by Republicans and Democrats alike, allowed shipping timber overseas to China At the same time we began seeing legislation that allowed corporations to hardball unions and run them out. Remember, as I wrote above, the local union gave the local workers a living, but it certainly didn’t make them rich or powerful. In other words, because those greedy employees were taking such advantage, we allowed our politicians to build legislation that killed unions so these guys couldn’t steal from the companies that employed them. Hooey!
Today, the workers in the timber industry in Oregon still make the same amount of money they did back in the 1980s, if they have a job at all. The guys I grew up with have minimum wage jobs or are unemployed. Oregon has a Meth Culture that is known across the country. The cute little houses I grew up around are run down or non-existent. Even those that have jobs can’t afford a home since Californians with large wallets bought up all the land and drove up the market.
These are your lazy poor. Guys who used to work themselves to death over a lifetime, who can’t get a job because the rich shipped their jobs to China. If you think this is unique to Oregon, think again. Detroit, manufacturing on the East Coast and California, the jobs have all been shipped overseas so a handful of rich folks could get richer. It runs across the country. No unions, jobs shipped overseas, and a handful of very rich owners, like Jeff Bezos of Amazon.
I hear it and read it every day. The lazy poor. I’ve never heard a more ridiculous piece of propaganda ever. I live with the rich. I went off to college, got a couple of degrees, and have a good living. I see how the rich live. Their kids are pampered and sent to private schools and they take the afternoon off to play golf or over-manage their kid’s lives. A rich person calling a poor person lazy is an affront.
Evil Unions… I was required to pay my union dues when I worked in the Oregon lumber mills to put myself through college. I never really questioned the fee, it wasn’t that much, relatively speaking. I never realized it’s value until the first time I needed the union. A shop foreman decided that he wasn’t going to hand out checks until we signed a petition. The lumber company wanted access to government timber and they weren’t being allowed. The timber was on BLM land that I grew up fishing, hunting and hiking on. No one wanted it cut, period. The standoff lasted for ten minutes until the union steward showed up with a union lawyer and we got our checks. For the first time I realized the unions, which were already being badmouthed, first by Reagan, and then by Clinton, were the only thing standing between me and a company telling me what I was going to do, outside the company confines.
The first time I realized that the unions weren’t there to protect malfeasance or laziness was the first time I came back from lunch one minute late. And I do mean one minute late. The foreman met me and told me, “you come back late again and you’re fired.” The union guys around me, they had a laugh, told me not to worry, but that I needed to watch the clock. The notion that unions allow employees to be lazy or to take advantage simply isn’t true by my experience. Unions simply give workers the right to stand up to company malfeasance. Yes, there were some corrupt unions, but they didn’t steal from the companies, they stole from the employees they represented. Companies were against unions not because the unions were corrupt but because they made them take care of their employees. The unions made companies pay a decent living wage, provide benefits, and some job security. All of that is pretty much gone now, making a large pool of unemployed poor, labeled as lazy because there are no jobs and no unions to protect their jobs.
Human nature isn’t perfect. But labeling folks as lazy because their jobs have been shipped overseas by a few greedy people is wrong. Letting corporations convince us that people are lazy because they aren’t willing to work themselves to death on the cheap is wrong. Treating humans like they are chattel is wrong. Giving the rich more power than God is wrong. We learned this the hard way in the 1930s when the poor had to wrest this country from the rich, and how we’ve allowed ourselves into being lied to about the issue today, should be a cause of great concern.