Labour protests surrounding Black Friday and the sordid, shadowy response from retail groups underscores why many Americans don't feel very thankful for their jobs. With good reason.
The Nation, a U.S.-based leftist magazine, detailed a smear campaign against activists protesting working conditions at Wal-Mart, McDonald's and other minimum-wage-paying companies. The campaign was launched by a largely-anonymous group called Worker Center Watch which, The Nation alleges, is run by the Parquet Group, a consulting firm whose senior partner is Wal-Mart's former vice-president of public affairs, i.e. lobbying.
The incident is a timely reminder of the continuing battle between labour and capital, and since the 1980s, labour has been losing so badly that the North American economy is faced with a crisis demanding immediate attention by policy makers.
Most economists agree that there's a problem. Worker compensation as a percentage of U.S. GDP has fallen to post-Second-World-War lows, creating a demand shortfall that, paradoxically, is threatening not just record corporate profit margins, but economic growth as a whole.
Globalization has already slashed developed-world manufacturing jobs. Problems of economic inequality will only get worse, as technology-driven efficiencies cripple job growth among what MIT economics professor David Autor calls "middle-skilled professions," which includes both blue-collar manual labour and white-collar clerical and administrative work. David Graeber, professor of Anthropology at the LSE, has argued that most modern clerical and administrative tasks are easily-replaced "B.S. jobs" anyway – that they are busywork that functions as a form of welfare.
It is in everyone's best economic interest – no matter what political stripe – to ensure the financial benefits of the process are spread wide enough to ensure there's enough demand for what the economy produces.
The politics surrounding the necessary redistribution will be vicious, as always. Potential solutions like guaranteed income (which is currently being debated in Switzerland) will be opposed as strongly as the plutocrats of the 1930s opposed the New Deal. Name-calling and moralizing are inevitable.
All this discussion is of little interest to the 47 million unemployed and working poor Americans who depend on food stamps. They're too busy trying to survive and not feeling festive, despite the U.S. holiday.
Scott Barlow