From plantation roots to hotel branches, from private to public sector, from employer to employee, Hawaii’s workforces are diverse, complex and dynamic. And it’s all brought into starker relief against today’s backdrop of fiscal difficulties, job struggles and an unstable economy. In honor of Labor Day, the Star-Advertiser asked a trio of local experts to reflect on the status of labor in Hawaii today.
It seems as if the sky is falling. Every day brings more bad news for regular, hard-working people. Mass unemployment with no recovery in sight. Millions of people foreclosed upon and evicted. Huge cutbacks in wages and benefits for those lucky enough to have jobs. Retirement hopes shaken as Social Security and Medicare are put on the chopping block while retirement savings accounts veer up and down in value on a daily basis.
Even worse, nobody is doing anything about it. Republicans are willing to crash the country to make sure we keep on giving public money to the richest of the rich. Democrats keep putting the most irresponsible bankers in charge of overseeing the corrupt and parasitic banking industry. Both parties doing business as usual as more and more of our youth are dead and maimed in pointless wars that suck up our treasury — and where we can’t even define victory.
The rich are getting richer, and the rest of us are getting poorer.
It’s all so overwhelming.
What can ordinary people do?
The truth is that all of our problems flow from a single fact: It is the most selfish, short-sighted and greedy amongst us that are running the country. The biggest bankers, the people who crashed the economy in mindless pursuit of profits, are the ones who tell our politicians what to do.
The fact is that our country is sharply divided into two groups: a tiny group of bankers who are getting all the benefits from all of our work, and the rest of us who actually work for a living and are watching our prosperity and security draining away.
The fact is that there is only one hope for the future of our country. We need the vast majority to take back our society from the tiny group that now runs it. In theory, this is simple. We live in a democracy where majority should rule. We are the majority, so why don’t we just vote for change?
In practice, it’s not so simple. Unless the majority can actually organize itself to act in coordinated fashion, all we do is cancel each other’s votes.
To get the majority to act as one takes organization. That kind of regular-people’s organization is difficult to build and hard to sustain. There is only one model that has proved its success: labor unions.
Only labor unions have been able to amass sufficient resources to effectively organize the vast majority of people who work for a living. Only labor unions have been able to sustain consistent policy and practice on social and economic issues over years and decades.
Whatever you may think about unions, the fact is that only unions have been effective in constraining the power of the greedy and antisocial financial elite.
It is no accident that the greatest progress for America’s people came during the years when unions were able to organize a large percentage of working people. And it is no accident that, now that unions have been sharply reduced in power, that the full-court press by the rich against the rest of us is reaching new heights of arrogance.
We are the majority. The majority has the power to make change — but only if people are organized. If you want to get back to the good things about America, organize unions.
Eric Gill is financial secretary/ treasurer of UNITE HERE Local 5.
