"A fair day's wages for a fair day's work" is a long-standing labor movement slogan (it dates from July 1834, in fact, exactly where and under what circumstances I will at some point address). I have chosen the second half as the title for these posts because the slogan as a whole captures the spirit of what I will write about: how we might best secure for the working classes of the world the recognition and the reward they deserve.
For my own part, I have a long-standing, if oblique, relationship with the labor movement. I helped organize and lead a strike of student cafeteria workers at Columbia University in 1967 because we were still paid in script and not money, and I have been associated with the effort to help wage earners secure "a fair day's wages for a fair day's work" ever since.
For my own part, I have a long-standing, if oblique, relationship with the labor movement. I helped organize and lead a strike of student cafeteria workers at Columbia University in 1967 because we were still paid in script and not money, and I have been associated with the effort to help wage earners secure "a fair day's wages for a fair day's work" ever since.
Second, despite more than two centuries of dynamic growth and innovative politics, American society has yet fully to devise a way to ensure either that everyone prepared to put in a fair day's work is fairly rewarded; or that everyone who does reap a reward receives an amount approximate to the share they deserve.
And what's true in the US is even more insistently true elsewhere, especially in those corners of the globe where people are still struggling to make the commercial, and especially the democratic, turn that marks the point of inflection between the extractive societies of the past and the productive societies of the future (if we have one).
Further, there is not only a morality and a politics in the phrase but also an economics and a sociology--indeed, a whole way of life--to which I hope to call us, and our attentions, in these posts, if I can.
Finally, the phrase also captures a set of commitments, in particular to work, and a set of values, in particular to fairness, that I think are central to what has made the United States
It is never too early, never too late, and never unfitting to remember these truths; or to explore what they might mean for us and others, here, now, and always.
