What Price Respectability?

Nothing corrupts like Respectability. We will do anything to gain it; we will do anything to keep it. There’s an old saw that “every man has his price”. Some people who couldn’t be bought for any amount of money will all but sell their souls for a place at the table with the “adults” and the opportunity to look like they belong there.
It’s at the core of what went wrong with the revolution in Orwell’s “Animal Farm”. Revolutionaries the world over, once they have gained power, seem to have no further ambition but to become respectable heads of state with all the appropriate trappings.
Take a guerrilla fighter out of the jungle and he will work like a dog to become as close to being the people he fought against as possible. He will put on a uniform or a suit he would not have been caught dead in during revolutionary days just to fit in.
The same thing, I was reminded, seems to have happened to American union organizers. I tuned in to Bill Moyers this morning. He had as guests two union gurus in their middle or late years talking about what happened to unions in America.
They did rather offer something of an answer to the question my wife has been asking ever since she worked a couple of years at JC Penney’s early this decade. She watched employee after employee get cut from full time with benefits and vacation days to part time with no insurance, no sick days, no paid time off.
Zip. You come in one day and your $8.00 an hour job has been cut from 40 to 29 or 24 hours, just under the limit for benefits. Now you work four hour shifts, so you use the same amount of gas to get to work, and you get fewer paid breaks. You still have two kids to support and are expected to dress nicely. (it’s not just the military that’s eligible for food stamps while working.)
Why, my wife has often asked, don’t the unions come in and sign these people up? I’ve often felt that the people who staff our retail establishments are not all that different from the factory workers who fought to raise their pay above a dollar a day.
The difference, Mr. Moyer’s guests made clear, was that the factory workers eighty and more years ago had dedicated union leaders who fought for them. They were NOT respectable. They got arrested. (Cops in Detroit used to marvel about Jimmy Hoffa. You could take rubber hoses and beat him half to death and he never made a sound. He remained contemptuous of respectability until someone finally had to kill him.)
During the late forties and early fifties, the union guru’s made clear, we were able to gut American unions of their willingness to fight for serious social issues. On one hand, the stick. We threatened to label them as Communists if they didn’t stop being obnoxious.
No more big causes like Social Security or forty hour weeks—an occasional strike at a steel mill or an auto company might be okay—but let’s not have any talk about “classes” in America. They got scared and started to behave (a little bit like Obama backing down on health care).
(Anyone who thinks there aren’t social classes in America has never dealt with the very wealthy. I have. They are very polite, but you come away knowing you are nowhere in the same social class that they inhabit. The president of General Motors is as different from an hourly laborer on the floor as a peasant was from a duke.)
Then, the carrot. As in “Animal Farm”, the top union men got invited to sit at the management table—with the guys in the really expensive suits. For behaving, they even got to wear pretty nice suits themselves. They were as respectable as a corporate executive vice president. They loved it.
The lady with 29 hours and two kids to feed is on her own. Union organizers and leaders wouldn’t like to lose their respectability by getting down in the muck and becoming obnoxious in their fight to give her a living wage. The paneled doors in the executive suite might swing shut on them again.
So what if union membership has gone down by 50% in the past decade or two? The union leaders are still at the “adult” table. They like it there—and nobody shouts, “Communist!”.