Saturday, May 25, 2013

A Marxian Reaffirmation From A Bangladesh Tragedy

This story, even stemming as it does from the horror of the recent factory tragedy in Bangladesh, offers the freshest hope that I have had in a long time for the progress of worker's rights.

It's been fairly obvious for some time now that the shipping of American jobs overseas gave the companies doing the shipping enormous leverage over the lives of American workers.  Take these diminished salaries and benefits (or, no benefits at all, for that matter), or your jobs will be exported before you know it.  And, so long as other countries raced to the bottom in cheapening labor, they could go on saying this and living up to their words.

But now, perhaps, not anymore.  Perhaps Bangladesh will be the place where worker's rights rise from the bottom, and start to create a world-wide level playing field.  Will you feel the cost at the cash register?  Perhaps.  But that will be offset by the difference in your paycheck.  All of the recent political nonsense about austerity has led many people to forget a simple economic point, one preached over and over again by Paul Krugman:  your spending is someone else's income, and their spending is your income as well.

So, as Karl Marx once urged, workers of the world should unite.  They have nothing to lose but their chains, and a world to win.  And they can win it by remembering that all of us are workers and consumers--and, in both ways, we need to support each other.

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