Do unto others?

Operating Instructions
By Beth Shulman
TomPaine.com
Monday 29 August 2005

The temperature was 105 degrees on a California farm one day recently, but Salud Zamudio-Rodriguez's boss refused to let him take a rest from picking bell peppers and get out of the sun. Instead, he and the other migrant workers were ordered to double their speed to get the field picked clean that day. Soon, Zamudio-Rodriguez collapsed of heat exhaustion, and later he died.

Two other migrant farm workers died from heat exposure earlier this year, and as a result the California legislature is debating a bill that would require growers to add rest periods and shade to protect farm workers when temperatures exceed 95 degrees. But conservatives are opposing the measure as unnecessary interference with the market system. Have they no shame?

The idea that corporations should have total discretion in how to treat their workers is a growing and retrograde trend in America. Maryland Gov. Robert L. Erlich opposes legislation that would require organizations with more than 10,000 workers to spend at least 8 percent of their payroll on health benefits or contribute the money to the state's health program for the poor. It is "bad policy ... that a state will dictate to businesses the type and level of health insurance," Erlich said.

Such views deny the reality of American economic life. First, it's a myth that we have any kind of free market. Government regulations already set principles that dictate who can do what to whom, and government enforces those principles through the courts. Laws of property, tort and contract are social creations enforced by government. As Franklin D. Roosevelt put it, "Economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings."

Second, corporations are also created by government. Their very existence is dependent on our laws, including their legal status as "persons." In exchange for the rights and privileges of personhood, American society has the right to hold corporations as accountable for their actions as ordinary citizens.

Third, and most important, it is the central role of government - and of the elected officials in it - to set rules we can all live by that are consistent with American values. Corporations are not elected. Their focus is on the bottom line. But as a society, as communities and individuals, we have different values. Just as other countries determine the rules under which multinational corporations must operate there, we have an obligation to determine such rules here.

The role of government is to promote the general welfare, and that includes leveling the economic playing field so corporations can compete on the basis of their productivity and creativity, not on who can impoverish the most workers. If we as a society don't determine the rules of their game, corporations will write their own. Do we really want to leave it up to Enron or Wal-Mart to determine whether work will provide the basics of a decent life?

Citizens had a role in determining that corporations could not compete by using child labor, or dumping environmental waste in rivers, or discriminating against certain groups, or paying wages below a certain level. We still have the obligation today to determine corporations' operating conditions. We can declare through our elected representatives that corporations must provide health insurance or pay into a state plan, provide a certain number of paid sick days or ensure that their workers are safe.

Today the state's role is even more critical, for corporations are pushing more and more risk onto the American labor force. Even at a time of record profits and productivity, job volatility is a significant problem for millions of American workers. Wages have stagnated, more than 44 million Americans live without health insurance, employer-provided traditional pension plans have dramatically declined, and jobholders get less and less time off. Work is providing fewer and fewer of the basic necessities that Americans have always assumed it would provide.

What happens when we don't set appropriate rules that safeguard ordinary Americans? We get more brutal cases like that of Zamudio-Rodriguez. It is the role of our society to set rules that ensure that workers are rewarded for their hard work and that corporations treat workers with dignity and respect - not to mention basic human decency.

Beth Shulman is the author of The Betrayal of Work: How Low-Wage Jobs Fail 30 Million Americans (The New Press, 2003) and works with the Russell Sage Foundation's Future of Work and Social Inequality projects.
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