WHAT would life be like without garbage collectors, carpenters, mechanics, construction workers, farm workers, fisher folks, nurses, medical technologists, electricians, waiters, waitresses, messengers, drivers, civil service workers, etc? Can you imagine hauling your own trash to dump fills?
In good times, we probably never imagine what life would be like without workers doing odd jobs for us. But now that Covid-19 is giving us plenty of lonesome think-time, we are getting a good glimpse of life without workers.
We suffer for missing the services of workers whom many of us take for granted deserve to be poor because they are lazy. Yet you should’ve seen how glad and appreciative the homeowners in our subdivision were when garbage collectors picked up our trash for the first time in a long time since the start of the lockdown.
In the pandemic, however, workers suffer more because they miss the low wages we give them for their work. They are so poorly paid they don’t have savings for this rainy day. Also, with their meager income they are forced to live in congested informal settlement areas that are now worst hit by the pandemic.
We have to think of a radically new normal for our workers by improving their living conditions beyond just raising their wages a notch. It might be time to reason our way into giving them a share of the profits of business or, better still, into creating a world where workers are co-owners of businesses they work for as is true in progressive countries.
Absolute ownership of property either by private individuals and corporations or by the state (as in communism) is the root of the poverty of ordinary workers. It is this unquestioned concept that prevents workers from enjoying living conditions worthy of the equal human dignity they share with owner-employers.
Absolute ownership is not natural but a by-product of the industrial revolution. Indigenous peoples do not have a concept of private property much less absolute ownership. Tribal elders act as stewards of communally-owned ancestral lands that produce for the benefit of the whole tribe.
Nor is it Christian. Early Christians owned property communally for the benefit of members. How the Catholic Church became a defender, de facto though not in utterances, of absolute ownership is a discourse for which we have no space here.
Labor Day honors workers with cheap talk. Call me visionary or worse but it is my firm belief that as long as we stick to the concept of absolute ownership more humane living conditions will never accrue to workers who lack security of tenure and suffer from low wages, unhealthy working conditions, etc. simply because only the absolute owner has a say on the matter. Why?