OPINION: What (or who) is holding down wages?

It appears that one of the major issues in the upcoming campaign for governor will be how to get high paying jobs for Montanans.

Let us begin with a central fact and work from there. In the 1950s General Motors was the country’s largest employer. The autoworkers union negotiated a contract with GM that gave assembly line workers a salary of $35 per hour in today’s dollars, plus health and retirement benefits. Today the country’s largest employer is Walmart. A starting clerk gets $9 per hour, no benefits, no union.

In the 1950s GM workers had moved into what we consider middle income and were living the so-called American Dream. How did this happen? After all, early in the 20th century most workers were living in or on the edge of poverty despite the efforts of Teddy Roosevelt. Obviously, that did not happen because GM owners and managers were brimming with the milk of human kindness, though stockholders and managers found that they, too, were doing very well.

The workers themselves did it. Only the workers could have done it — not the owners, not the government, though it was necessary for the government to back them. It was a tough, hurtful, and, sometimes, bloody fight.

Today, only the workers themselves can return wages to where those of their grandparents were. There are many reasons why, now, the fight has turned against workers and sent them back toward or into poverty. Home-based manufacturers were an easier foe than international retailers. Shutting down a manufacturing plant was an effective weapon. It could be used to hurt both managers and owners.

But how do you shut down Walmart or McDonald’s? The store manager is as much a victim as the worker. Many manufacturing jobs have been moved overseas and even more have been replaced by robots, and the workers have shifted to service jobs with no union.

Another fact. During the past year ABC News gave 81 minutes to Donald Trump and 20 seconds to Bernie Sanders. Sanders is the only available candidate who will back workers against Wall Street, but how can the workers find out about it? How can they find time to do anything about it when both parents have to  work to simply make ends meet?

Montana politicians like to defend coal mining by pointing out that coal miners’ jobs are high paying (though they are well below auto workers wages of the 1950s). But coal miners’ wages are relatively high for a simple reason: Workers have an identifiable opponent and a union contract, so their wages have remained relatively high even though coal prices have been undermined by the market power of cheap natural gas and the reluctance of some customers to pollute.

Can we voters do anything? We have the choice of electing a government that will back the efforts of the workers or one that will help Wall Street stomp on them. I hope the economic history of the 20th century has finally taught us that wealth does not trickle down, it accumulates at the top because wealth percolates up from the bottom.

An educated public is one of the greatest dangers to Wall Street dominance. In the 1950s, college was tuition-free and was the open door to higher wages. The GI Bill helped produce one of the country’s greatest economic booms. Today, college is financially beyond the reach of most Americans without incurring crippling debt. It is not because the universities are spending recklessly or getting rich but because corporate/banking organizations like ALEC have drummed on legislators to remove public finding so the bankers can get rich on student loans while damping the rest of the economy.

The fight of workers for a living wage and prosperity is the fight of all of us. It is not only that increasing workers’ wages means more wherewithal for all of us. It’s that unless we hang together, the shift to wealth to the top can continue until it ends in violence as it did in Russia.

Robert O’Neil is a resident of Kalispell.