Bread and Roses: Guaranteed for All
by Sherill Hatch
“The worker must have bread, but
she must have roses too.” In 1912 thousands of textile mill workers put their
lives and livelihoods on the line in Lawrence, Massachusetts to demand living
conditions beyond bare subsistence. Their action, a turning point in labor
history, became known as the Bread and Roses Strike. The strikers, mostly
immigrant women, understood deeply that they were entitled not only to survival
but to the beauty, pleasure and ease that roses symbolize.
What would these workers, who
risked so much for bread and roses, think of the situation of today’s workers?
In our wealthy country a full time minimum wage job leaves a parent with one
child below the poverty level. Even with government benefit programs, huge
numbers of families struggle so hard for bread they can hardly dream of roses.
A full century after the Lawrence
mill workers called for lives of dignity we’re dishonoring their vision and
sacrifice. It’s time to get as creative, impassioned and powerful as we need be
to finally get both bread and roses into the life of every worker. And let’s
take the next step too: it’s time to expand the definition of “worker” to fit
reality.
Certainly wage earners deserve a
decent life in exchange for their labor--but what about those whose work
happens outside the marketplace? Our culture has a deep assumption that “work”
means making money, period. This is a distortion with many ill effects. Here’s
just one: since stay-at-home parents are considered to be “not working,” even
single parents with very young children are required to work outside the home
to receive government assistance. But this requires daycare facilities, where
caring for the same children is
defined as work.
There’s a revolutionary idea
brewing for ensuring that workers both in and out of the market get their needs
met: a guaranteed basic income. In place of the current hodgepodge of
means-tested benefit programs, every adult citizen would receive a monthly
stipend, no strings attached. Some version of a basic income either already
exists or is being piloted/seriously considered in Switzerland, Brazil, India,
Namibia, Alaska, and the Latin American Parliament, among others.
At first, the concept of giving
everyone money just for existing seems wrong; we’re so conditioned to the idea
that finding a place for ourselves in the market is the only way—the right way—to
survive. Many people’s instant reaction to the basic income idea is “But no one
would work! They’d be getting something for nothing!”
Is it true that people will work
only if forced to? That the right to a decent life must be earned? That only
income-earning employment is work? Whole books could be written to answer these
questions, but here’s a start. Pilot studies in Canada and Namibia show that
when a basic income is assured, paid work hours don’t go down much, if at all.
Sometimes they even go up.
Karl Widerquist offers a powerful
answer to the existence-must-be-earned belief. Here’s his reasoning: Every
able-bodied adult could meet their own needs if allowed the “full and direct
access to resources” that our hunter-gatherer ancestors enjoyed. When laws
remove that direct access (through ownership of land, water, etc.) the survival
of those who don’t control resources usually depends on making employment
contracts with those who do. If saying no to working for a resource-owner
threatens a person’s existence, that person is not truly free. Access to a
basic income would simply replace our former access to natural resources—thus
restoring an essential freedom: our “power to refuse.” (Widerquist has a
book but it’s a pricey textbook, so see “Status Freedom” pdf at
usbig.net/papers.php.)
Given the freedom to say no, what
would we say yes to? My prediction: all kinds of meaningful work--including the
work of saving a planet from disaster. This is work already being done by a
powerful minority of passionate, creative, skillful people. But it’s often
being done around the edges of time-consuming day jobs which, given the urgency
of our global crises, we might choose to refuse. A basic income might launch
our collective genius directly into the most important work we’ve ever faced.
It just might turn the social safety net into a safety net for the planet
itself.
The Bread and Roses Strike
redefined basic needs to include roses. One hundred years later let’s make that
definition stick--and let’s take the next step. It’s time to embrace a new
definition of work as expansive as the poet Mary Oliver’s:
“My work is loving the world.”
– from the poem “Messenger”
Sherill Hatch blogs at fulljoy.us
Posted by Chris Hewitt
on 5:22 PM.
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