ESSAY

By Barbara Ehrenreich

Put another wienie on the fire for the working class. It's time for the $ annual barbecue in honor of the people who slaughtered the pigs, and made the hot dog, and trucked it to market and bagged it for you. The little guy and gal, that is, the working stiffs. They need all the honor they can get these days. At the rate blue-collar wages are falling, the U.S. is going to reinvent slavery in the next few decades, only without any of its nice, redeeming features, such as room and board.

A job is supposed to be a ticket to self-respect and social betterment -- at least that's what the pols tell us when the poor start clamoring for their welfare checks. But conditions in the low-wage end of the work force are beginning to look like what Friedrich Engels found in 19th century Manchester and described as immiserization. Within 10 miles of my suburban home, for example, there is a factory where (until they got a union contract a year ago) the workers slept in their cars and bathed in the restroom -- because, at the minimum wage, housing was not an option. A few miles in the other direction, Salvadoran refugees get $125 in cash for 60-hour weeks of heavy outdoor labor. For them, upward mobility would be a busboy's job at $2.90 an hour plus a cut of the tips.

Or I think of Jean-Paul, a Haitian-born janitor in one of the local schools. He's a janitor only at night. By day he works an eight-hour factory shift. That leaves eight hours a day, on average, for sleeping, eating, commuting, washing and brooding, as Jean-Paul often does, on the meaning of his life.

These are not isolated, exotic cases. Nationwide, the fraction of the work force earning wages that are inadequate to lift a family out of poverty rose from 25.7% in 1979 to 31.5% in 1987. During the '80s, the average hourly compensation of all blue-collar workers, computed in constant dollars, fell $1.68, according to the Economic Policy Institute, and those who were earning the least tended to lose the most. In what some sociologists call the "new working class" -- which is disproportionately made up of minorities and the young and female of all races -- work may be a fine ingredient for an ethic. But it doesn't really pay.

Ask a tweed-suited member of the better-paid classes what's gone wrong, and you'll get a lot of chin stroking about vast, impersonal forces such as declining productivity and global competition. But real wages fell faster in the '80s than in the '70s, while productivity rose faster in the '80s. Besides, executive salaries have soared in the past 10 years, and it's the executives who decide whether to invest in junk bonds or modern equipment and technology. Theories of the global economy may explain a lot of things, but they don't make it any easier for a U.S. worker to live on Third World wages.

Or go to Washington, and you'll find an Administration that loves the working class -- as a concept anyway. George Bush favors pork cracklings, and was probably munching on that well-known proletarian treat as he nixed the bill that would have extended unemployment benefits. Labor is like motherhood to most of our political leaders -- a calling so fine and noble that it would be sullied by talk of vulgar, mundane things like pay.

Even unions aren't much help anymore. Union workers earn 30% more, on average, than their nonunion counterparts, but there aren't many union workers left. Only 16.1% of the work force is organized, and that number is falling fast. Union leaders complain that it's hard to organize under a government that doesn't adequately enforce the rights of workers (to join a union, for example, without risking being fired). But the unions haven't exactly been exerting themselves. According to the Labor Research Association, the number of organizing drives keeps declining from year to year, and when unions do go to war, it's too often with one another. In 1990, for example, four major unions spent an estimated $40 million to $50 million battling one another to represent Indiana state employees -- as if they were the last nonunion workers left on earth.

This isn't just a labor problem. It hurts us all when hard work doesn't pay, and I'm talking about insidious, creeping, moral damage. Conservatives like to cite that ancient Puritan teaching: "He who does not work, neither should he eat." But the flip side of that stern motto should be written in the social contract too: "He who does work, does deserve a decent break." No footnotes about productivity, no disclaimers about global competition, no fine print about the rights of stockholders and CEOs -- just a guarantee that hard work will be rewarded with some base line of comfort and dignity. This was the principle behind the minimum wage, even if it's much too low: that survival cannot be left to market forces or employer whim.

Take that guarantee away and despair sets in, followed swiftly by cynicism and eventually maybe rage. For a man like Jean-Paul, it's the despair of knowing that his work, his energy, his very life, are valued at five dollars and change an hour, less than it costs him to pay for lunch. For his children, the response may be cynicism. The message from the Bureau of Labor Statistics is clear: Don't bother with a job. Go on welfare if you can. Rob a convenience store. Open up a cocaine dealership. Jobs are for chumps.

We need a little less talk about the work ethic and a little more ethics in relation to work. The President could set an example by supporting, instead of threatening to veto, the bill that would prohibit the use of strikebreakers and give workers a fighting chance. Employers might think twice about spending more on union-busting "consultants" than a pay raise would cost. Unions ought to lead the way, not just with a few scattered organizing drives here and there, but with something far more evangelical -- a national crusade, let's say, drawing on churches, communities and campus idealists. And what could be more American? The way to honor work, which we all claim to do, is first of all to pay for it.