The
Ethical Economy People Want and Deserve
By Carol Driscoll
I recently learned that more than 250 workers
at the Tyson Foods plant in Corydon, Indiana went on strike. These workers
— who earn on average $7.68 per hour for difficult, often dangerous work
processing 2,000 chickens per worker every week — refused to cave in to
management’s demands for outrageous concessions including the elimination
of paid breaks, the reduction of paid vacations and a staggering 60% increase
in the employees’ cost for health insurance.
What is a parent, unable to afford the increase
supposed to do if a child becomes ill? These demands from a company which
made over $1 billion dollars in profit last year are completely unjust
and immoral, and will add to the pain and hardship of men and women, already
greatly worried about how to pay their bills.
Further, I was incensed to learn that the company
is trying to squelch the protest of workers who object to processing contaminated
poultry products which could jeopardize people’s health. I respect and
thank these courageous workers, members of the United Food and Commercial
Workers Union. As a union member myself, and a conscientious American,
I am proud to join them in their boycott of Tyson’s products.
I am very sorry that this strike is necessary,
and it means a very great deal to me that the workers at this plant, and
in Southern Indiana, know what I am so grateful to have learned from my
study of Aesthetic Realism, founded by Eli Siegel. In 1970, Mr. Siegel
explained that the brutally unjust way of economics that had gone on for
centuries — the profit system — had failed because its basis, the contemptuous
use of many people’s labor for the profit of a few, has shown itself to
be as inefficient as it is cruel and ugly.
Contempt, defined by Aesthetic Realism as "the
lessening of what is different from oneself as a means of self-increase
as one sees it," is, I learned, as common as not listening to a person,
making a sarcastic remark to one’s spouse, gossiping about a neighbor.
Contempt is the cause of all economic injustice,
including working conditions that are dehumanizing and dangerous; where
the rights and dignity of people are blatantly disregarded and their labor
is used to make profit for stockholders — none of whom work for their dividend
checks, and likely never gave a thought to the hardworking men and women
trying to earn a decent living for themselves and families.
Despite the huge profits this company made,
Tyson Foods, like most American corporations, is worried about raking in
future profits; they would like — if they can get away with it — to weaken
the workers’ resolve and power by smashing the union. But I am so grateful
that the force of ethics has reached the point in history where nothing
— including lowering wages, increasing hours and workload, wiping out benefits
— can save profit economics.
"There will be no economic recovery in the
world," Eli Siegel explained, "until economics itself, the making of money,
the having of jobs, becomes ethical; is based on good will rather than
on the ill will which has been predominant for centuries."
And in an important issue of the international
periodical The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, Ellen Reiss,
the Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism, describes — with true power and
compassion — what working people everywhere are feeling and hope for. She
writes:
Never
before in American history was there such ill nature and just plain anger
in the workplaces of this land. The ill nature and anger are about ethics.
A person at a computer in Salt Lake City; a man cutting metal in a Pennsylvania
factory; a woman packaging chicken parts in a South Carolina plant, working
on an assembly line, at a freezing temperature, with dangerous equipment,
for little pay, with her body aching — these people are desperate for the
paycheck they get, but also feel humiliated, outraged, profoundly kicked
around.
The
American people are furious — more overtly, flailingly, permeatingly furious
than ever before at being treated unethically. They want, with American
blood beating in their veins, an ethical economy.
The ethical economy the American people want and
have a complete right to, where a person is seen with respect, is paid
well, and treated with true dignity, will become a reality in this nation
only when people everywhere are answering the emergent, beautiful question
that Eli Siegel — the kindest man in history — is
first to have asked: What
does a person deserve by being a person?
To learn more, you can write the not-for-profit
Aesthetic Realism Foundation at 141 Greene Street, NY, NY 10012; (212)
777-4490. You may also visit their website at www.AestheticRealism.org.
Editor’s Note: Carol Driscoll
resides in New York City. She is an Aesthetic Realism consultant on the
faculty of the Aesthetic Realism Foundation.
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