Bread and Roses
The Return of Labor and the 2020 Presidential Election
It’s April 20, 1914, and the United States is at war with labor. The rebellion began the year before when the United Mine Workers of America confronted the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, demanding an eight-hour work day and increased safety standards. The company responded with the Colorado National Guard, an army of strikebreakers, and a militia of sheriffs and detectives in the charge of Gould and Rockefeller’s syndicate.
The movement evolved into a 15-month strike, pitting the federal and state governments against the miners of southern Colorado. And then, on April 20, the National Guard confronted a tent city of 1,200 striking miners. The Colorado National Guard set up a machine gun and opened fire on the union, killing 21. Later that day, the militia looted the camp and set the tent city on fire in what became the Ludlow Massacre.
In many ways, the labor movement was a success. Today we still enjoy the fruits of the men and women of Ludlow’s pyrrhic victory: work safety standards, the eight-hour work day, and the weekend.
However, the lasting power of such triumphs have been slowly washed away in the century since Ludlow. As a result of the collapse of unions and the ascendance of the uber-wealthy since the Reagan revolution of the 1980s, a number of colossal failures have transpired. Many people today aren’t able to survive on the wage they are paid, an issue only exacerbated by paralyzing student debt and incapacitating medical expenses.
We live in a time of unexampled inequality. Not in a racial sense or the battle against discrimination in all its heinous forms: on the contrary, we have made great strides as a society on these fronts. Instead, the indisputable failures of our systems of government and collective morality to install in its stalwarts an insatiable yearning to fulfill the promise of providing equally for each and every citizen of this nation; in a phrase, wealth inequality.
The wealth problem — and that’s what it is: a problem — is aggravated to such an extreme in the United States that the richest three Americans — Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffet — have more wealth collectively than the poorest 160 million Americans. In fact, the richest 10 percent of Americans control about 77 percent of U.S. wealth.
Similarly, in terms of income inequality (rather than wealth inequality), the richest 1 percent of Americans receive about 20 percent of national income. The growth of inequality in the U.S. is relatively new: that last figure grew from only around 11 percent in the late 1970s. In addition, this phenomenon is isolated to the U.S., as Europe has seen their inequality stabilize over the past 30 years, not grow.
This is a serious issue. Wealth and income inequality precipitate and exacerbate many issues in today’s society: it is an obstacle in the way of the promise of a quality education, a roadblock to professional and personal success and it serves as an amplifier for racism, sexism and discrimination of all types. Inequity defeats the resolve of the American Dream by crushing aspiration under the callused and oppressive thumb of poverty.
And all the while, the American people have watched in silence over the past quarter century as our defenses against those who have stripped our nation of egalitarianism have gained the upper hand, drawing more and more wealth higher and higher up the socio-economic hierarchy.
This is measurable fact: the unions that once collectively bargained on behalf of workers have collapsed under the strain of popular disinterest and disengagement. After the tumult of events such as the Ludlow Massacre and the entire labor movement of the early 20th century, the power of unions — and public recognition of that power — atrophied in the worst possible way; a torpidity that has gradually destroyed the very liberties that we died to establish not that long ago.
In the upcoming presidential election, there is only one candidate in this overcrowded primary field who will tackle this crippling affliction of American society: Elizabeth Warren.
In Warren, as Washington Post columnist George Will put it, “Democrats have their Margaret Thatcher… if they dare.” She is, unlike most of the Democratic field, a “conviction politician.” She is someone who knows what she believes and is unafraid to see her promise through to the end, no matter the challenge.
She will fight every day to vanquish the debilitating sway of wealth and income inequality. In finding solutions to this challenge, Warren first plans to expand access to child care, an issue that has affected her personally. She will also turn her attention to investing in affordable housing and definitively resolving the student loan debt crisis, so that paying for rent and an education do not remain crippling economic burdens for the middle and lower classes of America. Finally, she will combat financial and bureaucratic corruption by finally reigning in Wall Street and implementing a tax system on the rich that will force some redistribution of the wealth because, frankly, the amount of wealth they have relative to the rest of us is far too great.
Warren announced all this to a animated congregation on February 9, 2019 on the steps of Everett Mills in Lawrence, Massachusetts. There, 107 years ago, 25,000 workers, many of them women working in the textile industry, went on strike demanding an increase in pay and safety standards. Lawrence, like the Ludlow Massacre, was another early chapter in the struggle for economic equality, serving as a reminder for what is at stake, our responsibility in continuing that struggle today and how this, greater perhaps than anything else, should inform who we determine will lead us on the local, state, and national levels.
Such a display of solidarity with the crusades of the past was a monumental symbol: to see Warren standing where they stood, carrying on the fight for labor, brought the movement full circle in a single moment. In that instant, she confirmed her resolve to the world: that she is the Thatcher of the left, an unwavering leader determined to see the working American receive their just due.
That determination is what we need to move our nation forward. Warren is someone who has spent her life meticulously crafting solutions to inequality, our greatest problem: first as a professor at Harvard Law School, then at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, now as senator for Massachusetts, and, perhaps, in the near future, as president of the United States.
