Who Defines the Struggle?

I've been thinking about the world of work. There has been, for example, much discussion of how to rate teachers. Many pundits proclaim that we need to test kids as a way of deciding pay and employment for teachers as if kids were a product instead of people with free will. On a broader front, the owner class says that wages should track efficiency and yet with all the recent gains in efficiency wages are still flat.

At the same time we have all seen what efficiency has done for corporate profits. Twenty years of labor efficiency has resulted in massive profits for corporations and huge wage increases for corporate bosses. What do we think is going on when there is such a disparity between what we are told to expect and what actually happens? I don't think it's hard to figure out; I'd say we have been propagandized and flat out lied to.

We were told that Labor Unions were corrupt, inefficient and outdated. Who told us? Corporate Media, Corporate Owners and CEOs, Politicians who owe Corporate America for their election and we even told this same story to ourselves. Let's face it, if you hear a lie often enough, it starts to sound like it might be the truth. Even worse, we bought the philosophy of bootstrapping and individual attainment.

Yes! Some people do pull themselves up an have great success; think about Bill Gates of Microsoft for example. Bill became a Multi billionaire after dropping out of college and starting a company in his garage, as the story goes? Not exactly true - he is the son of a well-to-do lawyer who sent him to the best private school in Seattle and to Harvard University until he quit to design the Disk Operating System which made him rich and famous. As we see, even Bill Gates needed a community to help tug up his bootstraps.

What's important here is how all of us define the way we prosper and what we call the things that get in the way of that prosperity. The things we struggle with and who defines them has been obfuscated by the Great American Story, the Horacio Alger - up by your bootstraps propaganda that ignores the infrastructure of community and culture, the work of government and family that props up every endeavor. Shouldn't we be just a little skeptical of Corporate Media and Corporate Leaders who take the money and then accuse labor of not working hard enough to get their share.

Let's you and I write our own definitions for struggle and what is considered the fruits of those struggles. People work because it's how we provide food and shelter for ourselves and our families and how we measure our worth to ourselves and others. In times of plenty (like the USA currently) excess work is used to insure a plentiful future. That's the simplest was I know to define work and it's rewards.

If you go along with that definition then when you and I work hard and don't quite make the food and shelter budget, much less our measure of worth, there might just be something systemic wrong. If you then look around and see that some have a thousand year supply of food and shelter and others are starving for food and shelter while working as much as you, what then? What I think is that you and I must redefine the struggle as being one between us and those who have somehow gotten away with that thousand year supply.