Robber Barons Redux

We’ve come full circle

I can remember almost nothing of the specifics of what I learned in High School. Yet, more than half a century later, I do have a detailed set of recollections from one of Mr. Statham’s Modern History classes.

The class was about the rise and fall of the ‘Robber Barons’ in the last decades of the Nineteenth Century. Industrialization and mass production had meant that vast amounts of goods could be created by far fewer workers. The resulting mass unemployment meant employers could force punishingly long workweeks and pitifully low wages on the working population. The richest of those employers then bought out all their major competitors. Monopoly pricing then enabled such Robber Barons to amass vast fortunes.

The class featured an archived newspaper article from the 1890’s that focused on the plight of a group of factory workers who worked ten hours a day, six days a week, cutting tiny wood chips that passed for seeds in a mass-produced ‘strawberry jam’ that was mostly sugar and red food colouring.

Such ‘muckraking’ journalism helped create the social and political pressure required to rein in the ultra-rich Robber Barons that then dominated the US economy: the Rockefellers, Morgans, Carnegies, Vanderbilts, Astors, and Mellons.

Governments, under pressure, began breaking up the monopolies that enabled artificially high prices. Governments also pushed for eight-hour work-days in all organizations with government contracts. Unions became more commonplace.

I can remember other snippets from the course.

The Great Depression of the 1930’s temporarily made things worse for working people, but created a strong backlash against laissez-faire capitalism. Unions were finally given legal protections. The New Deal strengthened the regulatory powers of Government, introduced the idea of a social safety net, and mandated a five-day, 40-hour workweek.

Mr. Statham argued that World War Two and its aftermath created further pressures for change. The recognition that North America could meet almost all of its domestic needs AND produce vast amounts of weaponry even while millions of workers were off fighting overseas, inspired the flood of returning soldiers to push hard for a better deal for working people.

Because birthrates had declined during fifteen years of depression and war, the cohort of young workers entering the workforce in the fifteen years following the war was quite small. Millions of returning soldiers setting up households and starting families created a huge demand for housing and all manner of consumer goods. Both created a strong upward push on wages and increased the bargaining power of workers.

Even the rise of the Soviet Union worked to the advantage of the working population. The threat of communism pushed capitalists to be more generous to workers than they might otherwise have been.

Why did all this information become permanently etched in my 18-year-old brain?

I could see that the quality life for working people had improved immensely over the course of the Twentieth Century. By 1969 - the year of Mr. Statham’s class - my father was able to comfortably support a wife and four children on one income. He’d bought a new house, a new car, a cottage and a boat, and still could afford occasional luxuries - working only 40 hours a week. Yes, he was an engineer, and a manager, but the unionized workforce where he worked could afford all those things too. (Perhaps a smaller and older house, but essentially the same package.)

But I also couldn’t help but notice that the immense improvements in the lot of the working population during the Twentieth Century were the end result of a series of fortuitous events, not some immutable law of history. Not to mention a great deal of work and struggle from those in political, social, and labour movements.

It was a wake-up call for me. Progress had been hard-won. And perhaps was fragile.

The first trickle of baby-boomers had already entered the workforce. A veritable flood of baby boomers was on the way. Married women had begun entering the workforce in droves. If the baby-bust of the 1950’s had created a strong upward pressure on wages, what would the massive influx of so many new workers do to wages?

Computers, automation and robotics were heralded to bring about a Second Industrial Revolution. The first Industrial Revolution had brought mass unemployment and a steep decline in living standards. Why should the Second Industrial Revolution have a different outcome?

Back in 1969, we welcomed the future with a naive optimism. The hippies were convinced the Age of Aquarius had arrived; peace and love would prevail. Technophile futurists said a future of leisure and abundance was inevitable. Economic optimists predicted that free trade would bring peace and universal prosperity. We had this idea that ‘progress’ was inevitable, the natural order of things.

Various science-fiction writers tried to warn us what was coming. We didn’t listen.

If you’d predicted back then that the Governments of Canada and the United States would aid and abet the off-shoring millions of high-paying manufacturing jobs to China, no-one would have believed you.

If you’d predicted back in 1969 that the top one-thousandth of America would have almost double the wealth of the bottom 50% of America by 2024, they’d have said you must have been smoking that funny marijuana stuff.

But here we are. Billionaires and mega-corporations are the new Robber Barons. They have a level of control over both government and the media well beyond anything that existed a century ago. And monopoly pricing has returned with a vengeance.

The mRNA ‘vaccines’ are the Twenty-first Century equivalent of the ‘strawberry jam’ of 1890. We’ve come full circle.

It is reasonably clear that we will not be rescued by ‘muckraking’ journalists this time around.

It’s also clear to me that it is no accident that two halves of America hate each other. Or that America has so many enemies. Anything to distract us from the emerging neo-feudalism of our Brave New World.

New technologies have created immense new wealth over the past 50 years. Almost none of that new wealth has gone to the bottom 90 percent of the population.

Yes, most of us have more toys than we did 50 years ago, but that’s almost entirely because of the shift to households with two full-time incomes. We’ve gone from a 40-hour family workweek to an 80-hour family workweek. It’s a lifestyle that’s been hard on marriages. A lifestyle that doesn’t leave much time for parenting. A lifestyle that comes with high overheads and high levels of stress. New technologies may have created great wealth, but that wealth didn’t come to us.

Huge gaps between rich and poor have happened many times in the long history of humanity. Usually they are remedied by some combination of economic collapse, war, or revolution. All three seem possible at the moment.