ITHACA, NY — If you aren’t a rich and white American, you don’t matter in the US. Minorities, females, the disabled, and many other non-white male identities are unable to live comfortably due to the obstacles in the workplace made by the private sector and the federal government.
The private sector and the federal government are main gurus of the economy. The private sector is the portion of the economy that is not controlled by the federal government but are controlled mainly by rich business leaders. The federal government’s role is to protect the people and uphold to the constitution.
Under the control of the private sector, laborers, are mainly seen as capital rather than humans. During the antebellum era slaves were capital and not much changed after the civil war. For example blacks experienced extreme racism and mistreatment in the workplace from their employers and from people in the same roles. Still the government remained uninvolved because of the prevalent belief in classic liberalism.
Classic liberalism sees the government as a threat to economic freedom because the people did not want the government to have a monarchic rule on society. However, the government was also not fulfilling their duty by allowing marginalization.
Surprisingly, black people were not the only workers that weren’t economically free. Whites, females, immigrants, though treated much better, were also not given not given economic liberty from the private sector. These disadvantaged groups were still separated by the social construct of spheres. Women were divided from men, blacks divided from whites, immigrants were divided by Americans and these divides were made by the people by invoked by the workplace.
The private sector wanted to keep the small percentage of rich white men in power and did so by creating a divide within the people so that the can ignore the economic disparities. The employers in the private sector “failed to understand that those who supplied human labor for industries were human beings” (Gompers, 129). However, Gompers still saw the government still remained a threat because they could corrupt the system, even more than it was already.The private sector caused an unequal distribution of wealth and saw workers as objects rather as humans.
With the increase of working class upheavals during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the workers began to unite in order to end the misconception of workers as objects. During the progressive era, emerged the CIO and unions. Unions were groups of workers that came together in order to advocate for one another. Lichtenstein saw unions as especially useful when the stock market crashed.
The Great Depression called for government intervention. The Great Depression was a time of economic distraught. Work became scarce, conditions worsened, and the market crashed. Some argued that the government should help the business leaders so that they could redistribute wealth equally.
The government’s solution for the Great Depression, formulated by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was the New Deal. The New Deal wanted to regain the strong economic boom before the Great Depression by manipulating the economy. The government reallocated money into private banks, trade, and businesses.
The policies under the New Deal also aimed to help the working class gain better working conditions. Social security, the Wagner Act, and the Works Progress Administration were program set in place to help workers regain their rights. However, the federal government could not make everyone happy. In order for the Great Deal to be deemed effective by the public, FDR had to exclude blacks and domestics from its policies.
After the Great Depression, classic liberation returned but in a new form, Neo Liberalism. Neo Liberalism wanted the government to not involve them not because of the fear of it taking over and removing democracy but because of the believe that people would get too dependent on the government for help.
Again, people in power, government officials and business leaders, failed to understand the problem and they are failing to understand the problem currently. Trump, Clinton, and other politicians want to solve contemporary problems with old solutions. However, the conflict between workers were distractions to blind the working class of the actual problem, unequal distribution of wealth. As Herdon explains, racial divides were an artificial divide to maintain control of a system of control of black and white workers. In the workplace there were also gender divides, citizenship divides, and race divides. The war is not between black and white but between the rich and the poor.
– Academic property of Miss Optimistic.com
