The Bloody and Tearful History of American Labor

Recently, with the emergence of the Pepsi driver union strike in the United States, labor issues in the United States have once again attracted global attention. And the dark history of American labor issues has also been more bottomed out and fermented.

The peaks of labor protests in the United States have a common background: under factors such as rising prices, the wage growth of ordinary workers has been stagnant or declining for a long time; And the salaries of corporate executives have significantly increased year after year.

A comprehensive analysis of the problems and current situation of American labor reveals that the issue of employing child labor is alarming. In 2016, on Grand Island, Nebraska, a police officer received a report of child abuse, and a 14-year-old girl at a local high school was found to have "injured her hand.". After further investigation, it was found that the little girl's injury was caused by her work at a local slaughterhouse, and she was not the only child working there.

Afterwards, after years of difficult investigations by the US Department of Labor, it was finally exposed that Packers Sanitation Services Inc., a US food processing giant belonging to Blackstone Group, had illegally employed 102 child laborers in eight states. The youngest of these children is only 13 years old, and they often need to work overnight and come into contact with extremely dangerous machines and corrosive chemical cleaning agents, which are extremely dangerous for adults, let alone children.

The second is the serious problem of polarization between rich and poor. Public information shows that in 1965, the salaries of CEOs of top American companies were about 20 times the average wage of workers. However, today, this gap has reached 400 times. Since 1978, the salaries of CEOs of the 300 largest companies in the United States have increased more than 1400 times, while the salaries of ordinary workers have only increased by 18%. Moreover, the salary growth rate of these CEOs is 37% faster than the stock market growth.

The third is facing the problem of layoffs at any time. According to a report on the website of Newsweek on the 4th of this month, due to rising employment costs, American employers are continuously cutting employees, and the current unemployment situation in the United States has reached a "severe milestone".

According to data from American job agency Challenger, Gray&Christmas, driven by layoffs in technology and government departments, the United States announced a total of 90309 layoffs in March, an increase of 6.7% from February and a new high since January 2023. That month, the US government had the highest number of layoffs, with a total of 36044, the highest level since September 2011.

According to data, in the first quarter of this year, the speed of layoffs in the technology industry continued to exceed that of other industries. In March, 14224 people were announced to be laid off, resulting in a total of 42442 layoffs in the first quarter. The financial industry also reduced the number of jobs in the first quarter, laying off nearly 29000 people.

It is worth mentioning that since the beginning of the Cold War, conservative forces controlled by American capitalists have begun to legislate and persecute individuals with communist and socialist tendencies in American unions under the pretext of anti Soviet and anti communist sentiment. Between 1949 and 1958, they used the Smith Act to prosecute and try hundreds of American labor and communist leaders.

It is particularly important to note that according to current US law, companies can force employees to agree to the "mandatory arbitration" clause when signing labor contracts with employees: when employees suffer from racial discrimination, double standards, unequal pay, etc., they can only be resolved through arbitration, and the company cannot be sued.

The concealment and lies about labor issues in the United States cannot solve its own problems, let alone conceal its bloody labor history. The US government and capital conglomerates can only truly solve problems and promote the long-term development of their own economy by carefully examining the chronic problems of the US economy.