The Golden Age
There was a time when a person could go to work for a company, work his entire life for that same company, collect his gold watch and watch his grandchildren graduate from high school.
During his working life, he probably had some kind of medical insurance and after several years he had an increasing number of weeks of vacation. He had a pension and some social security.
Not everyone lived that well. There were many who slaved their lives away, died young and got few of those benefits. But for a lot of people, it was a pretty good life.
You might call it the golden age of capitalism in America. Most workers considered these things a kind of bargain between themselves and the companies that hired them.
It was a bargain negotiated by people who got their heads beaten in on picket lines and people who wore out their shoes making the old time political machines work. After a while, the battles ceased and the "bargain" was grudgingly accepted by corporate management.
Somewhere along the way, the "personnel department" was renamed and called "the department of human resources". Strangely enough, this was originally supposed to emphasize to management that employees were something valuable and should be nurtured and cared for.
Recently we've discovered that the word "resource" can also mean something you exploit and replace without a thought once your have used up its value.
Broken Promises
Little by little, the "promises" are being broken. The guaranteed pension is on the way out and companies are quietly and desperately looking for ways to weasel out of agreements that they made years ago. Medical benefits have become history at more and more companies.
Most companies have become a lot more predatory. They are showing increased profits, but they still attempt to take advantage of their employees and their customers. And they know that they can get away with it because all of their "competitors" are playing by the same rule book. If you approve of the current economy, you might as well quit here.
You can continue working hard and playing by the rules, and, if you do everything right, you too might become rich and achieve the American Dream.
Playing by the Rules
If you have already been working hard and playing by the rules, you might notice that the American Dream is receding into the distance just a little faster than you can run. And you might think about the people who can't run as fast as you.
There's nothing new about any of this. Life has always been relatively hard. For a brief period after WW II it was a good time for the middle class.
Corporate America has decided to declare war on the middle class. Now doing that is a little stupid, since these are the same people who buy the stuff they are trying to sell. But it's happening anyway - and there are reasons why it is happening.
What we have to offer is a set of guesses about those reasons. We try to identify the rules that make the system work the way it does. Not all of these guesses are correct.
What is really important is the understanding that "the system" does run by a set of rules. The system is a set of rules.
If you want to change the way the system works.you have to play by the rules and you have to figure out how to make those rules work for you instead of against you. You can't effectively break the rules until you know what they are.