From: Gregory Brown To: undisclosed-recipients:; Bee: [email protected] Subject: Greg Brown's Weekend Reading and Other Things.... 3/08/2015 Date: Sun, 08 Mar 2015 08:18:59 +0000 DEAR FRIEND Robert Reich: America is headed full speed back to the 19th century I recently ran across an article in Salon Magazine by Former labor secretary Robert Reich — America is headed full speed back to the 19th century — on the dangers of on-demand jobs and our growing intolerance for labor unions. The growth of on-demand jobs like Uber is making life less predictable and secure for workers. The problem is that these new jobs are low-paying with much less security. On the other side, a Forbes Magazine contributor, for example, writes that jobs exist only "when both employer and employee are happy with the deal being made." So if the new jobs are minimum wage and irregular, too bad. As Robert Reich points out that much the same argument was voiced in the late nineteenth century over alleged "freedom of contract." Any deal between employers and workers was assumed to be fine if both sides voluntarily agreed to it. It was an era when many workers were "happy" to toil twelve- hour days in sweat shops for lack of any better alternative. It was also a time of great wealth for a few and squalor for many. And of corruption, as the lackeys of robber barons deposited sacks of cash on the desks of pliant legislators. Finally, after decades of labor strife and political tumult, the twentieth century brought an understanding that capitalism requires minimum standards of decency and fairness — workplace safety, a minimum wage, maximum hours (and time-and-a-half for overtime), and a ban on child labor. We also learned that capitalism needs a fair balance of power between big corporations and workers. We achieved that through antitrust laws that reduced the capacity of giant corporations to impose their will, and labor laws that allowed workers to organize and bargain colle