What is the value of a man's sweat, a woman's labor, a day's work?

Why is it acceptable that the man or woman who places their very lives and health at risk doing hard work is any less worthy of a living wage than the man who sits behind the desk? A couple of days ago there was a thread I read through about janitors--those expected to clean the equivalent area the size of five homes in a single shift. I thought of my mother who worked as a nursing assistant in a care facility for minimum wage until the day she was diagnosed with renal cancer. This little woman (she was barely 5' in height)was expected to be able to roll and turn people twice her size, clean them, feed them, and make certain their daily needs were met when their own families would not shoulder such care. Yet, when she died after working in that place for 20 years she was only making $5.75/hr. We had to fight her workplace to keep her at a status so the insurance she paid into all those years would cover her prescriptions and medical tests until she died. I took care of her in my home and watched her die.

We read about the tantrums of celebrities and wealthy people in which they are sometimes outright physically abusive to the people they hire to take care of their personal needs. The celebrity and the upper level manager or the millionaire politician have little idea of what it means to labor in this way in an economic quagmire created by their greed and excess.

At what point is it permissible for someone to be entitled all the best health care money can buy and for someone else to be turned away? At what point does the value of one person's life and labor serve only as a tax write-off and is not an asset contributing to the wealth of a nation? When did actual labor become the object of derision and it become a badge of dishonor to get the hands dirty and for sweat to drip into your eyes? When did aching muscles become unfashionable if from honest labor and not from the gym machines?

It is past time for the Democratic Party to embrace the worker and quit trying to gain entrance at the country club. It is time to labor in the vineyards and to live with the worker, to smell the sweat and to appreciate the dirt under the nails. It is time to pick the banners of the great labor, civil rights, and women's movements and to lose the millionaire and billionaire candidates and turn again our eyes toward equal rights and justice. The promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness must mean more than as an election year slogan. If the Democratic Party will not address these issue because it is the right thing to do, then it deserves to be rejected as a viable party as well.

Great post!
The Democratic Party needs to get back to its roots of supporting the little guy in this country. But it seems hell-bent on being nothing more than republican lite, appealing to the upper-crust, country-club set.


Nominated.

:applause:

Your mother was the kind of hero this party should champion.

:kick:

down through the centuries is what you are describing here. That economic injustice that says a few people's "work" is automatically more valuable than other people's hard work. Everybody sees it; everybody experiences it.

The sad thing is, no matter what economic system you have, this problem seems to crop up anyway. Even behind the Iron Curtain, politburo bosses were enriching themselves with dachas, expensive imported food, cars, etc all the while preaching to the Soviet masses that they had to endure hardship just a while longer. It'll all be better in some undefinable future. Though I won't even try to disagree that there were probably some people who had it better under the Soviet system than the Czarist one it replaced.

At first we thought monarchy and an inherited ruling class were the problem. Get rid of the vestiges of the old feudal system is the answer! Our Founding Fathers did. So did the instigators of the French Revolution.

So we got rid of them and went looking for scapegoats: Slaves, Jews, Romany, Cossacks, anybody who wasn't Khmer Rouge.

The differences today are that we have:

1) The right to vote

2) The right to literacy and education

3) The right to free speech

Our problem now is that we don't use these tools nearly to the extent that we should. When I say "we" I mean all of us collectively as a society, as a world community. Now our biggest problem is becoming too satisfied with what we are allowed to have rather than what we all deserve.