Wealth in America:

To whom does the wealth of a nation belong? In America we like to believe that person responsible for creating that wealth has a right to a portion of that wealth. Where things get confusing is in defining just what the creative force is. What in fact is the responsibility and definition of creating?

In the early years of America wealth came from agriculture. Crops were grown by individual farmers who owned and worked their soil. That was the model for agriculture in the north states. However in the states starting with Virginia a totally different method of farming developed. Vast acres of crop land were brought under cultivation. Far more acreage than a man and his family could prepare plant, tend and harvest. The missing additional labor was provided by slaves. These Americans were not considered worthy of a wage. The efforts of the American slave went to benefit his owner. Over the years labor came to be regarded as a necessary but unimportant part of the wealth creation process. This thought process remains widely spread throughout the American south. One of the reasons that the American labor movement has never caught on in the south is slavery.

When the concept of the worker as an equal partner in wealth generation was first put forward in the 1800’s by Karl Marx these ideas remained largely unknown in America. With Marx’s death in 1883 the new view of wealth generation began to spread. The worker by this time was essential to not only agriculture but to industry that had been transformed by the industrial revolution. Part of the industrial transformation was the victory of the American industrial North over the agricultural South in the American Civil War. The south lost that war but never gave up the belief that labor was an unimportant part of wealth creation. Ask a southern working man today what he does for a living and he will almost never identify himself as a laborer.

In the industrial north of America the production of coal for heating was where labor made its first demands for a larger slice of the pie. By larger this meant a miniscule wage compared to the profits being made by the mine owners. The mine operators were a separate entity and they seldom benefited to the same extent that the mine owners did. The mine owners were either a steel company or a railroad company. Cross ownership arrangements between steel companies and railroad companies further clouded the mine ownership issue.

Mines in the American south were operated a bit differently. In these mines convict labor was used and the issue of wages was totally bypassed. Convict labor got no wage at all. Any wage that was paid was paid to a middle man who owned a labor contract that had resulted from a court judgment against these largely black Americans. This system became so abusive that in essence slavery was re-imposed upon black mine workers in the American South. This happened in other labor areas most notably in agriculture and timbering. Southern mining, timbering and agriculture all shared a common approach of low or no wages to the worker. All the while huge profits were being made by both southern and northern American capitalists.

Times were changing and the forces of change were the oil companies and the automotive companies. Somehow in the rush to create new wealth the labor component of wealth generation received very little attention and largely did not benefit from this transforming process. The exception was of course were labor unions demanded that labor receive its just due in the form of a adequate wage. This occurred in the automotive industry and in the goods transportation industries of railroads and trucking.