The Global Economic Arena and The Rationale

At The Rationale Com at http://www.therationale.com/, we explore the voids in philosophy and religion when it comes to workers and labor. We call workers and labor the "stepchildren" of philosophy and relgion where human dignity is generalized but never seems to be defined in terms of individual labor or workers environments.

With the surge of Globalization and Free Trade driven by powerful forces outside the will of the people, human dignity has suffered further setbacks during a time when it should have advanced.

My own individual experience goes back to a core experience while working in a factory while going to a Jesuit University. It was an individual experience but it was part of a universal one too because so many people were involved. The specific experience was a conclusion of other experiences up to that time and from that time on.

I started college more than a year after graduating from high school. I never trusted the academic community and still have a problem with it. By the time I graduated from college at age 23, I had more work experience than most fellow graduates. I had more than ten years working in our family food store and did some of the purchasing. I worked at the largest advertising art studio in our city and by chance was a " 18 year old account executive to some of the largest advertising agencies in the city and nation while I attended college art classes at night. I also spent a few months setting up three assembly lines for an oil furnaces manufacturer. So by the time I started college, I had a background that was different from the academic world and found it deepening with most every college class I took.

I then worked at more than four factories while going to college. The specific experience surrounded my being harnessed at a punch press. An operator of this punch press had to wear a leather harness to pull their arms back as the punch press came down bending a metal part. ( I could stop here and discuss what Peter Maurin would say about this in terms of human dignity - he, perhaps, came closest to anyone I know in the philosophical relationship of workers and spoke against the industrial revolution accordingly. However this would take too long and I have taken too long to get to my point anyway. ) After being harnessed to a machine, I spent days in philosophy classes with the top Jesuit profs. who were most likely some of the best in the world, studying things like Ethics. My Ethics professor , a Jesuit, flunked about one fourth of the class on a regular basis. He excelled in logic and demanded the same of his students. I had already rejected the business school which was one the best for being out of it related to my real world business experience up to that time. However, I felt the philosophy department should provide me with answers about the contradictions of being harnassed to a machine at night while being taught about the top philosophers and their philosophy by some of the top educators in the field.

This was the core experience that followed me for most of my work days. With Globalization and Free Trade, the voids are even greater with seemingly no one stepping in to make things right or at least moderate the degradation of workers' dignity. We live at a time when consumerism governs economics and the workers related to it. The global economy main priority is making money on money and workers are the tools used and the real commodities being traded. Aristotle said making money on money was an unnatural thing to do.

However this is where we are today with the gold standard replaced by oil mixed with blood. It is a time when workers are being traded in a new kind of slave trade as production is moved from place to place for the sake of the cheapest labor down to wage slave and child labor. Again we ask , who said we had to compete like this in a global economic arena. And why do some of the best academics promote it supporting the tenets of The Flat World authored by Thomas Friedman from the New York Times . It is not a level playing field scenario. It is a deepening race to the bottom. I wonder what Peter Maurin would say if he was alive today. This question follows many added years in the business world from the factory floors the highest echelons in corporate management. There was a time in Rome when it was better to be a slave than a freeman. Are we seeing history repeating itself?