Quick Note: I finished writing this piece just before the massive derailment and subsequent chemical spill that happened in East Palestine, Ohio in early February 2023. Workers in the industry had been warning for decades that something like this was bound to happen as companies prioritized profits over safety for the environment and their workers. While it’s no consolation for any of us, in my small part I want to join the chorus of “I told you so.” It will be interesting to see if anyone reading this in the far future, or even the recent future, will remember what happened at East Palestine, or if it will be forgotten as just another small town destroyed by greed and shortsightedness.
At the end of 2022 several unions of railway workers in the United States threatened to strike as a way to improve their working conditions, especially more paid sick days. Eventually after some tense negotiations a “compromise” was reached that all but quashed most of the union’s most important demands. While these negotiations were ongoing there was a lot of discussion both among news outlets and in the general public about the potential strikes. Mostly these discussions revolved around whether or not these unions were right in threatening to strike at all. Should these unions and the workers they represented have risked large-scale slow-downs or shutdowns of our nation’s railways as we were approaching the holidays?
Many people in this discussion opined that it was selfish for these railway workers to potentially strike as the nation was still reeling from the pandemic, inflation, and a possible recession. What right did these workers have to disrupt a vital transportation artery?
I disagree with this line of thinking, and it’s why I decided to talk about it in this post. Why do I disagree? Let me change the question I asked at the end of the last paragraph into a statement that I think reflects the subtext of the question. Instead of “What right do these workers have..” I think what people are really saying is “I don’t care what those people’s working conditions are like, I’d prefer they do their jobs without complaint, so it won’t affect me negatively.” In my opinion, the attitude that animated people opposed to a potential strike was one of, “I’m not willing to make sacrifices or be inconvenienced so that others can try and better their lot in life.”
Why do I think this? Mostly because I’m utterly pessimistic, and I think people can often be myopically selfish in their worldview. I know life is difficult for everyone, and we all have our own lives and worries that necessarily occupy our time. But I think this myopic selfishness goes beyond the mere fact that people are busy and caught up in their own lives. An easy example of this is the wealth inequality that has existed in practically every settled society for all of human history. Imagine some of the world’s wealthiest people today. They do not have nearly as many of the same struggles or worries that the vast dregs of us do. Yet do you see them committing their lives to charity and good deeds to help those less fortunate than themselves? And no, I do not consider the ultra-wealthy donating a pittance of their total fortunes to be charitable, mostly I suspect they do that so they can get a tax write off. There’s a school of thought in philosophy that posits that an action cannot be considered moral if there is an ulterior motive for that action. According to this school of thought, a wealthy person donating to charity to pay less taxes is not moral. The point of this digression is, even when people are not burdened with the daily struggles of life, how many of them think of someone other than themselves?
To return to the topic of the recent strikes, a lot of Americans were unwilling to support the potential strikes because it would hurt them in some way financially. And there is no doubt that is true, at least in the short term. But where I think many Americans, and people in general, go awry is that they only think in the short term, without considering any long-term benefits or consequences. Sure, a strike in some key industry would hurt the economy in the short term. But wouldn’t people who are happier, better compensated, and more fulfilled in their occupations be a good thing for the global economy? Wouldn’t we live in a better society if we were all willing to sacrifice a little to improve the lives of others? Couldn’t we raise everyone’s conditions if we were willing to be a little selfless? Wouldn’t the rising tide raise all boats?
If we adhere to the logic that no one is allowed to strike or protest for better conditions if it hurts us or the economy in some way, then no one is allowed to strike ever. If we want to live in a society that values people over profits, then we need to be willing to support people when they speak out about ill treatment. Someone might retort that we should only support protests or strikes for better conditions as long as they are reasonable and not selfish or outlandish. While in theory I would agree with that, I think that logic can be taken too far. After all, it isn’t selfish to demand to be treated fairly and with dignity. The values I thought we had as Americans is that we all have a finite amount of time on Earth, and that if we sacrifice some of that time at work, we should be fairly compensated and treated with respect. Those are the values that Americans should remember when they see people demanding respect and appreciation for their work. And they should also consider that if we refuse to help one another raise our standards of living, we might all be inadvertently helping keep one another down.