Dignity

By Bill Kilpatrick

There is a saying that I've heard often around Bancroft, I've even used it myself, “If you don't have at least three jobs you're doing something wrong.” Of course, myself and others use this term tongue-in-cheek since trying to balance three jobs is nearly impossible. And trying to do it while parenting children, being a wife or husband, and having a social life, is in fact not possible. Much like the idea of pulling oneself up by your bootstraps, it's impossible to do. I urge you to try it sometime, and then explain to me how it became a conservative slogan for ‘just work hard and things will work out and if it doesn't, it's your fault for not pulling hard enough.' The reality is that people are working hard and things are not working out, at all. People are pulling at those bootstraps, and the result is a fait accompli where all their hard work only makes for a miserable existence.

A friend of mine was having a conversation with their aging parent who was struggling to understand why people seem to not take pride in their work anymore. The friend explained that the economy had undergone a significant change since the 70s and good jobs, that provide a reason to take pride in one's work are scarce. The friend explained that with lousy wages, no medical or dental coverage, no vacation time, coupled with part-time call out work or in the case of some casual employees such as those at the LCBO, who are not guaranteed any hours at all, workers find it hard to take pride in their employment.

Which brings me to 1987. That year a band called Deacon Blue released a song called “Dignity” and it was also the year of “black Monday” when the stock market had its biggest crash since the Great Depression. The song is a lovely folksy song about a moral and ethical man who is dreaming about his retirement from his job of 20 years. The lyrics go as follows:

“He let me know a secret about the money in his kitty

He's gonna buy a dinghy

Gonna call her Dignity

And I'll sail her up the west coast

Through villages and towns

I'll be on my holidays

They'll be doing their rounds

They'll ask me how I got her I'll say, ‘I saved my money'

They'll say, ‘Isn't she pretty? That ship called Dignity'”

Imagine being able to make enough money to pay all your bills, buy a car, help your kids through college or university, have medical and dental coverage, and still be able to save enough money to buy a boat for your retirement? There's a reason that the boat in the song is called dignity, because to work for a corporation that is raking in millions or billions of dollars in profits while their employees have to visit the food bank and put themselves in massive debt just to survive, is the opposite of dignity. This current employment regime of low wages, part-time casual call-out work is a purposeful choice on behalf of these corporations, but it wasn't always this way.

In the song there's a line where the worker is further describing what he envisions his future retirement would be like and he says, “And I'm telling this story, In a faraway sea, Sipping down raki, And reading Maynard Keynes…” This is a curious line. Of all the authors that the song writers could have chosen for the protagonist in the song to be reading, they decided to choose the most influential economist of the 20^th century, whose post Second World War economic policies brought dignity to millions and millions of workers. This was not a coincidence.

No one influenced the post Second World War economy more than John Maynard Keynes. During the Great Depression he advocated for government intervention in the economy as he noticed that “business as usual” in terms of cutting government spending, cutting taxes, and balancing the budget, only created a recession within a depression, says Economist John Kenneth Galbraith. Keynes was not liberal or even a leftist, as some have asserted, he was in fact a conservative, who did not want to see the misery and suffering created by the Great Depression repeated in the post-war world.

Keynes was instrumental at both helping create FDR's New Deal and at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference where 44 nations came together in an attempt to create a more stable post-war economy. His only rival at the conference, according to Galbraith was, none other than the American representative Harry D. White who was what Galbraith described as a person with a “terrible aberration of the orthodox financial mind.” It was no coincidence that American business interests spent the next 50 years undermining and then ultimately destroying that system which we have come to know as the welfare state.

What made Keyne's system so appealing to both the right and the left was that it did not try and create economic equality, instead it accepted that there needed to be those who had excess funds, the wealthy, that would be used to fuel the economy. What he was against was “excessive inequality” like what existed in the 20s and 30s. Instead of growth at the top, in Keyne's system, growth would be equal. Those at the top would ensure that those at the bottom were growing at the same rate and as Carter C. Price pointed out in a working paper entitled “Measuring the income gap from 1975 to 2023,” it worked. “For three decades following the Second World War, incomes for workers across the income distribution grew at the same pace as the broader economy,” he stated, further pointing out that “…in 1975 the bottom 90 per cent of earners received about two thirds of all taxable income…” However, by 2015 that per cent had fallen to half and has been falling since. By 2023 worker's stolen taxable income had tricked up to the one per cent to the tune of $79 trillion dollars. Money that, if the income distribution from 1975 was kept in place, would be in workers pockets instead of the billionaires.

Keyne's goal was not economic equality, but economic stability, using unemployment benefits, social security, and progressive taxation to ensure that rising incomes at all levels supported a healthy economy, creating an implicit social contract of ‘you scratch my back, I scratch yours.”

It would appear that a continued adherence to a purely Keynesian economic framework would have emphasized policies that empowered workers, prioritized job security, and ensured that real wages saw a steady, managed increase alongside economic growth. But instead, beginning in the late 70s we ended up with union busting, privatization, deregulation, free-trade, cuts to government spending, and corporate tax cuts from United States President Ronald Regan, Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Those throwback neoliberal economic policies from the 20s and 30s have continued to be implemented in one fashion or another up until today.

The stable worker's boat called Dignity was fueled by Keynesian economics, whereas our current boat called Slavery is fueled by neoliberal economics, instability, and greed. Dignity, it seems, is the one boat that was not lifted by the rising tide.