Dr. Robin Hood
Dean Robinson’s “Health Politics and Inequality” class has taken some surprising turns. Jill Quadagno’s book, “One Nation, Uninsured” served as an efficient history of how we got the lousy system of health care that we have, so the questions of how and what kinds of alternatives we ca have were neatly dispensed with.
Basically, the “simplest” and fairest universal system would be to simply expand our already existing Medicare system to cover everyone. That would give us the Canadian “single payer” system (which, coincidentally, is also called Medicare). Of course, to fund the program, the government would have to institute a new payroll tax on employers. For employers who already pay around a quarter of an employee’s salary in insurance premiums, this would essentially replace those premiums and would probably lower their costs and improve their market position, as it would serve to “take health care out of competition” by equalizing their equalizing their costs with those of employers that do not currently provide health insurance for employees (and for whom such a payroll tax would be a new and unwelcome development). Business, being business, would likely seek to take the cost of health care off its ledger and dump it on the public in the form of tax income tax increases – which would naturally be controversial. Yes, polls show that Americans are willing to pay higher taxes for more social services. But, the millions of Americans who already receive health care through their employers do not want to pay for what they already have. This would not be a tax increase, as much as it would be a pay cut. The combination of such anti-business tax agendas with the fact that such a “Medicare For All” solution would necessarily be a frontal assault on the rich private insurance industry creates a powerful coalition of capitalist opposition to universal health care that is built in to the problem. This is to say nothing about the potential to energize the religious right over the issue of public financing of reproductive health services. Clearly, it will take a rock-solid coalition of “the good guys” if we have any chance, and the labor movement must take a leading role in forming such a coalition.
Where Dean’s class has taken an interesting turn is the presentation of Ichiro Kawachi’s research of the effects of inequality on health. The research presented in his book, “The Health of Nations: Why Inequality is Harmful to Your Health,” basically finds that the level of inequality in a given society has a direct relationship with average life expectancy, disease rates and infant mortality. Kawachi controls for income levels, access to health care and a host of other factors one might expect to explain these numbers. Holding all other things equal, a person who lives in a country that has a large gap between the rich and the poor is unhealthier than his direct counterpart in a more equitable country. This is the same for rich people as it is for the poor.
You might expect a socialist to love this report, but I find it troubling. The problem is that wealth redistribution is just so…un-American. In my past life as a teenage mutant ninja socialist, going on speaking tours and doing media interviews for the Socialist Party, I’ve always de-emphasized the Robin Hood aspect of socialism. What’s most important to talk about is, first, what we as working people need and deserve: Meaningful work at good pay; decent, affordable housing; health insurance, vacations and pensions. Second is what’s preventing so many of us from having these things: the capitalist system of production for profit and not for need. I’ve always differentiated between private property and personal property. What we want is to publicly own and control the basic companies and industries, not to share your toothbrush and wife. Taking away mansions and yachts from the rich is not crucial to the functioning of the economy, and would not be the first step of a socialist revolution. But I don’t talk about it because Americans don’t like the idea. They want to believe that anyone can “earn” such ostentatious wealth (as if the Waltons and the Hilton’s “earned” their daddies’ money!). But, if Ichiro Kawachi’s research is correct, those ostentatious displays of wealth are terrible for our health. Watching “MTV Cribs” could literally kill you (and the rich idiot with the air-conditioned display room for his hats).
In many ways this is a moralistic argument for socialism, and I hate those. I’m a materialist, and prefer to focus on jobs, peace and freedom. But, Robin Hood was right, and we need more people like him.
Hershey’s Corporate Kiss-Off
This article was originally published in the January-February 2003 issue of “The Socialist.”
The recent announcement by the trust that operates the Hershey Industrial School that it was considering selling a large stake in the Hershey Foods Corporation set off waves of protest in the town of Hershey, PA, that eventually sunk the proposal. What kind of company town has effective veto power over its corporate benefactor’s business plans? Clearly, Hershey is a company town like know other.
To understand it better, one should place the town’s history in the context of the social reform movement of the turn of the century that formed alternative model communities founded with the aims of conquering the abject poverty and gross inequalities of the era’s great cities. The most identifiable are the socialist cooperatives like Robert Owen’s New Harmony, IN and Job Harriman’s New Llanos, CA, but socialists did not have a monopoly on alternative city building. The towns of Pullman, IL – best known now for the disastrous American Railway Union strike that turned Eugene Debs towards socialism – and Hershey, PA – best known now as the poor man’s Disneyworld – were themselves social experiments.
When the Pullman Sleeping Car Company needed to expand in 1880, initial plans had the company simply building its factory complex with the city of St. Louis. Paternalism and arrogance drove George Pullman to instead build a new city that he thought would be free of alcoholism, crime, poverty and labor strife. Ironically, it was his devotion to the city of his creation that brought on the strike of 1893. Had Pullman’s factory been located in St. Louis, he would no doubt have simply laid off thousands of employees during the national depression that was causing profits to plummet, but as it was the main employer and economic engine for a community he built and felt responsible for, the company instead embarked on a plan for work sharing. Wage rates were never cut, but weekly pay for employees was severely reduced because of reduced hours.
The conventional story of the strike is that Pullman reduced his employees’ pay without lowering rent on the company-owned homes where many employees lived. However, the vast majority of employees lived in two adjoining towns that had sprung up around Pullman, where they could own their own homes, as well as avoid the company’s overbearing meddling in their private lives and morality, and, anyway, the company never evicted a single employee during the resulting rent strike. The strike was more a result of pent-up frustration with the company’s dominant role in all aspects of life in Pullman.
The famous strike was eventually put down by the National Guard, and work resumed at Pullman’s factory, but the town was never the same. George Pullman died in 1897, resentful of his reputation as a tyrant and the reputation of his model town as an oppressive fiefdom. One year later, the Illinois Supreme Court ordered the company to sell all land not involved in the production at the factory, and the town shortly blended into the rest of Chicago, as an industrial slum.
The Sweetest Place on Earth
Amazingly, just a few years after Pullman died, another self-made businessman decided to build a model company town of his own. Friends warned Milton Hershey that the Pullman town had been a disaster and a black mark on the Pullman name, and that Pullman’s residents wouldn’t have elected George Pullman dogcatcher. “I know we’re taking chances,” replied Hershey, “but I won’t be a candidate for dog catcher: I don’t like dogs that much.”
When Milton Hershey decided to build his model town, the name “Hershey” was not yet synonymous with milk chocolate. Indeed, in 1900 the world did not yet know milk chocolate. Chocolate was a luxurious treat for the wealthy. Milton Hershey had made a fortune with a caramel business, which he sold for the unprecedented sum of one million dollars in 1900. Although he retained rights to a small chocolate subsidiary, it specialized in novelty chocolates and was something of a hobby for Hershey, who simply planned to spend his wealth and the rest of his life touring the world with his wife.
For some reason, Hershey abandoned the idea of conspicuous consumption and opulent travel and, like George Pullman, became interested in solving the problems of modern industrial life. Thus, Milton Hershey started the Hershey Chocolate Co. to support his town, not vice versa. Hershey worked on a formula for milk chocolate that could be mass-produced, to provide his town with sustainable industry.
Ground broke on the new town in 1903, near its own source of dairy farms in Pennsylvania Dutch land. The Philadelphia and Reading Railroad served Hershey, at the request of Milton Hershey. Hershey also built a trolley system.
At the center of town was a 150 acre park, featuring a band shell, golf course and a zoo. Hershey continued to add attractions, and by 1913, the park was receiving 100,000 visitors a year, giving Hershey a second industry: tourism. Hershey built banks, department stores and public schools. In addition, he built training schools like the Hershey Industrial School, a generous boarding school for orphans.
In fact, when Hershey’s wife died in 1915 he donated his entire estate – 30 years before his own death – to the Milton Hershey School Trust, which operated the Hershey Industrial School. This strange, quiet act of philanthropy had the peculiar effect of creating a corporate giant that is to this day owned by an orphanage. The result is that the town of Hershey and the Hershey Foods Corp. are more closely tied than one might believe possible in this era of free trade.
Hershey, PA is no stranger to labor strife, however. In a case of history repeating itself, Hershey was the target of a strike by a radical labor union – this time the CIO – during a depression – this time the Great Depression. Despite the fact that Hershey laid off no workers and made no wage cuts, Hershey, PA was caught up in the wave of sit down strikes and Communist agitation. In April of 1937, 600 workers took control of the factory for five days. The strike was broken not by the National Guard, but by angry farmers (who were losing 800,000 pounds of milk a day) and workers loyal to the company, who broke into the factory and beat-up and forcibly removed the strikers. Hershey eventually signed a contract with the more conservative AFL.
Despite this black mark, the town of Hershey, PA is a modest success. Though by no means the utopia Hershey envisioned, the town exists today as a successful tourist destination and the chocolate factory continues pumping out product, and providing the town with a base for industrial jobs.
It may be easy for a reader who is normally critical of the role of corporations in public life to romanticize the example of Hershey, PA. Certainly, the relationship between the Hershey Company and the town of Hershey is an admirable one when compared to Flint, MI and General Motors. Also, since the established rules of the new global economy eschew corporate-community ties, we can be pretty sure that experiments like these are a thing of the past.
In fact, it was the rule of law that nearly caused the Hershey School to sell the company this past summer. The rules of “fiduciary responsibility” that have bedeviled stockholders’ “corporate responsibility” efforts caused Pennsylvania Attorney General, Mike Fisher, to pressure the trust to diversify its holdings, the majority of which are Hershey stock. It was enough to have business observers, like the Wall Street Journal, salivating over the merger possibilities, as well as the influx of Hershey Trust cash in a soft market. It also came at a time that Hershey workers were fighting out the longest strike in company history, over proposed health plan cutbacks, proposed by the first non-Hershey resident CEO in the company’s history. Whatever respite Hershey workers and residents have won seems likely to be short-lived.
Rise of the Loompa Proletariat
In the movie “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” Willy Wonka employs in his factory Oompa Loompas, strange little orange men who seemingly work for free. The Oompa Loompas, who sing while they work, seem to be charged with much manual labor.
They mix the chocolate and other confections, carry out Wonka’s orders, manually power his personal yacht and otherwise do his bidding-all at the beck and call of his whistle. After seeing just one minute of the movie with the Oompa Loompas on the screen, one obsesses about this work arangement. Are these Oompa Loompas slaves, or indentured servants? Are they salaried employees? Is this some Stalinist work camp?
Wonka answers this question himself early on when several visitors on a tour of his factory raise these troubling issues. The Oompa Loompas, he explains, come from a far off place called “Lumpaland,” where, because of their diminutive size, they were in constant danger of being gobbled up by assorted “fierce creatures.” And so, in what he would have us believe was an altruistic gesture, he “freed” them from their native land and had them brought to his factory in the “greatest of secrecy,” where they could live in “peace and safety”…and become his new source of labor.
Were the pint-sized immigrants scabs? It is explained earlier in the movie that years ago Wonka had fired all of his employees, charging them with industrial espionage; trading secrets with his chief competitor, Slugworth, Inc. Wonka closed his doors and ceased production. Three years later, the factory began production again, but, mysteriously to the public, without hiring workers and without opening its doors. At this point, it seems clear that Wonka brought in the Oompa Loompas to solve his labor problems, and kept his doors closed to keep nosy government investigators out in order to keep his little sweat shop running.
The Oompa Loompas certainly seem to be property. In fact, one of the guests on the tour of the plant, bratty Veruca Salt, demands that her father buy her one. He complies and actually haggles with Wonka to purchase one of the little orange men. But Willy Wonka strangely refuses! Is this mere greed, a desire to keep all the hard working Oompa Loompas to himself? The answer comes shortly when Wonka takes his guests to his top secret laboratory. On the door is a large sign, clearly stating, “Top Secret: No Unauthorized Oompa Loompas Allowed Inside.” Behind the door toil dozens of Oompa Loompas. Clearly not your average slaves, they’re actually busy mixing and inventing new candies! These Oompa Loompas are skilled artisans, setting their own hours and work loads.
Evil slave-driver?
How is it that Wonka trusts the Oompa Loompas with such trade secrets as the formula of the “Everlasting Gobstopper,” but fired his human workers out of mistrust. Wonka openly fears that Slugworth will learn his secret formulas. Either international patent and copyright laws don’t exist here, or they don’t apply to these candies. (A third possibility that Wonka never thought to patent his creations seems too far-fetched.) In any event, the result is clear: in order to maintain the massive rent on his products, the kind of rent that makes new products and marketing schemes t.v. news and causes panics in candy stores when the supply “Scrum Diddlyumptious” bars has run out, Wonka must rely on secrecy. He shows that he will go to any length to
maintain secrecy. He has already displaced hundreds of factory workers.
He uses fear and intimidation on his guests on the tour, as well as the general public. And yet he trusts the Oompa Loompas with his trade secrets.
Abused worker?
This was doubtless part of his arrangement with the Oompa Loompas when
he brought them to work for him. Freedom from fierce creatures in exchange for labor. Labor in exchange for housing. And since the Oompa Loompas remain within the Wonka factory and on the Wonka property at all times, there was no way they could trade secrets with the enemy. Wonka, a true capitalist, had fully exploited the immigrant workers!
Or had he? There is a clear dichotomy between the unskilled Oompa Loompas who mix the candy, power Wonka’s yacht and otherwise toil away, and the skilled artisan Oompa Loompas who invent the candy, set their own hours and have the run of the place. These Oompa Loompas are clearly the intellectual superiors of the unskilled variety. Surely, they must appreciate their own situation. They hold in their minds and hands the very information that could ruin Wonka. If they were displeased with the pay or treatment they got from him, they could easily find work elsewhere. Slugworth would, in Wonka’s own words, “give his false teeth” to learn Wonka’s trade secrets, as well as double the pay and benefits of the Oompa Loompas who could be the key to a greater market share.
It would seem that these Oompa Loompas had come to appreciate their fortunate situation and made a deal with Wonka, a little “partnership between labor and capital if you will. And all they had to do was sell out their brother workers, the unskilled Oompa Loompas to achieve it. So, the skilled Oompa Loompas got the best pay, hours, and, one would assume, choice lodging, while the unskilled variety got the shaft.
And yet, they seem so happy. They actually sing while they work. They sing, in fact, about how great it is to work for Wonka and how everyone should be like the “Oompa Loompa doopity doo.” (Okay, they’re not the best songwriters in the world.) This is what gave the impression at first that Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory was a Stalinist work camp, that the workers believe their exploitation to be freedom. The Oompa Loompa’s songs could be characterized as agit-prop.
It isn’t Stalinist propaganda, but something very similar. The workers are singing about labor’s goals being the same as management’s. That’s how Wonka and the skilled Oompa Loompas got them to go along with the
agreement! You’re job security depends on the success of this company, they must have been told. Sacrifices had to be made for profits. After all, if the company made no profits, the Oompa Loompas would be out of a job, and thrown back to Lumpaland. Now that’s motivation!
There seems to be one thing missing from this whole scenario. I used the term “brother worker” intentionally. All the Oompa Loompas we see in the film are males. Discounting the possibility that Oompa Loompas are radically different from us anatomically, there must be female Oompa Loompas. Where are they? It may be safe to assume that this is the final part of the arrangement between Wonka and the Oompa Loompa overseers. It is, by this point, clear that they are salaried workers, paid, albeit unequally, in food, shelter, clothing and protection. These payments for their work is not only for them, but their families. Wonka only puts the adult males to work. The women and children do not have to work.
Now, let’s put on our econimist hats and put this little arrangement into perspective. From the little we see of the world outside the Factory, using Charlie (who doesn’t seem to have a last name) and his family as an example of the typical family, women and children had to work as well. Charlie has a paper route, and his mother took in laundry. These two incomes had to provide for six people: Charlie, his mother, and four bedridden grandparents. (All four in the same bed. Kinky.) There is no father evident in this family. He presumably had to leave town when Wonka closed his factory and the job market soured. But, assuming that the father was in the picture three years prior and worked at the Wonka factory, his earnings would not have to provide for seven people alone. That burden was shared with his wife and son. So, previously, Wonka was paying his human workers enough money necessary to produce and reproduce just themselves for another day of labor.
Given the population density of this area and its presumed saturation of the job market, the existence of a labor union is doubtful, and the wages doubtlessly depressed, so Wonka could easily pay his workers that little. Let’s use as the sum of the wages paid ten Wonka dollars per worker per day. This labor afforded Wonka a commanding share of the chocolate market, however, it was beginning to cost him his rent. So Wonka downsized his entire workforce.
Now, with the Oompa Loompas employed as labor, Wonka had to pay enough money to produce and reproduce each Oompa Loompa and his family.
Assuming a typical Oompa Loompa family of husband, wife and 2.3 children, and assuming that an Oompa Loompa, being half the size of a human worker needs only half the food, shelter and clothing, Wonka would be paying each Oompa Loompa 21 and a half Wonka dollars per day, or, its equivalent in food, shelter and clothing. This is also assuming that Wonka employed an equivalent number of Oompa Loompas as humans. For this increase of $11.50W per worker per day, Wonka gets serious increases in productivity.
For the human worker, Wonka got ten hours work for $10W pay. This is
assuming that Wonka is a fairly liberal employer in a rather Dickensian
atmosphere. Given that the Oompa Loompa worker lives where he works, and also given that the Oompa Loompa sees a personal stake in the success of the company, he obviously works harder and longer than the human worker. At this point, any speculation as to the amount of the increase in productivity would go way beyond merely bordering on absurdity, but sufficed to say, it would be substantial. And it would give Wonka a permanent edge over competitor Slugworth, whose human workers could never keep up.
The other edge it would give Wonka is the aforementioned rent. With workers that can not only be counted on to create new candies but to keep the formulas for said candies top secret, Wonka can retain his huge market share and status as a popular icon of confectionery capitalism, and leave Slugworth permanently in a distant second. The benefits to Wonka are obvious.
For the Oompa Loompas, they get the leave a country where they would have died. For the Oompa Loompas in charge, it means freedom, respect and the necessities of life for them and their families. The unskilled Oompa Loompas are duped into believing that this labor is gratitude and payment for their very lives and the lives of their families. With that artificial outlook, it’s easy to see why they would be so happy. Maybe Oompa Loompa ignorance is bliss.
[This article originally appeared in Vol. 6, issue #11 (April 1998) of Lumpen.]
Health Care’s “Death Spiral”
In “Uninsured in America,” Susan Starr Sered and Rushika Fernandopulle attempt to find out “where the bodies are buried” in our health care system where over 45 million people have no insurance. The book is a patchwork of profiles of people who got sick at times when they lacked insurance and the often devastating effects this had on their lives. The authors, who describe this phenomenon as the “death spiral,” don’t find so many bodies buried (although they do find many in jails or on the street) but they do find health problems that are allowed to become critical before state assistance will kick in and doctors actually pay attention, and emergency rooms used as primary care resulting in crippling debts.
Without getting bogged down in dry facts and figures, the authors provide a pretty good understanding of how the number of uninsured Americans hides how many Americans are functionally uninsured, covered by plans that have expensive premiums, deductibles and co-pays, that refuse to pay for the very “pre-existing conditions” that people most need health care for and slipping in and out of the patchwork system of Medicaid, charity, clinics and emergency rooms.
The book reminds me of an experience working for the health care workers union, doing community organizing among poor souls on Long Island whose medical debts were referred to collection agencies. Although the non-profit hospital where they went to the emergency room was required by law to provide a certain amount of charity care, these patients were never informed of the option to apply for the charity. Instead they were treated, charged tens of thousands of dollars that they could not possibly afford and had their lives turned into nightmares of bill collectors, bankruptcy and foreclosure. One family actually had good health insurance won through a union contract, but a bureaucratic error at the hospital resulted in the patient – not the insurance company – being billed. The insurance company and the hospital fought, refusing to admit error, and the hospital simply referred the matter to a collection agency. The rest of the people had no insurance. A surprising number of them had children with asthma who had bad attacks that required a visit to the emergency room. Just like that, the family became poor.
This patchwork system results in poor health care for all of us, I think. I hate going to the doctor with any kind of health complaint. I never get any kind of satisfying diagnosis. Usually, the doctor just guesses at a diagnosis and prescribes some kind of medication, without running any tests, and there’s no follow-up. I think the paperwork and bureaucracy is too much of a hassle. Fortunately for me, if my doctors miss something big, the care will be paid for by insurance so I won’t have to wait until I get so poor and so near-death that the state will finally pick up the bill, like the people profiled in “Uninsured in America.” Of course, why would I really want to push for tests that would confirm a medical condition, if that will only be used against me in seeking insurance in the future?