The Labor/Corporate Pendulum

The American Thinker ^ | May 28, 2009 | Hal Stevens

[Scanian]

I am here to pay homage to the pendulum. Many famous mathematicians and scientists have studied and learned from the pendulum, including Sir Isaac Newton. By studying the pendulum, Galileo surmised the duration of a single day could be broken down into small measurable increments. By using Galilean principles, Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens invented the first pendulum clock. Leon Foucault, a French physicist, via his invention, the Foucault pendulum, was able to demonstrate that the Earth spins on its axis. But as important as the pendulum has been to the world of science, the pendulum has served equally well as the great metaphor, demonstrating that, all too often, life swings from one extreme to the other.

I went to college in the early 1970's and received a liberal arts degree in sociology. Many of my classes centered on the history of American labor. I learned about sweatshops, child labor abuses, destitute coalminers with black lung, and Henry Ford's dark side regarding his factory workers. I read Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Political activists Emma Goldman, and legendary union organizer and strike leader Mother Jones, were inspirations to me. As a result, I came to believe American workers needed powerful labor unions to protect themselves against the potential tyranny of corporate America.

College zealotry aside, over the last thirty years, I have been awakened by numerous personal experiences with union workers, and in no instance were any of the gentlemen I worked with the Emma Goldman-type.