3 min read
For Labor Day, here's a brief reminder of how Dr. George Lakoff recommends framing workers, unions and pensions in "The ALL NEW Don't Think of An Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate":
'Unioniziation is a freedom issue'
Unions increase freedom, and it needs to be said:
Unions function to equalize the power of the company over the employee. Short of outsourcing, companies cannot function without any resource-workers at all. If the company is unionized, then all the workers as a group have bargaining power that a solitary worker does not have.
The alternative—taking whatever the company offers to the individual—might well be called corporate servitude or wage slavery. As the power of unions has declined, the wages of resource-workers have not gone up in thirty years. Over the same time, the wealth of wealthy investors and corporations has skyrocketed without more being produced. The decline of unions has meant a decline for most citizens in their share of their nation’s wealth, and with it a decline in all the freedoms that wealth brings.
Unionization is a freedom issue, and needs to be understood as such. But the failure to say it out loud and repeat it as often as possible allows conservatives to form organizations like the Center for Worker Freedom, as if unions were taking away freedom, and to speak of “Right to Work” laws, as if unions were taking rights away instead of granting you freedom from corporate servitude and wage slavery.
Workers are profit creators
Workers are profit creators, but a lack of framing has allowed conservatives to frame the issue in a way that puts employers above employees:
It is basic truth. Workers are profit creators.
But who says it? How many times, if any, have you heard that truth? It is an important truth; it reframes the issue of jobs from the perspective of the contributions of those who work.
Conservatives like to speak of wealthy company owners and investors as “job creators,” that they “give” people jobs, as if they just create jobs as gifts for people who are out of work. That is nonsense. The truth is that workers are profit creators, and that no one gets hired unless they contribute to the profit of owners and investors.
Pensions are freedom issues
Pensions are earned, not given:
A pension is a delayed payment for work already done. This is the most fundamental truth about pensions, and it is almost never said. It is an unframed truth. When you take a job and a pension comes with it, that pension is part of your pay, part of your conditions of employment. It is common for workers to forego higher current pay if there is a significant pension, since the pension is money to live on when you can no longer work. It is part of the employment contract... The money is earned.
Unfortunately, framing enters in here. Pensions and health care are called “benefits,” as if they are generous gifts to employees. They are not gifts. They are earned as deferred payments for work done. When a company tells its employees that they can no longer afford such “generous benefits” and will have to cut them, it is a framing lie. Either there has been theft or misinvestment or mismanagement.
“Benefits” are earnings, period. Pensions and benefits are freedom issues.
Unions are Agents of Freedom
From "Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think" (1996):
Unions are actually agents of freedom—freedom from corporate servitude and wage slavery. Without unions, employees have to individually take what is offered, usually far less than they would get with a union: not just pay but worker safety, health care benefits, pensions, reasonable working conditions and hours, reasonable vacation time. What is “reasonable”? What the union members can negotiate. Unions create freedom.
Read more in "The ALL NEW Don't Think of An Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate."
In case you missed it, here's are recent discussion of freedom issues in the 2024 campaign on the FrameLab podcast:
22. Kamala Harris, Joy and the Freedom Frame
George Lakoff and Gil Duran discuss the Democratic Party’s reclaiming of “freedom” as the main frame of the Kamala Harris campaign.
