--Published in Fulton's The Valley News, the Times Herald-Record of Middletown,
The Palladium-Times of Oswego, the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, and
elsewhere in New York State.
Nestle closing shows economics based on profit cannot work On Friday, May 2, Nestle’s Fulton plant closed after 103 years. "Nestle has sunk the city’s landmark business and taken hundreds of jobs with it," said Fulton resident Will Navagh. (The Valley News, 11/2/02) We don’t know what will happen to the Nestle employees; we passionately hope they find good jobs elsewhere. But we know this—no one should ever have to suffer the worry and shame of unemployment in this, the richest nation on earth. Yet every week there are more layoffs. Last month the Labor Department reported that 300,000 people lost their jobs nationwide. What is happening to America? In 1970, at a time when the economy looked much healthier, Eli Siegel, founder of the philosophy Aesthetic Realism, explained that economics motivated by profit would no longer work. The profit system, he stated, is based on contempt, the "lessening of what is different from oneself as a means of self-increase as one sees it." For enormous corporations to up and leave loyal, long-term employees in order to maximize profits is brutal contempt. It is contempt on the part of Nestle to throw hundreds of lives into turmoil, asking employees (in their relocation offer) to uproot themselves from their home, friends, and community while they smugly announce a net annual profit of $5.45 billion. Today, in 2003, we are experiencing the failure of an economy based on contempt. Corporate executives, thirsting for the profits of yesterday, decimate company health plans and outright steal money from employee pension plans. In just this past year, not only Nestle, but Hammermill, Ames, Verizon, Alcoa, and so many others, who reaped billions of dollars in profits from the men and women in New York State—men and women who gave the hours, weeks, and years of their lives to those companies—have thrown them away as dispensable. It’s no wonder people all over this nation are furious at the way they are used at work, seen simply as a means of making profit for someone else. Eli Siegel showed that this anger is part of the force of ethics working in the world itself which has brought about the failure of the profit system in our time. "Man should not make money from man," he said. "That was justice five thousand years ago, but it didn’t have a chance to show its power until now. People are going to see it. Ethics is a force, like electricity, steam, the atom—and will have its way.… There will be no economic recovery in the world until economics itself, the making of money, the having of jobs, becomes ethical; is based on good will rather than on the ill will which has been predominant for centuries." (www.AestheticRealism.org). We love what Ellen Reiss, the class chairman of Aesthetic Realism, wrote about what that an economy based on good will would mean for the people of this nation: "When the jobs of America are owned by the people who work at the jobs—when the wealth Americans produce from the American earth and American factories and offices with American thought and hands, goes to the people of America—there will suddenly be plenty of jobs and plenty of respectful compensation for people’s work." Every economic decision needs as its basis this question asked by Eli Siegel: "What does a person deserve by being a person?" When it is, unemployment will be something children read about in history books, not the reason why their parents can't buy them food.
Ann Richards & Christopher Balchin are New York teachers and Aesthetic Realism associates.
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