Building a Society

In recent weeks, much has been made of a comment by President Obama in which he said, "You didn't build that."  With the statement pulled from its context, many folks have taken exception to it, particularly people who have suggested that the statement dismisses or devalues the hard work that people put into building businesses.  This theme featured prominently at the Republican National Convention this past week.  It even served as context for a bakery in Virginia to turn away Vice President Joe Biden.

I'm certainly not the first to comment on Obama's statement and the context of the statement and/or to offer a counter-criticism of the complaints about the statement.  Heck, the Democratic Party and the Obama campaign were, as one would expect, quick to jump on that.  Yet, on this Labor Day, I want to touch on one aspect of those complaints.  In the speech in which Obama made this statement, he was talking about all of the various things that helped people be in positions to build their businesses.  They were taught by other people.  The roads they used were built by other people.  And so on ... Again, plenty of other folks have already covered that.  I want to focus, though, on how these complaints reflect on laborers.

As the story above about comments from the Republican National Convention demonstrates, these complaints take part in a tradition of thought focused on individualism.  They build out of a myth of the American Dream in which people build success in their own lives out of their own hard work and effort.  And they then argue that Obama's comment flies in the face of the logic of that mythology.

Yet, in the process of suggesting that their work should be valued, these complaints belie a particularly troubling self-centeredness.  Yes, insofar as we place value on labor, the work that one puts into creating and developing an organization warrants recognition.  Yet, anyone who thinks that they are alone in that process is either rather naive or rather uncaring.  In addition to the teachers, road builders, and others to whom Obama was referring when making the comment, businesses don't make it without employees.  Sure, some employees work harder than others, some have more commitment to their jobs than others, and so on, but individuals who perform labor allow organizations to succeed.  Without people doing the day-to-day tasks that any organization needs, the organization does not function and, thus, does not succeed.  Still, in the U.S. we're quick to deny these individuals much recognition.  Focus placed on things like "business leadership" invoke the idea that executives and owners of businesses provided the means for businesses to be profitable and, as such, they deserve large sums of money and large amounts of social and political power.  We then hear how that's their money--they earned it, and they should be able to do with it as they wish.

Except that they didn't earn it all by themselves.  When someone like Terrence Pegula has $88 million available to donate to Penn State hockey programs and still has $189 million left to buy the Buffalo Sabres, he got that money from investing in something.  And, in this particular case, he got it from sale of an oil and gas company that he owned (and which, by the way, made considerable money from fracking).  People worked for him in that company, doing many of the tasks, often very dirty tasks, that made that possible.  Yet, where are they in getting to have a say in the use of that money and the priorities used when doling it out?

In the end, the U.S. gives plenty of credit to business owners, entrepreneurs, and executives who run organizations.  Indeed, the Mitt Romney presidential campaign is centered on the idea that that's what makes someone qualified to be president, and Romney is far from alone among politicians from various sides in articulating such a sentiment.  We do just fine in recognizing their contributions.  On the other hand, we are much less effective in recognizing the labor that accompanied these folks' contributions.  When business owners complain that Obama's comment devalues their work because they did build their companies, as if they did it themselves, they're succumbing to the rather self-centered, undemocratic notion that lies at the heart of our ineffectiveness in recognizing the contributions of laborers.

For every business owner out there who takes exception to Obama's "You didn't build that" statement, there are scores of laborers who helped those business owners build what they are acting like they built themselves.  On this Labor Day -- this day of all days on which we are asked to think about the contributions of laborers to our society -- it seems like a good time to reflect on that a little bit more.