Sexual harassment in the workplace was a major impetus for the growth of organized labor in the United States and Western Europe. It shouldn’t be forgotten that the first large scale employment of wage labor during the industrialization of the US involved women and farm girls in New England. Wage labor was considered too demeaning by men, and females were judged to be more easily managed. But an idea we tend to primly repress today was in the forefront of the consciousness of those involved in early Union Movements in the US and elsewhere:
Employment is always demeaning when it is part of an organized process of extracting wealth from the many for the irresponsible benefit of a very tiny few.
But surely we continue to struggle to establish institutions and habits of mind that reduce the likelyhood some will have opportunities and motivations to abuse those who have been socially engineered into positions of fear or dependence? Isn’t that the thrust of recent (the previous two centuries) history?
Whatever the record of past victories, defeats, or the everpresent temptations of hopelessness, there is no escape from the need for enhancing liberal democracy (individual rights, rule of law, and countervailing institutions), but mystifications regarding private property and individual freedom must be decoupled from justifications for allowing a tiny few to dominate the investment and development priorities of entire nations.
Struggling to institutionalize accountability for harassment, demeaning behaviors, and psycho/social repression is part of the struggle to make power accountable and responsible to the common good.
Progress is certainly always being made, but civil (and brutish) resistance is so constantly fierce that setbacks are quite frequent. The tax scam juggernaut currently befouling Congress is extremely likely to institutionalize the irresponsible power of a predatory plutocratic oligarchy for at least a generation. It will certainly siphon resources away from the already haphazard efforts of our society to develop humane education systems for fostering the skills and knowledge required by complex working democracies where productive abilities are neither despised nor rewarded by diminishing (or humiliating) others.
