I have always been fascinated by how phrases enter colloquial usage stripped of their original intent. NPR covered one this morning that caught my eye. "Sold Down the River." Today it means to be betrayed, but the original meaning was literally a slave being sold to a plantation owner in the cotton kingdom and transported down the Mississippi. A short, brutal life of hard labor picking for the insatiable appetite of the textile mills lay at the end of that journey.
So when Glenn Grothman touts a 7 day workweek and some other conservative somewhere chirps longingly about ridding workers of the burden of overtime, it is not a slippery slope fallacy to note where they desire to take us. Any step commodifying labor or dehumanizing workers is a step back toward the re-enshrinement of slavery. Pitting one group of workers against another to bring both down, as governor Scott Walker regularly does in WI, is merely the age-old exercise of serving power. The fact that it not only happens in a democracy, but that these slave-power antics are popular among certain segments of the electorate who stand to gain nothing and lose much is a statement of how powerful propaganda can be.
Do we have to wait until everyone is sold down the river before figuring this out?
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