“It’s a big job just gettin’ by with nine kids and a wife. I’ve been a workin’ man dang near all my life, but I’ll keep workin’… long as my hands’re fit to use. I’ll drink my beer in a tavern, singin’ little bit o’ these working man blues.”
—Merle Haggard—
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When thinking about labor rights and advocacy for the working class, one typically connects the championing of these causes to leftwing and center-left organizations and parties. Rarely, if ever, would one connect “caring about workers” with the Right. And the reason that conservatism has sort of always been stuck with this perception of being on the side of management, bosses, and the owner class is because there is an understanding in conservative philosophy that hierarchy and order are important, and thus, some preference “should be” given in defending the folks who “maintain” those things.
A few problems here:
One, there is no small percentage of managers and executives who are particularly adept at fomenting dysfunction and resentment rather than maintaining anything. So even if we were to accept the premise that somehow managers/bosses/executives are supposed to play a role in maintaining societal “hierarchy and order”, any passive consumer of news or person who’s worked a lot of jobs will instantly note that many higher-ups perform these roles poorly and combine callousness with incompetence to such a degree they become (according to 76% of the public) the most hated people in America. To invoke the Roman imagery that seems to be a common feature in powerpoints about meritocracy, the leadership styles of many managers, bosses, and executives don’t so much resemble Maximus from Gladiator as they do Claudius… the drooling, hunchbacked, club-footed emperor reputed for being arbitrary and unjust.
Two, many of America’s major companies in recent years have been vocal in their disdain for exactly the traditional values conservatives of bygone days believed they would be the champions of, and have been equally vocal in their support of hyper-individualism and sexual degeneracy. Contrary to the conservative dream of nuclear families, widespread spirituality, and home ownership, your average CEO today dreams of atomized individuals, adrift in nihilism, barely able to keep their heads financially above water, because those types of individuals are easy to abuse and manipulate to work longer for less.
Three—and this one really drills down deep—to some extent conservatism’s association of managers/bosses/executives with “hierarchy and order” has been influenced by America’s historically Puritan roots, which taught us to equate idleness and wealth with slothfulness and avarice, and thus by extension equate leisure time and prosperity with wrongdoing; this negatively predisposes us to view disgruntled workers who want more time and more money as being morally suspect.
Yet, more to the point:
If the stability of an economy (high on a society’s “hierarchy” of importance) depends upon workers having high enough wages to—not only pay bills—but also afford small luxuries that themselves are huge boons to an economy (e.g. fast food, retail, entertainment, sports)
And if the stability of an economy also depends upon enough workers having high enough job satisfaction that industries don’t experience massive labor shortages or retention crises
And if the ability of heads-of-households to spend money on necessities and small luxuries for their families is key to preserving Family as the essential building block of society (fundamental to the conservative concept of “order”)
Then conservatism doesn’t actually need a business movement. It needs a labor movement.
