Fourteenth century Europe was governed under a feudal system. The king owned all the land and portioned it out to the lords for money and military support. Knights were given plots and had to pay some proceeds and promise loyalty. At the bottom was the peasant, who worked and toiled and paid, and had very few options and absolutely no opportunity.
It isn’t completely dissimilar to the modern world. If you can swap kings, lords and knights with new titles, middle management, board of directors, CEOs, and the other alphabetic royalty in the corporate castles. Of course, rampant abuse of labor is frowned upon, and today’s serfs are a little more mobile, able to move from one lord to another. But, they always work for the same king.
One of the byproducts of the Great Mortality (the European plague also known as the Black Death from approximately 1346 to 1353 CE) was a dearth of peasants. A lot of them had died. There was still as much work to be done but there were a lot fewer serfs. This gave the serfs an opportunity to vent their spleen. Which eventually brought down the whole system.
We were traveling somewhere recently, and decided to stop for lunch at a ubiquitous fast food chain. It would allow us to stretch our legs, use the restroom and get out of the car for a few glorious minutes. Plus we could have some food. A sign on the door said “Dining room closed due to staffing problems. Please use the drive through.”
We cursed, got in our car and drove less than half a block to the next fast food chain store. They always seem to end up close together, almost as if they travel in packs. It was open, the service was about what we expected, and the food was exactly what we assumed it would be. It never varies, no matter where you go.
On the news they talk about the labor problems coursing through the nation. Ripples of disruption flow from cargo ships to grocery stores to automotive show rooms, sapping restaurants of their ability to prepare and serve food, driving up prices, mangling the whole system. Commentators and editorials chatter endlessly about the unwilling and the lazy, but I can’t help think of the 700,000 people who passed away from the novel coronavirus. Most of them had jobs, they worked somewhere.
Our modern serfs may not realize it, but they have the power now. Meaningful reform is theirs for the taking. Paid holidays, paid insurance, vacation time. Of course, this isn’t to say the companies can fix all this themselves, any more than the lords and knights could. It took a concerted effort from the king, the ruling class and the newly expanded merchant and manufacturing segments to realize workers were a resource as valuable as wool, water, or coal.
Somehow it seems this lesson is forgotten at times over the years. It’s a shame that it takes a tragedy to address a national fault. America has made a big deal about the land of the free, but really it has become the land of the indebted. A land where working isn’t enough to get ahead, and in many cases it isn’t even enough to break even. If there is any hope for a silver lining in this dark cloud let it be the salvation of the working class. It’s long past due.
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Vengeance of Serfs (Geoffroy, 1845)
Public Domain