Oh, swell – here it comes again.

It’s the “Great Man” theory of history, trotted out periodically by plutocrats, patricians, royalists, and assorted other proponents of an elitist social order. They insist that great progress does not come from political movements, unions, and other grassroots forces, but from the genius and benevolence of individual, derring-do, capitalist innovators.

In a declaration this month, for example, a group of laissez-fairyland hucksters asserted that it wasn’t labor’s long bloody struggle that advanced worker rights, but industrial America’s generous bosses! These befuddled revisionists of corporate history proclaimed that “unions did not create weekends, the 8-hour work day [or] a living wage.” No? Who then? “Henry Ford did [it] in 1926,” they say, adding emphatically that “CAPITALISM & COMPETITION creates higher wages and better working conditions.”

Excuse me, boss, but capitalism constantly tries to destroy any competitive market, and it thrives by holding down wages, repressing worker rights, and eliminating jobs.

Forget the right-wing’s cartoonish portrayal of Henry the Great as a working-class savior. He was a Nazi-admiring, antisemitic, industrial magnate. Contrary to the revisionists, unions did indeed create their own progress, having fought for wage and hour protections since the 1860s. They rallied popular support with this slogan: “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will.”

This is Jim Hightower saying… And here’s an inconvenient fact that causes the hair of today’s corporate myth makers to burst into flames: It was not some genius capitalist who first established the 8-hour day as our national standard – it was government! President Ulysses Grant instituted it for all federal workers in 1869 – half a century before Ford finally trailed behind.

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