I once jokingly said I would buy a shoeshine kit and go to a public area-certainly NOT on THEIR property–near Goldman Sachs’ Manhattan office. There I said I would-via a sign sarcastically saying ‘God Bless Goldman Sachs: Shoeshine $5,’ by shining GS’ executives’ $500 pairs of shoes–get back some of my tax money that was used in the 2008-’09 bailout of Wall Street.
A friend of mine, reading about my planned protest thought I was serious and offered to ask a friend of his at the Daily News to send a reporter and photographer to capture my protest against Wall Street duplicity and greed for an article that could have been picked up and published nationwide.
Shocked, I initially said, “Yes.” But a day later, I called the reporter and reneged. I had begun to think like a capitalist: “Am I going to profit from this?” “Follow the money: who would profit?” and “Show me the money.”
The answers were “No” and “Not me.” The Daily News may have sold extra copies and profited. The photographer, with the copyright to the photos, may have profited. (The Daily News reporter had laughed when I asked for money to be photographed and interviewed.) Even GS could have profited from the publicity or a good laugh when the elite saw a serf (me) trying to get back at the financial giant for ruining the country, which had led to my being laid off.
I also was afraid to have looked the fool and possibly harming my friends’ and relatives’ reputations and their lives.
Or, maybe, the photo would have become iconic and helped the cause of the jobless and disappearing middle and lower classes in America. But that prospect had much too small a chance of success for me to take when, since 2009, I’ve had to scrape for money to pay the rent month-to-month and for food meal-to-meal.
It would have been easy for the Daily News reporter or GS execs to chuckle when their main concerns are whether to buy that third retirement home or whether to use the Daily News job as a springboard into a novelist’s career.
Or, maybe, as a 57-year-old ex-hippie-wannabe-too timid to attend Woodstock-I was merely exposing the “so-called liberal” white man’s yellow streak that has run down our backs since the Crash of 2008. As Chris Hedges in TruthDig.com wrote on Oct. 24, old white liberals like myself would never have succeeded as much as Occupy Wall Street’s brave, gutsy members down in Zuccotti Park have so far.
Are we former hippie wannabes going to collaborate now with the plutocrats as many French people did when faced with Nazi impositions? What’s to be done when you’re afraid to say “I hate Obama” or “I hate Cheney” in public for fear of being renditioned to Egypt? Or kidnapped in the dark of the night; like in an old Bogie film.
I used to be a World War II nut. I watched “The World at War,” a BBC, 25-part TV documentary. Loved it. But I was 25. Now I’m twice that. John R. MacArthur, in a copyrighted 2009 story in The Providence Journal, captures the essence of the dilemma faced by French people, and, for that matter, by the common Germans who knew about the concentration camps. And now by Americans. What do you do? Do you sacrifice yourself or family to save the country?
Have you ever asked yourself what you would have done if you had found yourself in Paris on June 14, 1940, when the German army rolled into town? Collaboration so quickly became the norm that this fundamental question – would I have run, fought, played ball or just kept my head down? – rarely gets posed in public. Of course, the answer would have depended largely on whether you were Jewish, or French, or both. But whatever your origins, or your politics, the practical and moral choices presented that day still trouble the conscience and demand debate
But we imagine intellectuals [liberals, I guess] to be more principled, or at least more thoughtful, than ordinary businessmen. But paradox and hypocrisy were the order of the day. Some non-collaborators in World War II France wrote for collaborationist journals and, for a time, even Maurois naïvely supported Maréchal Philippe Pétain, the head of the collaborationist Vichy regime that governed the so-called free zone in the south and eventually conducted its own roundups of Jews. As the historian Thomas Christofferson writes, “Purity never existed, not even among intellectuals. . . . For the most part, the intellectual resistance was a limited, Parisian phenomenon that very few people experienced firsthand.”
In the end, the Occupation is a French story that may continue to fascinate Americans simply because France is more interesting than, say, Holland, where a higher percentage of the Jewish population was deported. It may also be that Americans, in their perpetual innocence, prefer to consider the sins of others rather than examine their own history.
Hedges remarked in that recent column: “The occupation movement’s greatest challenge will be overcoming the deep distrust of white liberals by the poor and the working class, especially people of color. Marginalized people of color have been organizing, protesting and suffering for years with little help or even acknowledgment from the white liberal class.
“With some justification, those who live in these marginalized communities often view this movement as one dominated by white sons and daughters of the middle class who began to decry police abuse and the lack of economic opportunities only after they and their families were affected. This distrust is not the fault of the movement, which has instituted measures within its decision-making process to make sure marginalized voices are heard before white males.
“It is the fault of a bankrupt liberal class that for decades has abandoned the core issue of economic justice for the poor and the working class and busied itself with the vain and self-referential pursuits of multiculturalism and identity politics.”
Hedges, as usual, hit the nail on the head. I come from that once stronghold of liberal values, Minnesota, the only state that went for Carter, Mondale, and Dukakis since “Saint” Reagan began changing the U.S., ironically, into an “evil empire” in 1980.
“The [1960s] civil rights movement, after all, achieved a legal victory, not an economic one,” Hedges wrote. “And for the bottom two-thirds of African-Americans, life is worse today than it was when Martin Luther King marched in Selma in 1965. King, like Malcolm X, understood that racial equality was impossible without economic justice. The steady impoverishment of those in these marginal communities, part of the Faustian deal worked out between the Democratic Party and its corporate sponsors, has been accompanied by draconian forms of police control, from stop-and-frisk to militarized police raids to the establishment of our vast complex of prison gulags.
“The decision by protesters from Occupy Wall Street to join Cornel West in Harlem on Saturday, Oct. 22, to protest the New York City Police Department’s stop-and-frisk policy was an important step in taking the message of the occupy movement to our impoverished internal colonies. West, who led the protest outside the 28th Precinct at West 123rd Street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard and who was arrested along with about 30 others, was part of a crowd that chanted: “Stop-and-frisk don’t stop the crime. Stop-and-frisk is the crime.”
“The power elite are frantically searching for the ideological weapon that will discredit the movement. But the clarity of the protests, the painful personal stories of dislocation that are the heart of its message, and, most important, the self-discipline, despite police provocation, which has kept these protests nonviolent have advanced the movement and discredited the forces of control. The power elite, held together by the glue of force and fraud, are seeking ways to communicate in the only language they know they can master-unrestrained force,” Hedges continued.
However, the divisions between the poor and the working class on the one hand and the white, liberal middle class on the other reach back to the Vietnam anti-war movement.
Back in 1968, when MLK and RFK were killed and it looked like America had gone mad, accelerating a ridiculous war in Vietnam because LBJ didn’t have the guts to be “the first president in American history to lose a war,” Americans did face surveillance: John Lennon and Jim Morrison were just two wildly popular spokesman for the peace movement who were on the FBI’s hit list. However, there still remained habeus corpus, the right to a lawyer, and the right to be detained only after being charged in a court of law. None of that is true now.
Because in the 1960s there was part of our revered justice system still intact-so much so that a sociopath like Nixon was forced to resign and people sang and protested more or less freely to words written by Lennon and Morrison.
We don’t see that singing and protesting today. No one wants to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and be detained for no reason, indefinitely, in solitary, without access to a lawyer or habeus corpus.
No one is singing Morrison’s lyrics for the Doors’ song, “Five to One,” which nowadays likely would be considered “aiding and abetting a terrorist group” by “incitement to riot” or to be violent, depending on the whim of President Obama or his puppeteers [Mind you: I feel I’m taking a grave chance just printing those words that follow (below) now. I’ve told my friends and relatives what to do, if the Feds take me away. Does that sound like even the 1960s-style of democracy still exists in 2011?]:
“Five to one, baby
One in five
No one here gets out alive, now
You get yours, baby
I’ll get mine
Gonna make it, baby
If we try
“The old get old
And the young get stronger
May take a week
And it may take longer
They got the guns
But we got the numbers
Gonna win, yeah
We’re takin’ over
Come on!
Yeah!
“Your ballroom days are over, baby
Night is drawing near
Shadows of the evening crawl across the years
Ya walk across the floor with a flower in your hand
Trying to tell me no one understands
Trade in your hours for a handful dimes
Gonna’ make it, baby, in our prime
“Come together one more time
Get together one more time
Get together one more time.”
Hedges wrote: “The bulk of the white protesters in the 1960s had a movement that, while it incorporated a healthy dose of disrespect for authority, focused on self-indulgent schemes for inner peace and fulfillment. The use of hallucinogenic drugs, advocated by Timothy Leary in books such as “The Politics of Ecstasy,” and the rise of occultism that popularized transcendental meditation, Theosophy, Hare Krishna, Zen and the I-Ching were trends that would have dismayed older radical movements such as the Wobblies and the Communist Party. The counterculture of the 1960s, like the commodity culture, lured adherents inward. It set up the self as the primary center of concern. It offered affirmative, therapeutic remedies to social problems and embraced vague, undefined and utopian campaigns to remake society. There was no real political vision.”
“The power of the Occupy Wall Street movement is that it has not replicated the beliefs of the New Left. Rather, it is rooted in the moral imperatives of justice and self-sacrifice, what Dwight Macdonald called nonhistorical values, values closer to King than Abbie Hoffman. It seeks to rebuild the bridges to labor, the poor and the working class. The movement denounces the consumer culture and every evening shares its food with the homeless, who also often sleep in the park. But, most important, it eschews, through a nonhierarchical system of self-governance, the deadly leadership cults that plagued and ultimately destroyed the movements of the 1960s.
“The only effective tool for change will come through movements such as those that stand in direct opposition to state power and seek through the sheer force of numbers and civil disobedience to discredit and weaken the corporate state.”
“What we are witnessing in parks and squares across the United States is not simply widespread revulsion over the greed and cruelty of corporate capitalism, but the articulation of a new and potent radicalism. This radicalism challenges the right of corporations to poison our ecosystem and turn greed and self-promotion into the highest good at the expense of human life. If this movement can cross class lines, if it can articulate its vision to those in marginalized communities, especially poor people of color, it can tap into a force and power that was never part of the New Left. It can make possible the shaking of the foundations and, let us hope, the toppling of the corporate state.”
However, even though Occupy Wall Street has lasted longer than expected, one wonders when the hammer will fall. Society seems to have regressed since 9/11. Back to the age of lords and serfs. Back, perhaps even, to the age of slavery, when common men and women were treated like chattel. And, sometimes, those common men and women nowadays are led to their demise by predatory tactics. Lack of education, insider knowledge, and money to hire lawyers make them easy targets. They try to counter those minuses by uniting, joining a union. But unions aren’t what they were in my daddy’s day, just after World War II and FDR. Corporations and the GOP have taken care of that. My dad’s union got him a pension and retirement at age 62. I probably will never be able to retire.
One man’s attempt to join a union began in 2002. Let’s call him Bob. Bob’s fellow workers, editors and reporters at a New York-based newspaper-which at the time and still is a cash cow for the parent company, according to one of their recently (voluntarily) departed leading editors-still believed they’d profit if they unionized.
So, they met every week during lunch hours at the union’s office-a seven-block trek in midtown Manhattan. They even got up at 5 a.m. in order to get to a Manhattan hotel to picket company executives as they entered for a free-breakfast meeting. On other days, the workers walked in front of their regular office building, taking shifts around lunch time, to hand out fliers.
And they got the union! Or did they? Their first three-year contract, signed in October 2003, called only for a raise of $500 a year. Their union dues? Forty dollars per month. You do the math. Their second contract, another $500 raise. Again, the math learned in second-grade in Catholic school 46 years before was all Bob needed.
The rest of the contract? Let’s put it this way, their company’s highest executive in 2007 would say at a party: “I can see you unionizing, here in New York City, but why did you pick such a [crappy] one and settle so [damn] low?”
The first and second three-year contracts included phrases such as:
1. Reductions in Staff: “The Publisher will maintain the unilateral right to implement a reduction in staff for other than disciplinary reasons. Laid-off Employees: the Publisher may retain or recall a less senior Employee whose overall performance is better than that of more senior Employees.”
2. Discharge and Discipline: “…the editorial judgment of the Publisher is to remain paramount in all employment decisions…In no event may the arbitrator review the wisdom of or substitute his view for the Publisher’s assessment of editorial quality.”
3. No Strike, No Lock Out: “…No strike, sympathy strike or other interruption of normal employment or production shall be engaged in by Employees during the term of this Agreement.”
Then, also in 2007, that uppermost executive helped squire a deal with a British upstart. “It’s time our shareholders got a fair return on their money,” he told the workers via email. The common worker bees were prepped for a move to “fancy” Wall Street digs. A new human resources (HR) director appeared suddenly in an closet-size office at the old building. He looked baby-faced and innocent, 25 years old at most. He was quiet and efficient-never talking to the common workers. Much the way one pictures Himmler in his office in the late 1930s.
A glimpse of the future came when the workers moved to their new digs-a huge building near Wall Street in which the British parent’s little companies were consolidated into two floors. The workers called the floors “the stockyards.” That first day, each wandered into a blindingly white, new-carpet-smelling space the size of two football fields. They rubbed their eyes as they followed the “group leaders’” directions to their cubicles. From his, which Bob shared with another man, he could see 40 “head” of “cattle” to the northern side of the yard and another 40 head-bobbing their heads up and down over their one-foot-high stall walls as they lowered their heads to chew on some more words and then raised them to get cricks out of their necks-on the western side.
Because of the move to the “fancy” digs, half of Bob’s personal and company-related stuff had to be ditched. Now he was in a closet-size cubicle and the new HR director had a corner office with windows. Bob had space for only two personal photos.
Clearly, this was a place for grinding out the news like so much sausage. And if one “head” of cattle left or was “slaughtered”-the parent corporation just had to assign a young steer to his stall. Careful now! Those young ones bump and buck when first pushed into small spaces. But they’ll get used to it! Save money so the shareholders will be comfortable next time around!
A year before Bob’s company’s sale, in fall 2006, his father died in a hospital bed like a stranded fish gasping for air on a dock. The doctor-and Bob’s siblings-couldn’t euthanize him, like you would a head of beef-even though he had only 3 or 4 days left, at best. So, for those long days, Bob and his siblings watched him gasp for air and roll his eyes back in their sockets like Jack Nicholson in “The Shining.” Then the doc prescribed morphine. And Bob’s dad stopped rasping. More morphine. Sleep. More morphine (strictly to ease the pain! Not to let him die with dignity!). Bob kissed his dad’s still-warm, but dead, forehead at 2:30 a.m., finally, one night.
In late 2006, Bob returned to his cubicle at the paper. His dad’s death had given him lung problems-leakage into the lungs’ lining. Two doctors had prescribed surgery. Under this pressure and the recent loss of his dad, both of which Bob’s boss knew fully, Bob inappropriately answered a client’s silly email. His apologies didn’t help. No excuses were accepted from the corporation’s children. Bob felt like Oliver Twist.
He soon was ambushed with a “Final Warning” from the newspaper. If he made an “inappropriate” comment again-no matter if a doctor was holding a surgical scalpel to his neck–he’d be fired immediately. Bob wrote at the time, “I still am not clear on when the implied prior warnings came. If they did come, they did not come in concrete terms, nor in writing, nor were they labeled No. 1, No. 2 and so on. The Final Warning came in the form of an ambush. (My boss) and I had scheduled a meeting in her office to discuss new columnists. Four minutes before that meeting, she sent an email stating [“We are meeting at 11, but another issue has come up and (the publisher) would like to be part of our conversation. So please meet me in his office at 11. Thanks.”]
When Bob got to his office, a corporation lawyer and a senior vice president were there and the Final Warning was handed to Bob. Under this intense intimidation, with no time to prepare an answer and no union rep with him, Bob signed it.
In fact, Bob later learned that the union president had been notified by the publisher the evening BEFORE, but neither the union nor the company had warned Bob. With a warning, there would not have been an ambush which, Bob alleges, was set up to increase intimidation, and Bob could have taken the warning and studied it for at least 24 hours, if not a week or a month.
Bob later tried to communicate with his union rep and with the union president himself via the union’s Web site. In that note, Bob wrote that “[the union rep] tells me that [the publisher] called [the union president] yesterday AS A COURTESY and told him that I would be receiving a letter regarding an incident with a customer. How can [my boss] ambush me? How could [the union president] let her?”
Needless to say, the union president never replied to this communication.
It had been just another example of the union and company being in bed with each other and using predatory, intimidating-power-tactics over their chattel.
Despite six years of working full-speed and enduring a three-hour total daily commute, the Final Warning stayed on his record until he was laid off.
The Brits, during the financial meltdown of summer and fall 2008, sent all of two emails. The first, in September, admitted they had purchased some of “those toxic investments you’ve been hearing about.” They were “exploring” options that included layoffs in their London office (but not in the U.S.). “Whew! Still able to chew my news with my cattle-mates.” The second in October or November said there would be no bonuses (“Bonuses. Some people get bonuses here?”) or raises in 2009.
Then silence.
Finally, one fine January morning at 10:30 Bob called his boss to ask if he and she were still “on” to meet about a columnist who had been using only a rival newspaper as a source for his allotted 2,000 words. “Sure. Thanks for reminding me.”
At 11:30 that same morning, she called from the HR department, “Can you come to the HR room?”
“Himmler,” Bob’s boss and Bob sat in Heinrich’s glass-walled office. “Himmler” pointed his finger in the direction of the gas chambers. A little child was of no use to this camp.
The “Agreement and General Release (‘Agreement’)” shoved in front of Bob’s face included such phrases as:
1. The Company will commence payment as soon as practicable after receipt of a signed copy of this Agreement and your return to the Company of all Company property [no mention of this having to be done without warning and within 30 minutes or that Bob’s computer already had been turned off]…. We cannot process any payments to you until after the seven days [change-of-mind time] have elapsed and you have not revoked your acceptance.
2. You agree not to disparage or make negative references about the Company … to any third party.
3. You covenant to hold all confidential information, whether CONTAINED IN YOUR MEMORY [or elsewhere]…
Bob thought: “They own my mind too?”
Young Himmler stated “we will need a couple of weeks” to do the paperwork and get the money to your account. Meanwhile, Bob’s rent was coming due.
The duress of an ambush and the predatory tactics? Again, as in late 2006, no union rep. (She must have gotten another courtesy call the night before and had made other plans.) Bob later faxed the Agreement to her. She called back and said it was OK for him to sign it. Bob had to pay the Feb. 1 rent in two days. He had no money in savings-nothing, having a special-needs child and heavy medical bills. And he had a few hundred in checking. He knew he needed this comp package in order to pay his $1,680 per month rent on March 1 and keep a roof over his wife and kid.
According to the Agreement, Bob would be getting 14 weeks’ pay in a lump sum in a “couple of weeks,” according to Himmler. Close to the March 1 due date, Bob thought. He also thought, “Well, federal and state taxes will take quite a bit out, but I should get about $16,000 minus two or three thousand.” He signed and sent by FedEx the Agreement to Himmler.
The Agreement’s wording said he would be getting those weeks’ pay “less lawful deductions.” Bob thought that meant the usual taxes. Wrong. He got the lump-sum in the last week of February and it was about $9,000. The government had taken out 42 percent of his earned $16,000 or so! Himmler and the union had given him no more knowledge than the misleading, predatory words: “less lawful deductions.” On March 1, after the shock of the 42 percent loss, Bob wrote Himmler, asking for an itemization of all deductions. He received a reply from the Brits’ payroll department on March 13, telling him that the compensation or severance pay was NOT regular pay, but was “Supplemental” wages whose tax rates are much higher: federal (25 percent), state (7.35 percent), and city (4 percent)–for a total of 42 percent. This information reached Bob 43 days after his lay-off day.
He believed the company had once again had used ambush and predatory tactics with the full knowledge of the union for which he had been paying $480 a year.
“Himmler” certainly knew that “supplemental” wages would have 42 percent taken out. His boss knew that. The union knew that. They played him for the ignorant middle-class stooge he was. They preyed upon him, lying by omission.
Thank god Bob and his coworkers had picketed that hotel in freezing temperatures in 2002 and had gotten their union! However, as they shivered in the morning snow, they never realized the union was just waking up inside one of the hotel’s rooms after a cozy night with management.
“Our workers are picketing in front of the hotel.”
“So? Let’s go down to the executive dining room for some sausage, eggs, and, perhaps, a morning toast!”
Capitalism is an economic and social system in which most trade and industry are privately controlled for profit rather than by the state. The means of production (also known as capital), are owned, operated, and traded for the purpose of generating profits by private individuals, either singly or jointly. In a capitalist system, investments, distribution, income, production, pricing and supply of goods, commodities and services are determined by voluntary private decisions. A distinguishing feature of capitalism is that each person owns his or her own labor, and is therefore allowed to sell the use of it to employers.
The central axiom of capitalism is that the best allocation of resources is achieved through consumers having free choice, and producers responding accordingly to meet consumer demand.
Can we move past that to a more equitable economy that includes partial socialism? Can we implement any of one of the last truly liberal Democrats’ (FDR) famous Four Freedoms?
The Four Freedoms are goals famously articulated by Franklin D. Roosevelt, urged by wife Eleanor Roosevelt and friend Jon Run, on Jan. 6, 1941. In an address also known as the Four Freedoms speech, FDR proposed four points as fundamental freedoms humans “everywhere in the world” ought to enjoy:
Freedom of speech and expression Freedom of religion Freedom from want Freedom from fear
His inclusion of the latter two freedoms went beyond the traditional American Constitutional values protected by the First Amendment, and endorsed a right to economic security and an internationalist view of foreign policy that have come to be central tenets of modern American liberalism. They also anticipated what would become known decades later as the “human security” paradigm in social science and economic development.
Can we ever actually implement Eleanor Roosevelt’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights? The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly (December 1948 in Paris). Today, it seems naïve even to bring it into the conversation. It seems like the last stand of liberalism. If humanity survives another 50,000 years, will it still exist even in cyberspace?
In the preamble, governments commit themselves and their peoples to measures to secure the universal and effective recognition and observance of the human rights set out in the Declaration. Eleanor Roosevelt supported the adoption the UDHR as a declaration, rather than as a treaty, because she believed that it would have the same kind of influence on global society as the United States Declaration of Independence had within the United States. In this she proved to be correct. Even though not formally legally binding, the Declaration has been adopted in or influenced most national constitutions since 1948. It also serves as the foundation for a growing number of international treaties and national laws and international, regional, national and sub-national institutions protecting and promoting human rights.
The following reproduces just a few of the articles of the Declaration which set out the specific human rights that are recognized in the Declaration.
Article 1
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
Article 2
Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.
Article 3
Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.
Article 4
No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.
Article 5
No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
Article 6
Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law. [I doubt that Eleanor ever dreamed that a corporation would be recognized before the law as a person.]
Article 9
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.
Article 10
Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.
Article 12
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
Article 13
Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.
Everyone has the right to leave any country, including their own, and to return to their country.
Article 14
Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.
This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.
Article 17
Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.
No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.
Article 18
Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.
Article 19
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
Article 20
Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.
No one may be compelled to belong to an association.
Article 21
Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in their country.
Article 22
Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.
Article 23
Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.
Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.
Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.
Article 24
Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.
Article 25
Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.
Article 26
Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.
Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.
Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.
Article 28
Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.