As A. C. Grayling has points out in “Toward the Light of Liberty: The Struggles for Freedom and Rights That Made the Modern World,” when we trace the course of history over the past five decades from the battle for freedom of thought that began with the Reformation right up to Women’s Suffrage and the still-ongoing Civil Rights Movement, we see that it is not only our physical quality of life that has continued to improve but also — for lack of a better word — our spiritual life has improved. These are the fruits of democracy, and until recent years, the harvest has been steadily more bountiful.

It was not many years ago that working people, particularly former slaves, sharecroppers, and recent immigrants, labored under grueling circumstances and enduring lives of misery. As we drive past such old brick edifices as Fulton Mills (now luxurious lofts), we can only imagine what life was like for the workers who toiled there without air conditioning amid the dangerously whirring pulleys, wheels and belts, or for those who labored with bent backs in farm fields. What misery, we think.

Yet even as we bask in today’s improved working conditions comes the sound of a distant alarm. Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Nickel and Dimed” tells a deeply disturbing tale. As “mom and pop” businesses, often run by neighbors and fellow church-members, give way to massive corporations, Ehrenreich finds that working in the hotel industry, the contract-housekeeping business or even  food service establishments offers little in the way of a satisfactory style of life. Living day-to-day, from paycheck to paycheck, Ehrenreich tells of a life that is just one banana peel away from homelessness. What has happened, we ask, to our forward progress?

We have to ask why the minimum-wage workers put up with these dehumanizing conditions. There are several explanations, and one of these we soon learn is the Supreme Court decision know as Citizens United, a ruling which allows mega-corporations to hurl vast sums of money into the political arena. The very people who ought to be looking out for the rank and file workers are in fact looking out for the CEO.

Let us look next at what this means for our march of progress.