Read it here.
Showing posts with label Labor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Labor. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Friday, August 6, 2010
Say it with me: Irony.
In the post below I referred to the case where two state employees of Utah have leaked detailed information to the media from state records about people they suspect of being "illegal," including names, birth dates, addresses, social security numbers, and due dates of expectant mothers. It's a horrifying case. The otherwise neocon governor of Utah responded surprisingly quickly with a probe into who accessed and leaked the information, immediately firing one suspect and beginning the firing process for the other who has some protections as a permanent employee of the state. The story is shocking and incredibly scary for the 1300 people on that list. Firing and prosecuting the people who compiled and leaked the list will not reverse the violation that has been done to them or undo the fact that they face increased danger at the hands of local hate groups.
But there was one gem of irony in the Salt Lake Tribune's story about that second employee, Teresa Bassett of the Department of Workforce Services, that I just can't resist sharing:
So, an employee of the department of workforce services betrays the very workers she is supposed to have been helping by releasing their private information and making them targets of hate groups, and then when she faces consequences for doing so she turns to the union she has refused to join during her fifteen years of state employment to help bail her out.This week, Bassett sought the assistance of the Utah Public Employees Association, the union representing state workers, although she was not a member of the organization.
“Teresa approached me for some advice and I gave her the advice that she probably ought to seek representation by an attorney,” said Dennis Hammer, deputy director of UPEA.
Bassett also asked to join the union, filling out a membership card that Hammer said he would hold onto until the criminal investigation into her activities is complete.
Note to Bassett: Worker solidarity. You're doing it wrong.
Friday, November 6, 2009
Monday, October 19, 2009
Richard Seymour on Royal Mail Strike
Excellent post on the strike and what's at stake here.
Seymour ties it to a larger context toward the end:
These myths - about union intransigence, about the economic necessity of job losses, about the superior efficiency of private competitors, etc. - are being deployed for the purposes of turning a low-cost public service provider into a marketplace of competing providers in accordance with the extraordinarily resilient neoliberal orthodoxy. This brings with it the usual problems - soaring costs, as companies seek to make a profit, duplication of capacity as they fight for market share, and poorer service as low paid, casualised and de-unionised workers are less committed to the job, and less likely to have the time and training necessary to develop their skills. Royal Mail, for all its faults, is one of the last bargains in town. Less than forty pence for a first class letter to anywhere in the UK is nothing. What else would you spend that money on? You couldn't even buy a pint of milk or a Mars bar with that money.
More evidence that today's global capitalism is 'frictionless'
Haven't you heard? The language of class antagonism is outmoded, and capitalist social relations bring freedom and development for all.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Work. Why I Hate It.
From Marx's Early Writings:
With the advent of barter [the labourer's] labour became in part a source of income. Its purpose and existence have become different. As value, exchange value, equivalent, the product is no longer produced on account of its direct personal connection with the producer. The more production is diversified, i.e. the more needs become diversified and the more the activity of the producer becomes one-sided, the more completely work falls into the category of wage-labour until, finally, no other meaning is left to it. It thus becomes wholly accidental and unimportant whether the relationship between producer and product is governed by immediate enjoyment and personal needs and whether the activity, the act of working, involves the fulfilment of his personality, the realization of his natural talents and spiritual goals.I really hate work. I know this cycle all too well, and I felt it before I ever read a paragraph of Marx. Labor is our means to life, and so, labor becomes our life. Of course, being aware of this type of estrangement and alienation makes it all the more hard to bear, I think. Why is it, with this critical perspective of work, I can't make myself do any less work or try to think about it any less in my day to day? Why do I still feel guilty when I don't work? Why can't we shape a life or identity apart form work, once we know it has the power to overtake us? And why does society insist on praising for my annoying "work ethic," as if there were some moral triumph in wage-labor.
Wage-labour consists of the following elements: (1) the estrangement of labour from its subject, the labourer, and its arbitrariness from his point of view; (2) the estrangement of labour from its object, its arbitrariness vis-a-vis the object; (3) the determination of the labourer by social needs alien to him and which act upon him with compulsive force. He must submit to this force from egoistic need, from necessity; for him the needs of society mean only the satisfaction of his personal wants while for society he is only the slave that satisfies its needs; (4) the labourer regards the maintenance of his individual existence as the aim of his activity; his actual labours serve only as a means to this end. He thus activates his life to acquire the means of life.
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Current State of the UAW
(via Lee Sustar's article on labor in the newest International Socialist Review)
"It was during that 1930s crisis that the United Auto Workers (UAW) stormed onto the scene with dramatic factory occupations led by communists, socialists, and other radicals. Today’s UAW, though, is a vastly different organization. It has followed its long-established strategy of partnership with employers to an extreme conclusion by becoming, through health-care trust funds, a major shareholder in GM alongside the U.S. government and the majority (55 percent) shareholder in Chrysler. To achieve this bizarre form of employee ownership—the union trust fund will get just one seat on the company board—the union agreed to ban strikes for six years, eliminate work rules negotiated over decades, cut overtime pay, and further concessions.The result of all this is the virtual elimination of the difference between UAW-organized plants and non-union ones. The UAW, which once steadily raised the bar for wages and benefits for the entire U.S. working class, is now leading the way down."
This is indeed a sad state of affairs. It was difficult not to have relatively high hopes months ago in November as a new President and an increased Democrat majority in Congress entered Washington, both of whom touted their resolve to pass EFCA loudly and often. But given the way things have turned out, it's difficult to imagine how much different things would be for labor had Obama and the Democrats lost the election.
Obama has done little to make good on his promises to pass EFCA and his Administration has been more interested in bailing out bankers and placating Capital than in better the condition of working people. Sustar points us to a damning public statement from January in which the Obama Administration bragged that it was tougher on the UAW than the Bush Administration had been. Indeed, it touts the fact that "in virtually every respect, the concessions that the UAW agreed to are more aggressive than what the Bush Administration originally demanded in its loan agreement with GM."
But, of course, Obama is not solely to blame for the demise of what appeared to be an ascendant moment for labor in the US.
As Sustar points out, inter-union clashes coupled with problems in union leadership have been detrimental as well. Arguably, the follies of union leadership are a large reason why EFCA hasn't been passed. The UAW leadership, in particular, seems most in need of indictment at this point. I understand that they are trying to keep GM from going under, but the meagre scraps from the table they've settled for are tantamount to major defeats in the short and long term. Again as (via Sustar's article) former Canadian Auto Workers economist recently wrote: "the UAW's GM membership is down to 64,000 (from 450,000 at the end of the 70s, when major concessions first began to be extracted). If GM is 'successful' in its current restructuring, that will be further reduced to 40,000. Thirty years of concessions and a 90 percent loss in jobs. If ever there was a failing strategy for workers, this was it." And I think Sustar is right on when he argues that the concessions and defeats forced upon the UAW recently are tantamounts to defeats for the entire US working class (and, ipso facto, gains for capitalists).
In more ways than one this purportedly 'new era' in the US is looking more and more like a newly-packaged version of the same old. I don't think the Obama-Hoover comparison is out of place. This is a serious disappointment. It remains to be seen how deep the contituities will go or how apt the analogy will prove to be, but there is little concrete evidence that Obama intends to do anything like what FDR's administration began trying to do in 1933.
At this point, we'll be lucky if the already-compromised 'public option' gets through the filibuster-proof Democratic Congress.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
On Job Creation and the Midwest
Check out this post by Austin Thompson and learn a thing or two about job creation and true economic growth.
Intuitively, the more labor intensive the industry, the more jobs created. But there are profitable reasons in the short-term for why Fortune 500 companies would choose to invest in a more capital intensive industry. Less workers mean fewer costs, and labor replacing technologies won't demand a living wage, a pension, or healthcare insurance for a family of four---a human being will.The post details some important ideas to keep in mind during this whole 600,000 jobs in 100 days push.
The strategy of many Fortune 500 companies is to increase the ratio of capital to labor, thereby avoiding the burden of paying labor costs. Policy-makers who care anything about creating pathways out of poverty for the poor and decent work for middle-class families should be doing the exact opposite, increase the ratio of labor to capital. The increasingly narrow bottom-lines of Fortune 500 companies, are not the same as those of public servants---or at least they shouldn't be.
Monday, April 20, 2009
Class Power
In recent posts I've claimed that certain actions and economic arrangements are indicative of the class power of certain groups. I'd like to be more specific about what I mean by class and the relevant forms power exercised in virtue of this feature of contemporary capitalist societies.
By class, I mean the technical sense of the term such as we find in Marx's writings on political economy. I say that its 'technical' because the way of using 'class' that I'm interested in deploying differs from how the word is often used. In common parlance, class often describes the income bracket of a particular person as well as all of the attendant social marks, tastes, consumer tendencies and dispositions commensurate with that income level. According to common usage, class can refer to the well-off, the extremely rich, 'old money', nouveau-riche, the (amorphous and often-invoked) 'middle class', the poor, etc.
I want to use class in a different way. According to the Marxist-inflected approach that I'd like to resuscitate, class refers to a person's relation to the way that economic production is organized. In capitalism, most economic production is organized in such a way that one group owns the productive machinery, property and raw materials while another group, who does not own any productive machinery or raw materials, is employed by the former group and paid a wage to work.
The first group, capitalists, are so designated based on their specific role within economic production. They own factories, they make the major decisions about where money will be invested, how it will be spent, they create jobs, etc. They also have exclusive rights to the profits generated from the products produced in factories that they own. They are further distinguished as capitalists because they purchase (employ) labor for a price (a wage) in order that their companies can operate. Capitalists are a rather small fraction of the population of contemporary societies.
Workers, in contrast, make up the majority of society. They do not own productive machinery or possess large amounts of capital that could be invested for a profit. The only thing workers have to sell is their ability to labor (what Marx called 'labor power'). Therefore, they are dependent on capitalists to employ them in order that they can earn income and subsist.
Stepping back now and looking broadly at the organization of economic production in capitalist societies, we can make a couple of generalizations.
First, from the perspective of capitalists labor is a cost of running a company which is best kept as low as possible. This is analogous to the way that capitalists also seek to acquire any raw materials they need as cheaply as possible. Thus we should hardly find it surprising that capitalists virulently oppose unionization, labor organizing, minimum wage ordinances, laws establishing the 8 hour workday/40hr work week, and so forth. All of these either increase the price capitalists have to pay for labor, or restrict their ability to most efficiently accumulate profit.
Second, we should note that when capitalists have their way, workers have no say in major economic decisions. Capitalists make virtually all of the major decisions about where to invest capital, what to produce, how to organize productive efforts, where to set up operations, etc.
Now the point I'm trying to make isn't that everyone in society is either a capitalist or a worker. Contemporary societies are far more economically complex than that. Rather, my aim is to redeploy class as a concept that relates an individual to the way that production in society is organized. The reason for the focus on workers and capitalists is that those two classes are products of modern industrial capitalism and represent the most antagonistic economic classes in society. The payoff of understanding class in this way is that it enables us to examine and highlight asymmetrical relationships of power in the economic and social field that aren't simply a matter of disparities income inequality. Certainly it is relevant to the pursuit of social justice to ensure that people's life chances and access to basic social goods (health care, education, housing, etc.) aren't circumscribed by the amount of money that they (or their family) earn. But focusing only income inequality (as many liberals often do) scrutinizes only the effects of a capitalist economy; it doesn't offer any analysis of how differential incomes come about, it doesn't offer any analysis of how employment works (i.e. who does the employing).
US left-liberals frequently focus on the State as means to redistribute goods and resources in order to attenuate the social ills of capitalism. But this focus often fails to account for the fact that the State is always already an institution located within capitalism, and therefore subject to the market and the class which wields the most economic power. I'm not referring to the way that those with big money can influence elected officials via lobbying and campaign contributions, although this phenomenon is widespread. I mean something broader and more fundamental to the way that capitalist societies function. While there many other ways that such an analysis could proceed (e.g. the way that capitalist production impacts culture, education, language, etc.), I want to focus only on the way that class power impacts how the State operates in capitalist societies.
To get a sense of what I'm talking about, consider any number of examples of progressive/center-Left politicians who've been elected because they pledged to push through certain reforms that the majority of the population wanted, but that threatened the profits and clout of capitalists in the economic realm (e.g. see Mandela and Lula's respective first terms). Even when these left-minded politicians have uncontested electoral majorities and the intent to push through social reforms, they still have to fight against the inertia of capitalists who have enormous economic power. But why should that be? According to the standard liberal way of thinking about politics, representative democracy means that all political power is concentrated in the hands of the State, which is under democratic control. But if that were true, why would democratically-elected majorities in control of the State have to fight against anyone to exercise their democratic mandate?
Just as workers can use their role in production to wield power if they are organized (i.e. they can strike), so can capitalists threaten to use their control over production as leverage since society is thoroughly dependent on capitalist production for most all basic necessities (and we should also note here that the government relies on tax revenue collected largely from profits generated by capitalists).
For example, capitalists can threaten to say: if you raise taxes on us, we will produce less and then everyone will be worse off because the economy will stumble.
They can also threaten to close up and move their businesses elsewhere (i.e. leave the US, or leave a particular state, or a particular city).
They can say: if you impose rent-controls or rent-freezes, we will stop renting out the properties we own so there will be a housing shortage.
They can say: if you try and raise the minimum wage, we will lay off workers creating unemployment since we don't want to give up our current profit margins.
What can the government do about these sorts of threats so long as it relies upon capitalist production to ensure that society functions? Well, according to neoliberal orthodoxy, what you do is systematically give in to the demands of the class making these threats. According to this logic, if you want economic growth you cut taxes, if you want employment you slash wages, if you want rentiers to provide lots of housing you make conditions conducive to them getting filthy rich. More often than not, these measures are prescribed as necessities, as though the laws of nature required that if wages rise then employment must decrease as a result.
But if it is true that increasing wages will lead capitalists to employ less people, this isn't because of "nature". This is because greedy capitalists (i.e. people in our societies who make conscious choices) do not want their profit margins to decrease. They, in effect, 'make it true' that increasing wages decreases employment in the cases where this actually happens. The fact that they get to decide (i.e. not workers, not democratic bodies) whether or not to employ people is an example of class power. When politicians have to make public policy decisions based on what capitalists will do in response, they are making decisions based on the class power of capitalists. When capitalists claim that 'unionization is bad for the economy', they are implicitly referring to their class power insofar as what they mean is that increased wages and benefits for workers is something they don't want to see. Capitalists could, of course, share power and profits with the workers, but instead of sharing a sliver of either capitalists typically opt for moving their operations elsewhere or for a head-on fight. In both cases they use their role within production to force others in less powerful positions to do their bidding.
I'ts crucial to note that the above example isn't really a matter of income levels. Often very well-paid 'white collar' individuals in large companies have little more actual power than wage-earning workers do. They have little more say in whether they have a job, and often they are just as expendable when the ownership's profits are on the line. Of course, these individuals may lead more luxurious lifestyles and have less unmet basic needs, but this is not the same as class power. In some cases, salaried managers find themselves in a no man's land between a unionzed workforce and powerful capitalists above them.
When the ownership of Fedex threatens to cancel orders that they've arranged with Boeing if the EFCA passes, the capitalists in charge of the company are utilizing class power to pressure society into giving in. They are, in effect, threatening to send a torpedo into an already weak economy by cancelling a major order. Succinctly put, they're saying "don't even try to think about making unionization possible or we'll fuck up the economy even more than it already is and we'll be just fine because we won't be the ones losing our jobs." This threat is serious because it could effect a lot of people's jobs both in and well beyond Boeing. And the capitalists in charge of Fedex are capable of making these threats because they hold a lot of economic bargaining chips, in short, because they wield class power. Remind me again what a 'free' market is supposed to be...?
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
Historians for EFCA
(via Dissent magazine) The following is a letter sent by a large number of prominent historians, to Congress petitioning for the passage of the EFCA. It was sent on March 10th. (Also, check out this recent article in Dissent in favor of the EFCA (i.e. against company-run elections)).
To the Members of Congress:
We, the undersigned historians, feel a special obligation to speak out on behalf of the Employee Free Choice Act. In our courses, we describe how freedom of association became a prized American right and how, for working people, freedom of association became a reality when the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 granted them a protected right to organize and bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing. Students know this. It’s in the New Deal chapter of every textbook. So for them, it comes as a shock to discover when they enter the working world that they don’t dare exercise the rights the law says they have. And it’s up to us, as historians, to explain why they have been so badly let down.
The labor law, although amended and interpreted over many years, is still conditioned by a grand bargain made in 1935: the state would rule with a light hand if employers complied in good faith. That bargain once worked reasonably well, but no longer. In recent years, employers have taken to fighting the law at every turn. They have, in effect, withdrawn their consent, and it is no longer true that workers can exercise the rights the law says they have. NLRB elections have fallen by half in the past decade, and only a trickle of workers—about 30,000 in 2007—now gain collective bargaining through NLRB certification. The law is grinding to a halt. And, what is equally bad, we have a major act on the books that dishonors the rule of law in this country.
The remedies, however, are easily within reach. First: increase the penalties on employers who commit unfair labor practices and provide swift injunctive relief for victimized workers. Second: make employers who flout their duty to bargain (which they do, successfully, in nearly half of all first-contract negotiations) subject to a mediation/arbitration process. Third: enable workers to demonstrate their support for collective bargaining by signing authorization cards and thereby insulate them from the employer coercion that accompanies—and is given a platform by—the representation election.
These three provisions constitute the Employee Free Choice Act. It is legislation that deserves the support of every Senator and Representative who believes in the purposes of our labor law, which are, as it said 1935 and still says today, to protect “the exercise by workers of full freedom of association, self-organization, and designation representatives of their own choosing, for the purpose of negotiating the terms and conditions of their employment or other mutual aid or protection.”
We quote these words to our students. We’d like to believe they have meaning today. So we, the undersigned historians, support the Employee Free Choice Act and urge Congress to pass it this session.
Friday, April 3, 2009
EFCA under fire
Socialistworker.org has a nice update and critique of present state of the Employee Free Choice Act, which is stalling out in the Senate to the point of appearing dead in the water.
I am very much sympathetic to the ISO's line on the strategic question of how to get the EFCA passed. Organized labor, particularly Change to Win and the AFL-CIO have spent a lot of time, money and human resources trying to 'lobby' members of the Senate and run TV ads. Adam Turl, the author of the socialistworker.org piece, hints that because Big Business will always have more money and access to the halls of power, that perhaps labor shouldn't have embarked on the lobbying route at all. I disagree with that conclusion, although it is undeniably true that Big Business will always be on top in that fight. While its true that labor's emphasis ought to have been elsewhere (grassroots campaigns, etc.), I don't think this necessarily precludes any lobbying efforts whatsoever.
Indeed as Turl points out, the lobbying must be done right. That is to say, it must be conducted with the assumption that virtually nobody in the Senate is going to simply listen to 'good arguments' and vote accordingly. Pressure of some sort or another is what moves them. That, and maintaining their seat. Hence why Arlen Specter (R-PA), who co-sponsored EFCA in 2003 and voted against a GOP filibuster to kill the bill in 2007, has pulled a complete 180. He now staunchly opposes EFCA. Do you think he heard some good arguments and simply realized on the basis of reason alone that he had to change his views?
The worst part about the Change to Win, et. al lobbying effort is that it placed disproportionate attention on pleading with conservative Democrats (like senators from Arkansas), thus focusing public discussion and media debate on their terrain. It still feels too much like labor is tugging on pant legs pleading for later curfew or something. I dont see how this galvanizes the rank-and-file, nor does it create a situation like we saw in the 30s when labor militancy was, quite literally, a force that Capital and the White House alike could not ignore.
But labor's strategic failings are maybe 20% of the problem here. The real tragedy is that Democrats are jumping ship now, joining the ranks of Arlen Specter. Right-wing jerks like Ben Nelson (D-ND) show their true colors in a moment of struggle. Now, under intense pressure from Big Business, the Democrats are folding. What does this say about the Democrats? What does this say about Obama, who as I far as I can tell has been laying low on this issue? (recall back during the campaign he said: In response to a question about EFCA from a worker, Obama replied, "I won't just wait for the bill to reach my desk. I will work actively as part of my agenda to make sure that it reaches my desk...)
They had to know this was going to be war. I mean, the Chamber of Commerce told them it would be "Armaggeddon". We saw Walmart gearing up about a year ago in preparation.
Can the Democrats really claim "they tried"? Can they really defer this to a time when they will purportedly have more influence, more seats and more political capital? I'm not sure I can imagine when that would possibly be.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Staying in a hotel? Stay in a unionized hotel.
UNITE HERE has a search engine which finds unionized hotels that work with your travel plans.
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Nativism/racism lurking in British wildcat strikes
There's been a wave of recent wildcat Strikes among British construction (and other industries) workers, brandishing signs calling for "British jobs for British Workers". While labor militancy is usually something that I categorically welcome, it is becoming clear that this phenomenon is deeply complicated by nativism, racism and xenophobia. British fascists are unsurprisingly ecstatic.
Read the UK SWP's statement on "British Jobs for British Workers" here.
Lenin's Tomb has had a series of thoughtful posts on this troubling development, the most recent of which notes that resisting the temptation to either cheerlead for the wildcat Strikers or to wholly dismiss them as racist xenophobes is the starting point for any reflective, critical analysis.
Over at Histomat, the most recent post laments that:
"Unfortunately, Britain has also been hit over the last week by 'the wrong kind of strikes' - ie. not strikes against the power of capital or even against a particular multinational or national capitalist enterprise - but a strike against er, other workers. Genius."
Friday, January 30, 2009
EFCA and "Bipartisan" government
"Republicans and big business are going all out to stop the Employee Free Choice Act. How will labor respond?"
Right. And I suppose my question here is whether Obama and Co. will seek a 'bipartisan' (read: pro-business tainted) approach to the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA). Is Obama going to listen to the 'ideas' of the Republican Caucus's union-busting morons before throwing in support for a bill to pass it? Does he want an EFCA that reflects the support of 80 senators rather than 60? Let me say, emphatically, that I do NOT want to see such a bill. The extent to which Republicans might support an EFCA bill is precisely the extent to which it would have anti-labor provisions that would dilute the effectiveness of it as law. The Republican congress of the early postWar years did not seek bipartisanship as such as their goal: they waged concerted class war and rammed-through the Hartley-Taft anti-union bill to roll back the gains that labor had made in the 30s with the Wagner Act.
The EFCA is a VERY contentious issue for Capital (and consequently, most conservatives). They are aware of the stakes, and will do anything in their power to destabilize an effort to pass the EFCA. They've already begun their media war. The VP of the US Chamber of Commerce has already announced that the passage of the bill would be 'armageddon' and that he would do everything in his power to fight it tooth and nail.
But, you might say, this shouldn't matter. The US Chamber of Commerce doesn't vote on the bill directly. The Republicans do not have the votes to even filibuster the bill (after Franken is seated and assuming at least Liberman or one Republican breaks camp). Haha. Were it only that simple. A lot of details remain to be seen. But one thing is for sure (and here I agree with the ISO): active non-electoral struggle will be necessary for the bill to get the support it needs to pass. Labor will have to give this push its all, because frankly there hasn't been an opening for this kind of legal change in more than three decades. Although we could certainly argue about whether Clinton could have passed it in his first 100 days in 1993... he could have, perhaps, but it is clear in retrospect (and probably at the time as well) that his presidency wasn't an opening for that sort of change but a repudiation of it.
Bipartisan rhetoric isn't going to get the EFCA accross the finish line.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Friday, November 21, 2008
Your president wants you to join a union?
Obama on unionization and EFCA:
It will be interesting to see if he follows through on all of this. Working class voters swung to Obama in droves and labor enthusiastically backed him. If the Democrats cannot pass the EFCA in its current form (which is already somewhat compromised), then they will have betrayed all of the support they receieved from labor and workers this election.
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
MTA cuts service, yanks up rates... But Bail out GM!!
Ready for an off-the-cuff rant?
MTA in NYC is shutting down crucial train lines and considering increases in fares. Ridership has been on the rise and people have been paying more as the result of recent raises in fares, yet now they are going to receive less service. The problem is that the MTA is badly strapped for cash.
Meanwhile, GM is about to fold. The company owns factories that build motor vehicles. It employs a huge workforce who stand to lose their jobs and massively increase the ranks of unemployed which will in turn drastically take another hit on consumption, not to mention devastating a large part of Michigan.
Congress is considering a bailout of the auto-industry, by simply throwing money (on the order of billions of dollars) at the ownership in an effort to keep companies afloat.
What the fuck is going on?
Throw money at public transportation, nationalize GM and use the factories to build buses, shuttles, trucks and other vehicles appropriate to building public infrastructure. Build cutting-edge hybrid cars that can be sold internationally, and use all returns for reinvestment and expanding employment, rather than enriching ownership and investors.
Why should the most widely and heavily traversed public transit system in the entire country rot while we use taxpayer money to save a private firm who manufactures gas-guzzling personal vehicles? Keeping jobs for workers is the only crucial consideration here.
Of course, the popular argument coming from the anti-Union Rightists is that its the UAW's fault that GM is in bad shape: what we need is to put all of the workers out on their ass and then force de-unionization on them in order to refound the industry on more exploitative premises without the problem of having to pay workers pensions or benefits.
We need to build a lot of things right now... cars shouldn't be top on the list. Particularly when public transit is in such bad shape. With the money they are proposing to give to GM, they could very well invest in public initiatives that could employ people as well as build much-needed infrastructure and satisfy public needs.
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Unions are responsible for auto industry failures
This is one of my favorite of the outlandish statements repeated by conservatives as if it's common sense.
Let's talk about the shockingly absurd implications of it:
1-That the auto industry has failed because of some failure of low-level labor, rather than because of seriously poor corporate decision making. (note that no one is blaming the bank tellers for the problems of the financial sector)
2-That guaranteed higher-than-average wages, job security, and benefits hurt worker productivity.
3-That guaranteed low wages and no benefits would make people work harder.
4-That cutting benefits, job security, and wages, (killing the unions) would be worthwhile if it meant having a stronger auto industry in the United States--essentially that making an industry "competitive" is more important than empowering workers to live in reasonable conditions.
Obviously, all four implications are completely absurd, both logically, and as an indication of our social values. While I'm not sold on any kind of "bail out" for anyone without adequate federal regulation/control attached, I'm certain that anyone who suggests breaking up automotive unions is the solution to an ailing industry is really not a credible pundit.
Saturday, November 8, 2008
Capital gears up to fight the Employee Free Choice Act
"Lenin's Tomb" mentioned this Financial Times article recently, which previews the attack from Corporate elites against the Employee Free Choice Act (which Obama claims that he supports). Capital is determined to make sure this one never becomes law, and they are willing to spend a lot of money in the process.
Unionization in the private sector in the US is pitifully low, and has been in sharp decline for several decades. Union-busting legislation (like Taft-Hartley, for instance) passed during the reactionary spout of the early 50s has been extremely helpful in pushing that figure as low as possible.
It's unsurprising that Business elites are fretting about the possibility of seeing some of their favorite anti-union bludgeons stricken from the law. They are watching very closely to see what happens on this front:
"The business community is very concerned about the so-called Employee Free Choice Act,” said John Castellani, president of the Business Roundtable, which represents the interest of more than 100 large US companies in Washington.The good folks at Walmart are loading up ammunition to assault the bill's chances:
Wal-Mart, the largest private employer in the US, which has a staunch anti- union record, has already made its opposition clear. Lee Scott, Wal-Mart’s chief executive, told analysts last week that the change would result in “making this country less competitive” and “bringing coercion and force into the workplace”.The more upset these people are with what an Obama Administration might do, the better. But one thing that exuberant Obamaniac liberals might consider is whether in the last instance their uncritical groveling will prove more decisive than the bare-knuckles, multi-million dollar campaign sure to be waged by Capital in order to try to get its way.
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Defining "working class"--why the Marxist definition seems so strange now
Gwen at High on Rebellion has a thoughtful post about her understanding of working-class as an economic state, as opposed to the traditional Marxist understanding, which suggests one is working-class defined by the worker's lack of ownership over the means of production. This Marxist notion seems a little irrelevant to Gwen:
Being a relative newbie to Marxist theory myself, I'll admit I have trouble making sense of the resonance of talking about working class (as defined by means of production). It's not that we can't still divide people up based on their relationship to the means of production, it just seems a little pointless. Sure, in the industrial revolution there really were two major classes that mattered: those that owned the means of production, and those who lived tedious lives by producing capital for those who owned the means of production. The tragedy of being the proletariat isn't just about the living conditions the proletariat faces by not owning the means of production, but it's about a metaphysical problem created by this relationship to capital. The argument, as far as I can recall (and I may be doing it a great injustice here) is that the tragedy of not owning the means of production isn't just poverty in the sense we know it, but because it leads to objectification and estrangement: (From Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts)One thing I find really interesting and sometimes really upsetting about Britain in general and the British Left in particular is that everyone but me and Tony Benn identifies as working-class. At the Marxism conference a few years ago, I attended a session discussing “non-productive labour”, which I interpreted to mean people working in call-centres and similar areas. Imagine my surprise then when university lecturers and senior civil servants start discussing the difficulties they face as non-productive labourers and members of the working-class generally.
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I don’t think the traditional Marxist definition is very useful today, because it erases the genuine economic privilege held by a lot of people who don’t own the means of production. There is no comparison between lecturers and call-centre workers. Solidarity is not going to spontaneously appear between those two groups. Furthermore, it’s not clear that those two groups HAVE much in common. Is a middle-class lecturer going to vote to increase her taxes to provide cheap housing for a call centre worker? We know for a fact that a lot of them don’t.
The reason for the dissonance between my idea of class and the Marxist definition is a great example of this. Most radical leftist North Americans would use my notion of class. The cradle of parliamentary socialism in Canada is the Prairies - farmers who could only make ends meet if they all worked together started a political party. Socialised medicine in Canada basically started as towns pooling their resources to pay for a doctor who would then see anybody as required - because no one in town could afford a doctor by themselves. But by the Marxist definition of class, these farmers - who were up to their ears in debt, and there was a depression and a drought happening simultaneously - were petit bourgeoise, ‘cause they “owned” the farms and farming equipment (usually heavily mortgaged) and as such did not sell their labour but owned the means of production. The fact that they were dirt poor doesn’t seem to matter.
Labour not only produces commodities; it also produces itself and the workers as a commodity and it does so in the same proportion in which it produces commodities in general.Now personally, I'm never particularly compelled by arguments like this. And I'll admit, I can't really defend why it is that I wouldn't be moved by this argument, when I certainly can't reject the logical rigor or make a good argument for why this wouldn't happen to a laborer and wouldn't be a problem. It could and it might be. This was a good argument at the time, because the poor people were the same as those who had no access to the means of production and the wealthy or bourgeois people were the people who owned the means of production. So not only were those without the means of production suffering from material deprivation, but they were also suffering alienation and estrangement as a result, which made these spiritual problems more to compound the horror of the material problems for laborers. It was an industrial economy so the lines were much more clearly drawn.This fact simply means that the object that labour produces, its product, stands opposed to it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labour is labour embodied and made material in an object, it is the objectification of labour. The realization of labour is its objectification. In the sphere of political economy, this realization of labour appears as a loss of reality for the worker, objectification as loss of and bondage to the object, and appropriation as estrangement, as alienation.
So much does the realization of labour appear as loss of reality that the worker loses his reality to the point of dying of starvation. So much does objectification appear as loss of the object that the worker is robbed of the objects he needs most not only for life but also for work. Work itself becomes an object which he can only obtain through an enormous effort and with spasmodic interruptions. So much does the appropriation of the object appear as estrangement that the more objects the worker produces the fewer can he possess and the more he falls under the domination of his product, of capital.
All these consequences are contained in this characteristic, that the worker is related to the product of labour as to an alien object. For it is clear that, according to this premise, the more the worker exerts himself in his work, the more powerful the alien, objective world becomes which he brings into being over against himself, the poorer he and his inner world become, and the less they belong to him. It is the same in religion. The more man puts into God, the less he retains within himself. The worker places his life in the object; but now it no longer belongs to him, but to the object. The greater his activity, therefore, the fewer objects the worker possesses. What the product of his labour is, he is not. Therefore, the greater this product, the less is he himself. The externalisation of the worker in his product means not only that his labour becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently of him and alien to him, and begins to confront him as an autonomous power; that the life which he has bestowed on the object confronts him as hostile and alien.
Let us now take a closer look at objectification, at the production of the worker, and the estrangement, the loss of the object, of his product, that this entails.
The workers can create nothing without nature, without the sensuous external world. It is the material in which his labour realizes itself, in which it is active and from which, and by means of which, it produces.
But just as nature provides labour with the means of life, in the sense of labour cannot live without objects on which to exercise itself, so also it provides the means of life in the narrower sense, namely the means of physical subsistence of the worker.
The more the worker appropriates the external world, sensuous nature, through his labour, the more he deprives himself of the means of life in two respects: firstly, the sensuous external world becomes less and less an object belonging to his labour, a means of life of his labour; and, secondly, it becomes less and less a means of life in the immediate sense, a means for the physical subsistence of the worker.
But nowadays, as Gwen points out herself, dairy farmer friends of mine or my friends who own a glass cutting firm, yet barely scrape by, control the means of production, whereas, the accountants in my office make a quarter million dollars a year, have a lot of leisure time, take their families on vacation, are by Marx's definition, proletariats, because they don't own the fiber optic network we operate on.
This isn't to say the problems of estrangement and alienation aren't still a problem for even these accountants, because they have an estranged relationship to the product (in this case, as us the case in our late-capitalist economy, a service) their labor provides. And this isn't to say that having these relationships to the means of production, even if the laborer makes a comfortable income, isn't worth a revolution simply because of the estrangement and alienation. But when it comes to a scenario like Gwen mentions where she's listening to academics talk about what it's like to be "working class," I too have to wonder if this reliance on Marx's definition isn't an attempt to throw a pity party for privileged people and isn't more than a little offensive in light of the very real and very starkly different material conditions academics have as opposed to, say, my roommate who has worked as a fruit sorter for 5 years and just got a raise to $12/hour...
Something about it strikes me as sort of...well...who cares all that much about estrangement and objectification when there is such stark material inequality. In the case, as it is now, when Marx's classes don't line up with level of access to resources, I have to question the use of Marx's definition any more.
But, I have to wonder if Gwen and I haven't misunderstood something about the use of these terms and Marx's definition and how it would apply today...
I'm hoping T or some other friendly Marxist passerby can shed some light on this for us.
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