"This is what a union is, fellas." posted by lenin

Labels: american working class, matewan

The American Working Class posted by lenin

Michael Yates:

We don’t have time today to discuss all the various control tactics used by employers: the herding of workers into factories, the detailed division of labor, mechanization, Taylorism, personnel management, lean production—all of which deny workers their humanity, their capacity to conceptualize and carry out their plans, to actually “own” what they make. However, let us look at a sampling of jobs in modern America:

Auto workers: There are about 1.1 million auto workers. Not only are they facing rapidly rising insecurity, they are also confronted every day with a work regimen so Taylorized that they must work fifty-seven of every sixty seconds. What must this be like? What does it do to mind and body? In this connection, it is instructive to read Ben Hamper’s Rivethead (1992), a startling account of working in auto plants. Hamper worked in an old plant, where the norm was about forty-five seconds of work each minute. He eventually got a job in a new, “lean production” facility. He called it a “gulag.” In her book, On the Line at Subaru-Isuzu (1995), sociologist Laurie Graham tells us about her work routine in one of these gulags. Below, I have skipped a lot of the steps, because I just want to give readers a sense of the work. Remember as you read it that the line is relentlessly moving while she is working:

1. Go to the car and take the token card off a wire on the front of the car.
2. Pick up the 2 VIN (vehicle identification number) plates from the embosser and check the plates to see that they have the same number.
3. Insert the token card into the token card reader.
4. While waiting for the computer output, break down the key kit for the car by pulling the 3 lock cylinders and the lock code from the bag.
5. Copy the vehicle control number and color number onto the appearance check sheet....
8. Lift the hood and put the hood jig in place so it will hold the hood open while installing the hood stay....
22. Rivet the large VIN plate to the left-hand center pillar.
23. Begin with step one on the next car.

This work is so intense that it is not possible to steal a break much less learn your workmate’s job so that you can double-up, then rest while she does both jobs. Within six months of the plant’s start-up, a majority of the workers had to wear wrist splints for incipient carpal tunnel. Necks and backs ache from bodies being twisted into unnatural positions for eight hours a day. Supervisors recommend exercises and suggest that workers who cannot deal with the pain are sissies.

What is true for auto workers is true for all who do this type of labor—whether it be in beef processing plants or on chicken disassembly lines where workers labor with slippery blood and gore on the floor and on their bodies. And where cuts lead to infections and disease.

Clerks: There are about 15 million clerks in the United States. Many years ago I was on a television show with former secretary of labor Robert Reich. In response to my claim that a lot of the jobs being created were not all that desirable, he said that there were a lot of good jobs available, ones in which workers had a real say about their jobs (no doubt referring to the “quality circles” so popular then). One such job was that of “clerk.” I blurted out in a loud and incredulous voice, CLERKS! I suggested that perhaps Mr. Reich had never noticed the splints on the wrists of many clerks, signs of epidemic carpal tunnel syndrome. Since that time, I have actually worked as a clerk, at the Lake Hotel in Yellowstone National Park. I describe the experience and what I learned in my book Cheap Motels and Hot Plate: An Economist’s Travelogue. Clerks work long hours; they are on their feet all day; they take regular abuse from customers; they are exposed in full view of supervisors with no place to hide; they are accorded no respect (think about customers on cell phones in grocery lines); their pay is low; their benefits negligible. After a hard day at the front desk, I only wanted a few drinks and a warm bed. The stress level was extraordinary.

Restaurant Workers: There are 11 million of these, growing in number every year. Next to personal care and service workers, those who prepare and serve our food are most likely to experience a “major depressive episode.” Restaurant workers in Manhattan’s Chinatown log as many as one hundred hours a week, for less than minimum wage. The pace of the work, the pressure of it are unbelievable. Check out the arms and legs of a kitchen worker. They are full of cuts and burns. Substance abuse is widespread.

Secretaries, Administrative Assistants, and Office Support: These workers are 23 million strong. They are poorly paid, many in sick buildings, stuck in badly designed chairs, staring at computer screens for hours, taking orders all day long (usually women from men), and often heavily Taylorized. These workers, whose working conditions are satirized so skillfully on the television series The Office, have to contend with daily degradations, including all too prevalent sexual harassment. Here is what my sister said about her work:

I, too, share some of your fears and anxieties. As one of the administrative assistants you talk about, I can relate to the long days of sitting at the typewriter (in years past) and now at the computer. I am sure that is the cause of my neck and shoulder pain and the many headaches from which I suffer. Although I basically like my job and the people with whom I work, after thirty years I am anxious to move on to something else. I look forward to retirement in about three to four years, moving to the city, maybe working part-time, and finding meaningful things in which to participate.

Security workers: Three million men and women watch over others in prisons, malls, gated communities, in occupied Iraq, and on our city streets. This is a type of work guaranteed to be stressful and to generate not only an extremely jaundiced and pejorative view of the rest of society but also an extreme, macho personality, prone to violence.

Custodial workers: There are 4 million building and grounds workers, many of them immigrants, keeping our buildings clean and the grounds swept and manicured. Often they are hired by contractors who are themselves employed by the buildings’ owners. It has taken monumental efforts by the SEIU to organize some of these exploited workers, who must often labor in close proximity to dangerous cleaning fluids, solvents, and chemical fertilizers.

Medical workers: There are more than 13 million people laboring in our hospitals, surgicare centers, and nursing homes, as well as in individual residences. With the exception of those at the top, including health care administrators and most of the physicians, health care is a minefield of poor working conditions. Even nursing has been degraded and deskilled so much that the nursing shortage could be nearly filled simply by the return of disaffected nurses to their profession. At the request of the California Nurses Association, I spoke this summer to nurses in four Texas cities. I heard many tales of woe: sixteen hour days, two weeks straight of twelve-hour days, insane patient loads, constant cost-cutting that damages patient health, demeaning treatment by administrators, etc. Conditions only worsen as one goes down the health care occupation ladder.

Labels: american working class, dead labour, work

Waiting in the Food Line posted by lenin

Labels: america, american working class, economy, poverty, recession

Obama: The Price of Hope posted by Yoshie

There are many differences between the Iraq and Vietnam Wars. One of the most striking differences is this: the Vietnam War compelled many Americans, especially young people, to question the nature of liberalism in general and the Democratic Party in particular, whereas the Iraq War, far from disillusioning them, has renewed their hope for both.

The face of that hope is Barack Hussein Obama. Hamid Dabashi concludes, after detailing Obama's "limits":

Two of my three children (born and bred here in the United States) have now reached the age when they can vote. They are both committed Obama fans and voted for him in the New York primaries on Super Tuesday. At this point, I am afraid the votes of my two children are all I can offer Brother Barack. Come next November, I too may leave my own darkest convictions behind and vote with the bright hope of my children.

Sometimes I think that the worst thing about the United States is that there is always hope for it. ("The Limit of Obama's Imagination," Al-Ahram Weekly 885, 21-27 February 2008)

But what has Obama really done to inspire this hope?

The only things that I can think of are (1) he is neither Hillary Rodham Clinton, who voted for the Iraq War and the Kyl-Lieberman amendment declaring Iran's Revolutionary Guards a terrorist organization, nor John McCain, who wants Americans to stay in Iraq for 100 years and jokes about bombing Iran; and (2) he says he would meet with the President of Iran and other designated enemies of the United States.

Then again, Obama has voted for all Iraq war appropriations since his arrival in the Senate, wants tougher sanctions against Iran, and won't meet with Hamas (unlike 64% of Israelis in favor of negotiation with the organization).

While the prices of fuels, food, and just about everything are going up, the price of hope is evidently indexed to the dollar and home equity.

Source: Sudeep Reddy and Sara Murray, "Housing, Bank Troubles Continue to Deepen," Wall Street Journal, 10 March 2008

It helps Obama in cheapening hope that, no matter what he says or does, he seems unable to win over fanatical Islamophobes and Likudniks.

What are US leftists to do?

There is the Ralph Nader/Matt Gonzalez campaign.

Gonzalez is probably the most intelligent voice (and attractive face!) on the electoral front against bipartisan oligopoly.

But our Guardian Council, aka the US ruling class, more zealously excludes opposition than the Guardian Council of Iran.

Besides, no motion in the streets, no commotion in elections. Americans have just about forgotten the art of industrial action and street demonstration, unlike Iranians. To take an example, teachers in Iran had a strike last year, shutting down "an estimated 80 percent of Iran's public schools." Impressive. When was the last time any sector of American workers did anything like that?

The Bureau of Labor Statistics' data show a radical decline of work stoppages: now virtually no work time is lost to industrial conflict in the USA.

As workers have increasingly lost their capacity for concerted industrial action, the share of national income going to their wages and salaries has naturally declined. On 29 March 2007, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reported: "the share of national income going to wages and salaries in 2006 was at its lowest level on record, with data going back to 1929. The share of national income captured by corporate profits, in contrast, was at its highest level on record" (Aviva Aron-Dine and Isaac Shapiro, "Share of National Income Going To Wages And Salaries At Record Low In 2006: Share of Income Going to Corporate Profits at Record High," 29 March 2007). See Appendix Table 3 of the CBPP report below.

The top US union officials propose to support Iranian workers. The quality of their leadership of dollars-and-cents struggles, let alone class struggle, stateside, however, makes that a very doubtful proposition.

The same can be said about US leftists, most of whom would say that we must -- must! -- fight with Iranian workers against their ruling class while also fighting against our ruling class. To them I offer this anecdote:

[During the Civil War,] the secretary of state, William Seward, wanted to declare war on England and was supposedly restrained only by Lincoln himself ("One war at a time, Mr. Seward"). . . . (Geoffrey Wheatcroft, "Our Imaginary Friend," International Herald Tribune, 19 September 2007)

Given the chronic shortage of our troops, leftists might take a page from Lincoln: one war at a time.

Labels: american working class, iran, palestinians, us economy, US imperialism

The reproduction of the class system in the United States posted by lenin

When the billionaire Warren Buffet worries about the prospect of a "dynastic plutocracy", it is as if the United States had hitherto been in a state of classless social flux; as if the liberal absolutists who founded the country were not also upper class landowning white supremacist slave-owners; as if the country's business and political classes had not been rife with overlapping mega-dynasties since its inception; as if the Gettys, DuPonts, and Rockefellers were mere characters from, er, Dynasty. In fact, it's quite difficult to pin down the precise contours of America's class system. When two sociologists, Lisa A. Keister and Stephanie Moller, tried to review the literature in 2000*, they had a few hoops to leap through. The literature is not slight, but it is unbalanced, and the statistical sources are full of holes. They were able to establish fairly easily that "since the early 1920s, the top 1% of wealth holders has consistently owned an average of 30% of total household sector wealth", declining to 19% between 1972 and 1976, before rising to 40 and 50% in the 1980s and 1990s. However, there is a huge blind-spot in research because most of those studying the area look at income flows, not structures of wealth ownership and the advantages that wealth confers for its owners. As they suggest "the correlation between income and wealth ownership is relatively weak". Such correlation as does exist is actually largely attributable to asset income - income generated by wealth. On the other hand, "many families, particularly nonwhite families, have zero or negative net worth regardless of income". So, leaving wealth out of the picture leaves most of the story untold.

One 1995 survey showed that the top quintile of wealth holders owned almost 85% of total household wealth, and Gini co-efficients tend to demonstrate much greater gaps in ownership than in income. Another set of statistics produces the following results for wealth distribution from 1962-1995 (click to enlarge):



Aside from the very broad continuity of these patterns, what is striking is that the long-term changes that have been effected have not merely been at the expense of the almost propertyless majority, but also the 2nd 20%, who I suppose in American parlance would be 'upper-middle-class'. The bottom 80% saw a 2% reduction in wealth from 1983 to 1989. Take another look at the chart - suppose a roughly socialist egalitarian society persisted in the United States. Each 20th percent would have roughly 20% of the wealth, with minor fluctuations here and there. On this criterion alone, a very crude one I admit, the so-called 'upper-middle-class' is ripped off along with everyone else. The vast majority of Americans, in short are close to propertyless, possessing only a few insecure items such as cars and houses (especially those on dodgy loans or subprime mortgages). Now, even that massive accumulation of wealth at the top 1% contains massive internal differentiation, as:

the share of the top 0.5% of wealth owners rose 5% during this period, from 26.2% of total household sector wealth in 1983 to 31.4% in 1989. The wealth of the next half percent remained relatively constant at about 7.5% of total household wealth, but the share of the next 9% decreased from 34.4% in 1983 to 33.4% in 1989.

Of course, even these statistics occlude much. The super-rich stay well out of sight, unlike the ostentatious celebs and public personalities - you don't see these guys queuing up to appear on The Simple Life; they successfully conceal much of their wealth and use loopholes to avoid paying taxes - especially the estate tax, records of which provide much of the source data for studies; they don't respond very well to surveys inquiring about their wealth; and they certainly tend not to participate in long-term studies of their social movements. That is, they are an extremely secretive bunch, and sociologists have been obliged to devise statistical innovations to compensate for this and produce adequate data, with only partial success. This is something of a problem, because the bulk of research that has been conducted on this matter find that inheritance (whether at death or, as in most cases, 'inter-vivo') accounts for between 50% and 80% of the net worth of US families. It is clearly an area that is crying out for further study and enlightenment, yet it is shrouded in a heart of darkess. "We know very little about how much wealth is actually inherited," Keister and Moller point out, "because data on inheritance is virtually nonexistent." I suspect that if the US government, for all of its informational prowess and its willingness to spy on your phone calls and e-mails, were to initiate any attempt to discover the full extent of concealed wealth, the hysterical cry of 'communism' would shortly be raised. The irony is that you might well have to raise the banner of communist revolution merely to find out exactly how much accumulated wealth there is.

*I'm relying on fairly old statistics for the purposes of making a broader point about the structure of wealth distribution and transmission. For what it's worth, the latest statistics on wealth, produced in the latest edition of a standard text-book on the matter by Charles Hurst in 2007, suggest that the top 10% of US possess 80% of all financial assets, while the bottom 90% hold 73% of all debt. And debt, as any fool knows, is negative net worth for everyone but the propertied minority.

Labels: america fuck yeah, american working class, ruling class

GM Strike posted by lenin

It looks on the face of it as if United Auto Workers have made a deal very quickly in their dispute with GM. Though they have won some of the concessions they sought, the union leaders seem to have conceded an arrangement allowing the company to buy out workers and replace them with ones on lower incomes, or so the Wall Street Journal says. Further, the VEBA healthcare scheme, in which the union takes over the management of a voluntary healthcare programme rather than leaving the company with the costs, appears to be going ahead with some changes to make the system more appealling to workers (which means GM are going to provide enough money to keep it solvent). The walk-out spread very quickly, and seems to have been very powerful. This was the first national walk-out by car workers for decades, and the first by GM workers since 1970. The fact that GM made the concessions that it did is indicative of how much damage a lengthy strike could have done. Given how many defeats American workers have suffered, the UAW members might well simply accept the deal as it stands. They could clearly get a better deal than this, but it would take more than a two-day strike. Still, the deal has to be ratified both by UAW workers and (for some reason) the courts, so this may not be the end of the story.

Labels: american working class, strike