Class War in America: the Book |
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Victimization of American Workers and
the New American Morality Beginning
in the 1930s, and into the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s, working Americans
had some semblance of power because unions were gaining strength, trade
with other countries was managed so as to protect American jobs from
unfair labor competition, and in the U.S., greed was still considered a
vice and fairness a virtue. Since
workers had power, investors—through their corporate executives—had to get
what they wanted from workers by persuasion and by making promises. They
said: §
Work
with us. §
Be
loyal to us and we will be loyal to you. §
Give
us your best ideas. §
Help
us develop our technologies. §
Make
us more productive and profitable. §
Make
this nation the best in the world. §
We
will enter a new era together, in which §
you
will share in our prosperity, §
wealth
will “trickle down” to you, §
we
will all be better off, and §
technology
will free us all from
drudgery, give us more time for recreation, self-development, education,
and quality family time. These
promises appeared genuine. After all, during those years most persons
considered the U.S. to be a Christian nation with high moral standards.
You can trust people with high moral standards, so American workers
cooperated and made this country the most competitive and most prosperous
in the world. Workers
mined the metals, made the machinery, produced and serviced the products
and sold them. They not only did all the “hands-on” labor, they willingly
contributed their creative talents to give us the world-best production
techniques and processes. What they didn’t have in great abundance,
however, was the money to buy politicians. Wealthy
investors did have the money.
And by spending huge sums of it for propaganda, they began their rise to
power. Republicans and conservative Democrats gained control of our
government, and all their promises to workers—the people who built this
country—were forgotten. Once
investors and corporate executives got control of the political process,
their attitudes changed drastically. They didn’t have to make false
promises anymore. They could openly proclaim that:
The
materials to follow—from our most respected, conservative financial
publications—clearly describe the conditions that Republicans and
conservative Democrats now consider normal for many working
Americans. To
their credit, most of these publications, The Wall Street Journal and Business Week especially, must
have a few editors with the traditional journalistic standards for
objectivity. Many news items, and a rare editorial, sometimes suggest that
unbridled capitalism simply doesn’t work for the bottom 40% of America,
and to some extent, even the bottom 80%. For
example, notice how The Wall Street
Journal quoted an economist who said that “capitalism is getting
meaner” in the way it keeps inflation low. The article, “Inflation Stays
Low, with Aid of Some Luck,” presented a somewhat soulless definition of
luck: There
is another explanation for the surprisingly small increase in wages: Workers are so traumatized by
downsizing, outsourcing, layoffs and the waning power of unions that they aren’t demanding
raises. “Capitalism
is getting meaner,” suggests Princeton University economist Alan Blinder….
When shortages of entry-level workers and a higher minimum wage push up
wages for some, employers may
be stingier with raises for others.… And when given a choice, workers
prefer job security to bigger paychecks.1 Again,
in the Journal’s view,
outrageous corporate profits don’t cause inflation—it’s those damn working
Americans who would like to make enough to support a family without having
to work two jobs. But, American corporations have created a bit of
“luck”: §
Downsizing,
outsourcing, layoffs and the waning power of unions have traumatized workers so much
they are afraid of pressing for higher wages. Luck has nothing to do with
it. Republicans and conservative Democrat politicians have deliberately
brought about the conditions described in the first seven chapters of this
book. §
Our
country’s values are different now. Conservatives have made “mean”
synonymous with our new version of capitalism. Contrary to the way it was
in the 1930s through the ’70s, capitalism no longer considers manual labor
to be worthy of a decent income. §
If
you ever doubted the need for unions to defend the interests of working
Americans, just look at what the Journal thought, with amazing
frankness, about the sense of fairness of American employers: if employers
have to raise minimum wages, they’ll make it up by being “stingier with
raises for others.” When
corporations get meaner, they implement today’s management philosophy:
Let’s cash in the value that employees have been building into the
corporation since its beginning—and don’t share any of the profit with them. Business Week described the
trend-setting CEO Al Dunlap, known as “The
Shredder”: After
less than two years’ work [downsizing Scott Paper], Dunlap walked away
with nearly $100 million in salary, bonus, stock gains, and other
perks.…
Because Dunlap openly revels
in his “Chainsaw” sobriquet and loudly trumpets his slashing tactics, he
is helping change the norms of acceptable corporate behavior, argues Peter
D. Cappelli, chairman of the management department at Wharton. “He is
persuading others that shareholder value is the be-all and end-all. But
Dunlap didn’t create value. He redistributed income from the employees and
the community to the shareholders.…” “At the employee
meetings, he spoke about building the company,” recalls a former marketing
executive. “But by the end of 1994, it just became a volume-driven plan to
pretty up the place for sale.”2 Nothing
new here. Working Americans are the ones who create value and wealth. CEOs
and wealthy investors merely suck it up. How much they are able to suck up
depends on how much power they
have and how little power the employees have. It isn’t just Chainsaw
Dunlap’s employees who suffer from this kind of downsizing. It affects all
employees who fear their own CEOs will do the same thing. It’s the
“insecurity” that Greenspan is so proud of. Note
that §
Even
if, even if, Dunlap did
something that needed doing at Scott Paper, is anyone worth $100 million
for two years’ effort? §
Every
management consultant in existence has come across managers who, in the
words of former Scott Paper executives, “sacrificed the long-term health
of the corporation” in order to reap personal gain. §
Dunlap
isn’t “helping change the norms of acceptable corporate behavior.” Chief
executive officers like Dunlap already have established the
predominant norms for corporate behavior. §
It’s
the new fashion: To get workers’ cooperation, the CEO promises them that
they can count on him. Then, after they deliver what is
requested—conditions mysteriously change—and new circumstances demand that
he reluctantly sell them out. Selling
out employees can be discussed very cold-bloodedly. Many have forgotten,
or never realized, that, at one time, most working-class women didn’t have
to work for their families to have a decent income. In one of its periodic
paranoid analyses of the remote possibility that wages might go up, Barron’s described the 50%
increase of women in the labor force since the mid-1960s: Notwithstanding
the impression given by September’s employment numbers, the labor market
is far tighter than is generally realized.… First, the steady increase in labor
force participation has flattened out. This is most notable among women,
whose participation rate has plateaued at 60%, after having risen steadily
from 40% in the mid-1960s.…
Corporations, for their
part, are likely to hold labor costs in check in two ways. If compensation
rises, they may well react with more staff cutbacks.… Alternatively, with
the U.S. economy at full utilization of its resources, it could draw
further on those abroad.3 When
conservatives brag about the rise in average family income, they leave out
the fact that there are far more two-earner families in our country.
Dunlap’s behavior and Barron’s
warning that too many Americans have jobs for the good of the stock market
have several implications: §
Conservatives
have always tried to create new sources of labor to compete with, and
drive down the wages of, existing jobholders. One of the ways to do this
has been to keep wages so low that both spouses had to work to make ends meet.
Conservatives have put workers into a double bind: Women entering the
workforce create more competition—keeping wages low—yet those same low
wages make it necessary for them to work in order to maintain their
families’ standards of living. §
Since
that source of additional labor (women) may be drying up, an increase of a
mere 1½% annual job growth rate
might possibly cause wages to go up. §
But,
Barron’s consoled, there are
other ways to stop wage increases that wouldn’t affect corporate profits
or a skyrocketing stock market. Corporations could just make “more staff
cutbacks.” With hundreds (thousands?) of Chainsaw Dunlaps out there, it
should be easy to do. §
Or,
if employment is as high as it can go without wages going up, corporations
could just “draw further on those abroad”—ship more jobs
overseas! Of
course, the victimization of working Americans isn’t related just to job
security and financial well being. Actual working conditions are
degenerating. Among the conservative financial press, The Wall Street Journal has
probably done the best job of describing what it has called the
consignment of “a large class of workers to a Dickensian time
warp.”4 The
following excerpts all came from separate articles on the front page of
the Journal, and represent only
a small sample of what could have been included: In
“These Six Growth Jobs Are Dull, Dead-End, Sometimes Dangerous; They Show
How ’90s Trends Can Make Work Grimmer for Unskilled Workers” the Journal described how jobs in six
growing industries, such as chicken processing, environmental cleanup and
nursing homes, forced workers to work …not
just for meager wages but also under dehumanized and often dangerous
conditions. Automation, which has liberated thousands from backbreaking
drudgery, has created for others a new and insidious toil in many
high-growth industries; work
that is faster than ever before, subject to Orwellian control and
electronic surveillance, and reduced to limited tasks that are numbingly
repetitive, potentially crippling and stripped of any meaningful skills or
the chance to develop them.5 “At
Nordstrom Stores, Service Comes First—but at a big price; Retail Clerks
Work Overtime for No Pay, Are Pressured to Meet Selling Quotas” described
how Nordstrom Stores, …renowned
for its pampering of customers, expects its salesclerks to work many hours
without pay in an environment of constant pressure and harassment that
incites employees to prey on each other, according to nearly 500
complaints filed with the workers’ union and interviews with several dozen
employees in stores from Seattle to Los Angeles.… Just as retail chains of
all kinds—from Bloomingdale’s to Macy’s—are rushing to duplicate the
Nordstrom commission system, the stories of unhappiness at the company are
spreading.6 “A
Town in Iowa Finds Big New Packing Plant Destroys Its Old Calm; Housing
and Crime Become Headaches As IBP Hires Jobless from Far Away” describes
how Columbus Junction, Iowa, discovered that corporate values can be
destructive to “small-town values”: Columbus
Junction has learned that giant corporations can treat workers, and towns,
like interchangeable parts.… The intangibles that defined the heartland
town—stability and continuity—have begun to die. Since IBP came to town,
crime is up 400%.… Junior high and high school pupil turnover hit 25% last
semester alone.… The plant has become the tail that wags the dog.… “[It’s]
hard for anybody with a family to make a living at IBP, which is a pretty
sad commentary,” says the Rev. Stephen Ebel, a Catholic priest. Highly
efficient and aggressively
anti-union, IBP is driving
older Iowa packing plants over the edge.7 “Once
the ‘Rust Belt,’ Midwest Now Boasts Revitalized Factories; But Wages Tend
to Be Low” punctures holes in the claim that the new world economy is good
for workers because it creates jobs: The
heartland’s manufacturing renaissance comes at a price. The typical wage
of $8.60 an hour at the reopened Cummins plant is half that at the
company’s main heavy-duty engine plant in downtown Columbus.… In
Milwaukee, Briggs & Stratton Corp. is threatening to move jobs south
unless it gets additional breaks from its unionized workers.… Brooke
Tuttle, president of the Columbus Economic Development Board, figures that
the area has lost 5,700 jobs at the major employers that paid $12 to $15
an hour. At the same time, it
has gained 6,000 new jobs, partly by promoting the wages of $6 to $8 an
hour to business prospects. “You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to
know we’re still losing our standard of living,” Mr. Tuttle
concedes.8 These
excerpts were selected because they represent a cross-section of an entire
genre of news items that document what is happening to workers and working
conditions throughout the United States. Americans, especially those at
the bottom 40% on the income scale, are forced to endure increasingly
degenerating work and pay conditions. Not just in the retail industry, not
just in chicken processing or the trucking industry—but in virtually every
industry in which people do “hands on” work. These
and similar articles demonstrate that: §
Workers
not only don’t benefit from technology and automation—they suffer because
of it. They now are more like machines than they were before—and they are
expected to work even faster than before. §
“Corporate
values are not necessarily small town values.” How about: modern corporate
values aren’t even traditional American
values? §
Today,
American workers and towns are treated like
“interchangeable parts,” again, like machinery. They are without rights,
without souls, without futures—to be used up and discarded without a
second thought. §
Corporate
profits, not “stability and community,” are now the controlling forces of
society. A lack of a sense of community has
always been associated with a rise in crime rates, divorces, drug use, and
all kinds of social problems. Yet the leaders of our country choose to
remain blind to the results of legislation that turns control of our
society over to corporate executives who have no moral standards—other
than greed—to guide their behaviors. §
Corporations
no longer serve the community; instead they become “the tail that wags the
dog.” The tail gets all the nourishment, the dog makes all the
sacrifices. §
“Aggressively
anti-union” companies will drive unionized companies with good wages and
working conditions “over the edge”—if there are inadequate national protections of workers’
rights to organize. §
The
ultimate medical and psychological costs of creating working conditions
that cause problems such as “ulcers, colitis, hives and hand tremors” are
transferred to individual workers, and omitted from corporate
profit-and-loss statements. §
Unscrupulous
corporations drive moral corporations out of business if they don’t also “rush to
duplicate” their lower standards for the treatment of workers. It takes
only one unprincipled corporation to cause the standards of an entire
industry to degenerate. §
If
local residents will not accept brutalizing work conditions, desperate
people from other parts of the world will. By abandoning their
communities, corporations repeatedly prove to the locals how unwise it is
to expect to be treated like human beings. The
key, the indispensable element that caused this degenerating trend—is that
Republicans and conservative Democrat politicians deliberately and
consciously glorified the values inherent in a Dickensian mentality. They
brag about how their policies have made our economy grow, made our
corporations more productive and more profitable, and have benefited
customers in the process. However, they never talk about those who
made all the sacrifices that were required to achieve these goals.
Conservative “family values” have returned us to the work standards of
Charles Dickens’ 1800s—when the royalty of society lived like, well, royalty. And workers at the low
end of society were treated less well than machines. (Employers took
reasonable care of their machines.) The infamous tobacco industry’s
moral standards of deceit, and their sanctimonious protestations of
virtue, are now characteristic of corporate executives generally. How else
could these practices be tolerated without any hint of complaint from the
spokespersons for American industry? Where is the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce? Where is the National Association of Manufacturers? Where are
the members of Personnel Associations all across the country? Where is the
Christian Coalition? The
people who run these organizations read the Journal, as well as Forbes, Fortune, Barron’s and Business Week, which also
occasionally publish similar articles. They are unequivocally not members of “the biased liberal
news media.” The members of
Congress also read these conservative financial publications. Yet
Republican politicians resist every effort to protect workers in manual
labor jobs. They know these things are going on! How can they possibly claim the “family values”
label? Republicans
want “states’ rights” because, without national standards, each state is
forced to lower its standards for workers to the lowest possible level in
order to compete with the least progressive state in the country.
By
destroying what few national standards we have left—“giving power back to
the states”—Republicans ensure that workers will eventually have no protections. This, in a
nutshell, is the Republican strategy: §
Pit
southern workers against northern workers, §
Pit
non-union workers against union workers, §
Pit
nonunion (“right-to-work”) states against states that will allow workers
to form unions—and if all that fails, §
Pit
brutalized workers in other countries against working
Americans. And
“you don’t have to be a rocket scientist” to know that, as a planned
result of all this, working Americans are losing their standard of
living. So,
who changed our country into a nation that no longer values hands-on,
non-investment, non-inheritance “work”? Read on. Now go to:
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