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BOOKS RELATING  On the Global Waterfront:
The Fight to Free the Charleston 5 by Suzan Erem and E. Paul Durrenberger BUY THIS BOOK   Windows on
the Workplace: Technology, Jobs,and the Organization of Office Work by Joan Greenbaum BUY THIS BOOK    Rising from the Ashes?
Labor in the Age of “Global” Capitalism edited by Ellen Meiksins Wood, Peter Meiksins, and Michael Yates BUY THIS BOOK RECENT
ESSAYS ON: |
Essays on Labor and Working-Class Issues |
The Injuries of Class We live in a complex, divided society. We are divided by wealth, income, education, housing, race, gender, ethnicity, religion, and sexual orientation. These divisions are much discussed; in the last two years, there have been entire series in our major newspapers devoted to the growing income divide. The wealth-flaunting of today’s rich was even the subject of a recent Sunday New York Times Magazine article (“City Life in the New Gilded Age,” October 14, 2007). What is seldom talked or written about is to me our most fundamental division, one at the center of our economic system, namely the division of our society into a very large class of working men, women, and children, the working class; and a much smaller class of owners that employs the former, the capitalist class. These two great classes make the world go round, so to speak. January 2008 Wage Stagnation, Growing Insecurity, and the Future of the U.S. Working Class The most important promises used to justify capitalism are that your children will have a better life than you do, and in President Kennedy’s famous words, “a rising tide lifts all boats,” meaning everyone benefits from the accumulation of capital. These promises ring hollow in a period in which the relative position of the working people of the United States is declining and its ruling class is able to appropriate an increasing share of the national income. This pattern of accumulation and appropriation has become evident to many Americans and this awareness is beginning to affect political consciousness. March 2007 Rank-and-File Rebellions in the Coal Fields: 1964-80 Rank-and-file rebellions began rumbling in the coalfields from Pittsburgh and down the Ohio River after 1964, when dissident miners first challenged incumbents in international and district United Mine Workers (UMW) elections. Concern and anger also seethed through the coalfields of southern West Virginia during those years, particularly over black lung, a painful and often-fatal occupational disease. Doctors Isadore E. Buff and Donald Rasmussen helped spark those rumblings with speeches in union halls, schools, and churches. March 2007 Harder Times: Undocumented Workers and the U.S. Informal Economy Many of the informal economies operating in the world today are the offspring of globalization and need to be understood as such. The economic and social prospects for people engaged in informal employment—sometimes referred to as “precarious” and “off-the-books employment”—as well as their families and communities, are substantially inferior to those associated with formal employment, and the current boom of informal economic activity bodes ill for all working people. July 2006 The Glory and the Gutting: Steeler Nation and the Humiliation of Pittsburgh Last football season the Pittsburgh Steelers stunned fans with an unexpected series of victories. A Steeler Nation—composed of a generation of Pittsburgh’s workers who scattered across the United States as their jobs vanished in the last quarter of the twentieth century—filled stadiums in a dozen cities with their team’s colors, black and gold. The delirium peaked with the Steelers’ victory over the New York Jets, which seemed like an act of God. The improbable twice-missed field goals and overtime win continued the Steelers’ fourteen-game winning streak and their march toward the Super Bowl—until that road was cleanly blocked by the New England Patriots. Whatever deity oversees such matters, she must have a sense of equity or cosmic balance because the Steeler Nation in diaspora enjoyed its moment of glory just as the real, living, here-still-today city of Pittsburgh, near bankruptcy, suffered humiliation and dismemberment. December 2005 Labor Movements: Is There Hope? For the past thirty years, the class struggle has been a pretty one-sided affair, with capital delivering a severe beating to labor around the globe. When economic stagnation struck most of the world's advanced capitalist economies, beginning in the mid-1970s, capital went on the offensive, quickly understanding that the best way to maintain and increase profit margins in a period of slow and sporadic economic growth was to cut labor costs. Governments and global lending agencies such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund began to implement policies that made workers increasingly insecure. June 2005 Labor Imperialism
Redux?: The AFL-CIO’s Foreign Policy Since 1995 Throughout much of its history, the AFL-CIO has carried out a reactionary labor program around the world. It has been unequivocally established that the AFL-CIO has worked to overthrow democratically-elected governments, collaborated with dictators against progressive labor movements, and supported reactionary labor movements against progressive governments.1 In short, the AFL-CIO has practiced what we can accurately call “labor imperialism.” The appellation “AFL-CIA” has accurately represented reality and has not been left-wing paranoia. May 2005 Disposable
Workers: Today’s Reserve Army of Labor These are difficult times for workers. In the wealthy countries of capitalism's center, labor is struggling to maintain existing wages and benefits against a combined assault by corporations and governments, while conditions of workers in the periphery are even more difficult. The widespread acceptance and adoption of capital's agenda—"free trade," "free markets," greater "flexibility" regarding labor, and reduced social welfare assistance—has led to one group of real winners. Transnational corporations (and their owners and top managers) now have more freedom to produce where labor and other costs are cheap, have their patents protected, and move capital in and out of countries at will. Many workers, unfortunately, are finding that their situation has become more tenuous. April 2004 The Stagnation of
Employment Except in times of war, capitalist economies almost never reach full employment. The mere absence of jobs for those desiring paid employment, however, is not necessarily a problem for the ruling economic interests. Unemployment and the underutilization of labor more generally—the existence of what Marx called the industrial reserve army of labor—is a necessary part of a capitalist economy, since it keeps wages low as workers are forced to compete with each other for jobs. This becomes a serious problem for the system or for the political structure when the shortfall in employment coincides with a deeper structural crisis; when aggregate demand and thus investment opportunities are hindered by low employment and low wages; and when a shortage of jobs creates a political problem, sometimes even igniting popular opposition at the grassroots of society. All three of these contradictions are apparent in 2004, setting the stage for a national debate on the question of jobs, which more than three years since the beginning of the 2001 recession is now suddenly a front page story. April 2004 The “New”
Economy and the Labor Movement A New Economy? Today, we hear a lot of talk about the New Economy, much of it unsubstantiated and hyperbolically stated. In the United States, for example, consumers are supposedly concerned, as never before, with high-quality goods and services tailored specifically to their individual needs. Rapidly changing technology continually creates new, high-quality products, so consumer needs are perpetually changing as well. This rapid change places new demands on businesses. They must be maximally flexible, capable of changing product lines quickly, and able at all times to meet discerning and highly individualized consumer needs. Everything must be geared to customer satisfaction; a firm that does not quickly and consistently please its customers will lose business sooner than at any time in the past. The tremendous range of choices available means that customers will not be loyal to any company that cannot offer speedy gratification. Recently an Internet book company opened that promised same-day delivery! April 2001 “Workers of All
Countries, Unite”: Many progressives and leftists, in their desire to see improvements in the lives of working people, have too frequently ignored reality and jumped on the New Voices' bandwagon, leaving their critical faculties behind. They ignore the obvious. U.S. labor leaders, with very rare exceptions, are not radicals and never will be. The twin ideologies of nationalism and imperialism cast long shadows over them, and the failure to understand this poses a number of dangers. July/August 2000 REVIEW OF
THE MONTH It is an old axiom, common to both Marxian and Keynesian economics, that uneven, class-based distribution of income is a determining factor of consumption and investment. How much is spent for consumption goods depends on the income of the working class. Workers necessarily spend almost all of their income on consumption, with relatively little left over for savings or investment. Capitalists, on the other hand, spend only a small percentage of their income for personal consumption. The overwhelming proportion of the income of capitalists and their corporations is devoted to investment. It follows that increasing inequality in income and wealth can be expected to create the age-old contradiction of capitalism: on the one hand, sluggish consumer demand narrows the marketability of the goods that capital needs to sell; on the other, profitable investment opportunities depend ultimately on vigorous growth in the effective demand for consumer goods. It is not possible—in the words of the early-twentieth-century U.S. economist J. B. Clark—simply to "build more mills that should make more mills for ever" in the absence of sufficient consumer demand for the products created by these mills May 2000 Us Versus Them: Laboring in the Academic Factory On the last page of the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels say, “Workers of all countries, unite.” Now, I know that today, if pressed, many—even most—college teachers would say that Marx and Engels were not talking about them. They might admit that business interests dominate their boards of trustees; after all, Veblen wrote about this in 1918. And they might agree that there is considerable disparity between the pay and power of college administrators and themselves. However, they would not consider themselves to be anything as common as workers. Some may feel this way because they share fully the business values of the board members and most administrators, or at least believe that such values are necessary for the efficient operations of the universities. Not a few of them may aspire to be administrators someday. Others may think that, despite the values of board members, colleges are still somehow different from other workplaces. Colleges are places where administrators and teachers are colleagues, where these two groups settle their differences peacefully and without rancor. Many professors think of themselves as professionals, insulated from the crassness of the marketplace and the hurly-burly of the outside world of work. January 2000 REVIEW OF
THE MONTH Organized labor has always privileged collective struggle at the point of production, judging it to be capital's most vulnerable point. Denying employers the labor power needed for the production of surplus value strikes at the reproduction and expansion of capital, the accumulation process which is the core of the system. October 1999 REVIEW OF THE
MONTH Since Paul Sweezy gently rejected my first submission to Monthly Review in 1972, he and Harry Magdoff and all of the MR writers and staffpersons, living and deceased, have been my mentors, helping me to see things more clearly and to act more effectively. And Harry Braverman's book ranks near the top of MR's books which have deeply influenced my thinking. I remember mentioning it in my PhD defense in 1976. I told the committee that one of the weaknesses of my thesis, which was about public school teachers' unions, was that it had not incorporated the pioneering work of Harry Braverman in Labor and Monopoly Capital. I had a suspicion that the work of teachers was not immune to the forces described so well by Braverman: detailed division of labor, mechanization, Taylorization. Today, as the fine scholar David Noble will tell us, these forces are bearing down upon the professoriate, with potentially devastating results. January 1999 |
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