The New Old Thing: Working Class Solidarity

Everyone knows -- or so goes the propaganda -- that America has a postindustrial economy. I remember when it was called a 'services economy,' but it's fashionable to say 'information economy' and 'new new thing' and 'new media' and 'dot-com', etc.

The fact remains, however, that behind this highly ideological facade, most of the new jobs that Clinton-Gore tout are low-paying, temporary, dead-end variations of wage slavery. The country's largest employer? Microsoft? IBM? Perhaps Amazon.com? Nope, it's Manpower and Associates, a temporary worker firm.

Surely, the naive among us protest, surely even the low-end jobs of today are qualitiatively better than the evil factory jobs of a hundred years ago? In the May 18 Wall Street Journal I read that the fast-food industry is undergoing a kind of arms race; but the arms in question aren't weapons but human beings. Taco Bell and Wendy's and Burger King are competing for the fastest fast food service; they've become so mechanized and controlling that they glue workers to spots in the assembly line, even requiring them to position their hands in particular ways to shave tenths of seconds from production time.

Dress it up any way you want, but that's fascism! It's just the evil 19th century industrial factory system with uglier uniforms, better lighting, and equally bad pay (relative to inflation). But the essential condition remains unchanged: it's a social, economic relation whose only goal is to enslave people in order to profit from their labor. Beyond talk of worker ownership, team work, 'sales associates' and all the rest of the modern corporation's faux-new-economy dreck, we find that very little has changed. (Don't get me started on the fantasy life of dot-com mania. Horribly overworked programmers, admins, designers, html-hacks, and geeks who make a modest living (in fact, a bad living if they factor in how much they actually work) vastly outnumber the dot-com Richie Riches; they dare not ask about such 'old economy' things as overtime, since the layoffs are starting in force. The owners and their experts have nothing but class contempt for technical people.)

Starting a hundred or so years ago, it was labor and trade unions that forced (often literally only by force and a willingness to be the target of state violence) America's elite to make some (amazingly begrudging) concessions about worker safety, health, and basic dignity. Why does anyone expect that it won't again be labor and trade unions that will force -- if anything will -- a new round of concessions for workers?

[ Update: Somehow I forgot to mention a book I'm presently reading that bears directly on these issues. The antidote to wage slavery is passionate labor, which would be widely possible if the wastes (almost all of it caused by inherent features of market economies) of the market were reduced. Michael Perelman, one of the few economists I can stand to read, author of Class Warfare in the Information Age, has written a new book, which I'm reading presently: Transcending the Economy: On the potential of passionate labor and the wastes of the market, (St. Martin's Press, 2000). It's quite good. ]