-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: June 2, 2007 10:30:17 PM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Corporate Masters and Slaves
CEOs vs. Slaves
By Barbara Ehrenreich, AlterNet.
May 31, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/rights/52645/
Recent findings shed new light on the increasingly unequal terrain
of American society. The new "top" involves pay in the hundreds of
millions, a private jet and a few acres of Nantucket. The new
bottom is slavery.
Recent findings shed new light on the increasingly unequal terrain
of American society. Starting at the top executive level: You may
have thought, as I did, that the guys in the C-suites operated as a
team -- or, depending on your point of view, a pack or gang -- each
getting his fair share of the take. But no, the rising tide in
executive pay does not lift all yachts equally. The latest pay gap
to worry about is the one between the CEO and his -- or very rarely
her -- third in command.
According to a just-reported study by Carola Frydman of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Raven E. Saks at the
Federal Reserve, 30-40 years ago, the CEO's of major companies
earned 80 percent more, on average, than the third-highest-paid
executives. By the early part of the 21st century, however, the gap
CEO and the third in command had ballooned up to 260 percent.
Now take a look at what's happening at the very bottom of the
economic spectrum, where you might have pictured low-wage workers
trudging between food banks or mendicants dwelling in cardboard
boxes. It turns out, though, that the bottom is a lot lower than that.
On May 16, a millionaire couple in a woodsy Long Island suburb was
charged with keeping two Indonesian domestics as slaves for five
years, during which the women were paid $100 a month, fed very
little, forced to sleep on mats on the floor, and subjected to
beatings, cigarette burns and other torments.
This is hardly an isolated case (see my book, Global Woman:
Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy, co-edited with
Arlie Hochschild.) If the new "top" involves pay in the tens or
hundreds of millions, a private jet and a few acres of Nantucket,
the new bottom is slavery.
Some of America's slaves are captive domestics, like the Indonesian
women in Long Island. Others are factory workers, and at least
10,000 are sex slaves lured from their home country to American
brothels by promises of respectable jobs. CEOs and slaves: these
are the extreme ends of American class polarization.
But a parallel kind of splitting is going in many of the
professions. Top-ranked college professors, for example, enjoy
salaries of several hundred thousand a year, often augmented by
consulting fees and earnings from their patents or biotech
companies. At the other end of the professoriate, you have adjunct
teachers toiling away for about $5000 a semester or less, with no
benefits or chance of tenure. There was a story a few years ago
about an adjunct who commuted to his classes from a homeless
shelter in Manhattan, and adjuncts who moonlight as waitresses or
cleaning ladies are legion.
Similarly, the legal profession, which is topped by law firm
partners billing hundred of dollars an hour, now has a new
proletariat of temp lawyers working for $19-25 an hour in sweatshop
conditions. On sites like http://temporaryattorney.blogspot.com/,
temp lawyers report working 12 hours a day, six days a week, in
crowded basements with inadequate sanitary facilities. According to
an article in American Lawyer, a legal temp at a major New York
firm reports being "corralled in a windowless basement room
littered with dead cockroaches," where six out of seven exits were
blocked.
Contemplating the violent and increasing polarization of American
society, one cannot help but think of "dark energy," the mysterious
force that is propelling the galaxies apart from each other one at
a speed far greater than can be accounted for by the energy of the
original big bang. Cosmic bodies seem to be repelling each other,
much as a CEO must look down at his CFO, COO, etc. and think,
"They're getting too close. I've got to make more, more, more!"
The difference is that the galaxies don't need each other, and are
free to go their separate ways nonchalantly. But the CEO presumably
depends on his fellow executives, just as the star professor relies
on adjuncts to do his or her teaching and the law firm partner is
enriched by the sweated labor of legal temps. For all we know, some
of those CEOs go home to sip their single malts in mahogany walled
dens that have been cleaned by domestic slaves.
Why is it so hard for the people at the top to graciously
acknowledge their dependency on the labor of others? We need some
sort of gravitational force to counter the explosive distancing
brought about by greed -- before our economy imitates the universe
and blows itself to smithereens.
See what's free at AOL.com.
www.ctrl.org
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