"S. Lerner" wrote:
>
> White-Collar Sweatshop details the indignities of working in corporate
> America, where workers are paying the price for increased competition
>
> Atlantic Monthly
> June 7, 2001
This posting "rings true".
I think "we" (i.e., *they* --> the persons in positions of
power, which in other circumstances would be called positions
of stewardship!) need to broaden our/their understanding
of the extent and nature of the "externalities" of production.
Slowly, people seem to be getting the point that the solution to
pollution is not dilution, but that the producer of the pollution
needs to pay for cleaning it up as a cost of doing business.
But people have not yet got the point that the solution to
bad working conditions is not the employee's "free time", in which
the employee is supposed to heal himself by himself of all the impositions
of the workplace (like the environment was supposed to
neutralize toxic wastes all by itself).
The work process needs to be structured to
internalize the costs of cleaning up not only
the environmental pollution, but also the human pollution
the conditions of work do to the employees. Briefly stated:
Employees need nourishing working conditions.
The production of a given focal product has side effects.
Yes, these include "environmental effects" (AKA pollution).
But these also include the shaping of the employees' form of life.
Chemical leaks and bleeding ulcers are both externalities that
need to be brought back into the cost of doing business.
Just like companies cannot throw chemical poisons out the door, so too
they must understand that they cannot dump psycho-social poisons down
employees' souls.
Two co-products of any production process are the physical
environment in which the company operates, and the psycho-social
environment in which the company operates (its employees'
lives).
As the title of Werner Herzog's film about
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser goes:
Jeder fur sich und Gott gegen Alle
Yours from the white-collarwork world....
+\brad mccormick
>
> Compared to their peers thirty years ago, America's 80 million white-collar
> employees are working longer hours, for the same pay and fewer benefits, at
> jobs that are markedly less secure, and for corporations that regard firing
> whole ranks of employees as a way to post paper gains and so win Wall
> Street's favor. The long arm of the job has reached into employees' homes,
> their nights, their weekends, and their vacations, as technology designed
> to make work less onerous has made it more pervasive. America's insecure
> white-collar workers are victims not of poverty, like the blue- and
> pink-collar workers Barbara Ehrenreich writes about in Nickel and Dimed
> (2001), but of progress. They are, Jill Andresky Fraser writes in
> White-Collar Sweatshop: The Deterioration of Work and Its Rewards in
> Corporate America, "suffering the unwanted ... consequences of the nation's
> recent economic boom." Her new book raises the question of whether the
> deterioration of white-collar work is more cause than consequence of that
> now-fading boom. Is a eupeptic stock market a sign not of new wealth
> creation but of a redistribution of resources from workers to owners? Or,
> rather, from workers to their own pension funds? "We are all devouring
> ourselves," an art designer for a major publisher told Fraser. "We all own
> stock, and as stockholders, all we care about is profits. So we are the
> ones who are encouraging the conditions that make our work lives so awful."
> Call it cannibalistic capitalism.
[snip]
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA
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