Responding to Doug -
I know you didn't tell me (or anyone else) to shut up - I said it
feels that way. The way you use data sometimes has a chilling effect.
Rattling off a list of aggregate numbers raises more questions than
it answers and some are difficult to find quickly, but you seem to
accept only a response in kind. Taking the recent telecoms figures
you posted as an example, I actually started to poke around in the BLS
data on telecommunications, but the 2 digit level SIC includes tv &
radio and there is more than one 3 digit code that might reasonably
be included. I gave up. There are people who know a lot more about
that industry than I do, so I figured maybe they would respond, but
for what it's worth here are a couple of avenues of inquiry.
It's not clear from the way the column headers printed out if the all
private #s are also % of mfg, but I'm guessing yes. I would begin
looking at the occupational composition. The automation of operator
positions is not particularly related to the breakup and dereg, but
it probably decreased lower paying occupations and may have shifted avg
earnings in the industry up. Also, the wage premium over mfg
expanded since 80, but since 85 it has declined slightly, but fairly
consistently. It hasn't dropped as fast as the premium in all private
employment, but all private includes the trends in mfg and services
on both sides of the ratio which telecom does not.
>From what I remember Maggie saying before and from what I've read
in the press, the industry overshot in downsizing technical people and
is hiring back, but since downsizing occurred via early retirement
either the same people are coming back on a contract basis and\or
there are new, less experienced people coming in. (The downsizing
isn't over yet either, is it - I mean those huge numbers that were
announced were staggered over several years.) Anyway, this would
seem to support both Sid's position about exposure to competition
and Tavis's position that hardware is local. If the company can't
displace spatially, then it tries to change the terms of employment.
As for the working class authenticity act wearing thin, well, I will
think carefully before I say anything in the future. I tend to do
that anyway and most of the time a thread is dead and gone by the
time I mull over a response. Frustration tends to build.
I don't know if one can acquire authenticity, anyway. I was very
middle of the road middle class growing up (in a telecom family by
the way - my mother was a stenographer at New England Tel & Tel -
pre NYNEX - until she married my father who was an accountant
there and who the company retrained as a computer systems analyst
in the early 60s. He never worked anywhere else as an adult). I
have a degree in English. I was one of those new leftists who
discovered Marx in the late 60s and set forth to organize the working
class. I got my come uppance quickly. I probably should have come
back east and regrouped my life sooner, but for mostly personal
reasons, I didn't. There wasn't much to do with a rusty degree
in English lit and a bizarre work record in Louisville in those days,
so I got caught in the rut of working at GE, getting laid off,
working some low wage job and getting recalled.
I don't make claims based on who I am or what I did. What I say is
based on what I saw and heard. I went back to school to get a better
intellectual framework, but the theory has to make sense of what I
already know and if the aggregate data does not resonate with what I
know, then I wonder what it is masking. Like with the question I asked
recently about how to track sourcing in trade data and how to know
what it's effects on productivity measures is. I don't know how to find
that yet, but without it, from where I sit, sourcing is a big deal.
Sourcing offshore is part of that; how big a part, I don't know; but the
discussion is incomplete without it.
The theory that makes the most sense to me is SSA theory which
doesn't get much respect on this list. Discussion of SSA usually
devolves into whether or not there is some natural periodicity to the
long wave which, I think, misses the point. SSA makes sense
because it is historical and systemic. It accepts that capitalism
contains inherent contradictions and a tendency to crisis. It poses
that capital and labor will attempt to resolve the crisis. Out of that
struggle particular institutions and processes (finance, labor relations,
labor markets, labor process, political and cultural activity) will
emerge that regulate a regime of accumulation and mediate the class
struggle. Embedded in the regime are the underlying instabilities of
capitalism. It decays and a new regime will emerge. Recently
Michael Eisenscher took a first cut at analyzing some of the elements
of the regime we are experiencing now. Like I said, I don't usually
get off a response quickly and there wasn't much discussion of his
points by other people. It died out before i got into the discussion.
But I'm very interested in thinking about what constitutes the current SSA.
Flexibility seems to be a key to a new SSA and leads me to think about
how to develop agile working class institutions and how to use the
trend toward flexibility to dilute the dependence of workers on the
firm. This is something that my own very specific experience has led
me to think about a lot. Every time I got called back to GE there was
this rush of gratitude that things would ease up for a while that I
hated myself for feeling. This dependence for pay, for health
insurance, for pensions is a real constraint on struggle. People don't
tend in any serious way to bite the hand that feeds them and will
perceive an identification of interests with the company. If these
interests can be secured only for a few, then so be it - those few
will fight to keep it and the institutions we have tend to reinforce
that defense at the expense of those who are pushed out. I remember
you once posted some information that showed a fairly stable trend in
long term job tenure, a decline in medium term tenure and a rise in
short term tenure. This is exactly what I would expect given the
seniority system we operate under (even by and large in non-union
companies). When it comes to job tenure, them that have, gets.
(Up to the retirement threshold which may be mixing things up - early
retirement from a specific job, but later retirement from any job.)
The globalization of work seems to be another component of the
current regime. Capital has been globally mobile, but labor and
products markets were fairly well integrated in the developed world
and the dis-integration is what people are experiencing. Judging
from the amount of discussion on this list (and others), something is
happening. Globalization is a good word for it, but maybe it needs to
be contextualized. To call it globaloney demeans the interest that
people are showing.
As for the little bar scenario I drew - well, come on down. These
folks are really there. Charles was one of the few people I could talk
about economics with. He kept up with the business press. I first
saw the term "Neutron Jack" in a copy of an article he gave me. He
was a real advocate of the position that the state should offer GE tax
breaks in order to stem the bleeding of jobs from Appliance Park.
Mike was one of the few people I could talk politics with because he
was interested in it, liked history, understood left and right wing
at an abstract level and was thoughtful about his positions. Becky
is Becky. She's one of the few workers I knew who held liberal
positions about race and gender, the Gulf and Vietnam wars. Becky
is also very, very vulgar, yes. Carol reached out to me. I was
always something of a stranger there, always reading something, quiet,
not from Kentucky. I'd open my mouth and they all knew that. She
overcame her xenophobia on a personal level. She lives with a Jewish
guy - he is very secretive about being Jewish. She didn't even know
it until she moved in with him and I only know because she told me.
There is a large and active Jewish community in Louisville. For a
good part of the time I lived there there was a Jewish mayor. But
very few Jews in Louisville are factory workers and he was really
afraid of prejudice from other workers at GE.
These four people don't represent everyone at GE, but they are not
particularly atypical either. There is a lot of openness about
sexuality and a lot of vulgarity. There are also a lot of people
who are not vulgar and are reserved about sexuality - lot of church
going, family oriented people. A lot of vulgar, family oriented
people, for that matter. There is a pretty common level of low grade
xenophobia ("those Mexicans taking our jobs" and racist attitudes)
and a few who are really into it. A lot of workers are armed.
Assault weapons may not be common, but hunting rifles are and
handguns for self-defense. Street weapons are probably fewer
now because people there are getting older and less rowdy. Once
upon a time there was a very permeable membrane between the
factory and the street. A lot of drugs. A few bikers here and
there. The expression of the right to bear arms is very prominent
- flyers and bumper stickers on cars and all over walls and
bulletin boards and equipment inside the buildings.
Rowdy or vulgar or prim and proper, these are hard-working,
embattled people. But they don't want a revolution, they want a life.
They want GE to provide it. They want you to buy GE appliances so
they can have it. Each one just hopes to retire before the place shuts
down altogether. In the discussions on pen-l about post modernism I
remember someone saying that overdetermination was an epistemological
issue - for example, race as a category is overdetermined by class
and gender. But overdetermination, (ontologically, so maybe I'm not
doing this right) really plugs into something I have been thinking about
for a long time: That each person embodies a variety of influences
which carry different weights from person to person, or even in one
person over time. One is what one is by virtue of biology and experience
and position in society, but what makes any one aspect conscious,
meaningful and effective in terms of other actors in society?
I probably will shut up for a while. I've pretty well shot my wad
for now, anyway. And as Jim Devine is always saying - I've got to
get back to work. I just started working at Tufts helping edit a book
on the changing nature of work. I want to get more involved with
sustainable development. It gets at some of the contradictions of
whatever the new regime is turning out to be - the growth, consumption,
overcapacity nexus; growth vs development; redefining well being;
relationships between developed and developing countries; trade vs
development; internalizing externalities; systemic and dynamic
relationships between the resource base and production and distribution
of wealth and income; rethinking technology and productivity. I can
wish the movement was more sharply anti-capitalist and less touchy-
feely, but that isn't going to happen if the left is sitting off to
the side trashing and making fun of it.
Doug, if it ever comes to just sittting around and trading options, I'll
come looking to you for advice, because I don't have the first clue
about where to start.
--------------Laurie
What Doug said about what I said:
>Laurie Dougherty wrote:
>I'm not trying to be mean here. But this thread is really pushing my buttons
>and I'm tired of feeling told to shut up because I don't have all my
>coefficients in perfect order.
No one told you to shut up because of disordered coefficients. In fact, no
one has told you to shut up at all. Though I will say that this working
class authenticity act is wearing a bit thin.
Most of the people on this list are politicized intellectuals of one sort
or another. We're supposed to look at the world in some sort of historical
and theoretical context. Believe it or not, I think it matters a lot just
how new "globalization" is, and what it consists of exactly. I'd be happy
to hang out at your recommended bar and talk with people. In fact, I do
quite a bit of that already, and not just at bars, but at union halls,
church basements, and on the radio. I even have some working class
subscribers who write me and call me. They're not anything like your
description of the "real" working class quoted below.
And just what are we to conclude from this?
>You want to do a culture gig, Doug? Forget trashing Stanley every chance you
>get. Where is the challenge? Go on down to the Red Fox Bar at the bowling
>alley on the corner of Poplar Level Road and Old Shep across from Appliance
>Park. You can talk Wall Street with Charles who keeps up with that stuff, or
>politics with Mike who is very smart, funny, a great big teddy bear of a guy
>who collects assault weapons as a hobby, reads paramilitary literature and
>used
>to be a small town cop. Discuss the perils of postmodernism with my friend
>Becky (almost the only one besides me who did not buy the company\union
>Support the Gulf War T-shirt.) Buy her a drink. She collects glasses in the
>shape of a naked guy - a specialty of the house at the Red Fox. For yourself,
>you could get a naked lady. Carol - who believes that men are like tires,
>every
>woman should have a spare - will flirt with you until you start running by her
>that globalization ain't nothing new. She gets fairly rabid on the
>subjects of
>immigration and folks who don't buy American (US American, that is).
Really, I mean what's your point? In sequence, it looks like this:
political theory is irrelevant, and the U.S. working class is armed,
sexually voracious, vulgar, and xenophobic. Might as well give up politics
then and trade options, eh?
Doug
