A great article! But even if the current situation in the U.S. workplace is _legally_ feudal, it is not so in a socio-economic way: it's capitalist. A lot of what's described below is similar to what Marx described in his chapter on the working day (in CAPITAL, vol. 1). What's happened is that capitalism (in its typically opportunistic style) has preserved those aspects of feudalism that serve the lust for profits. Then it adds on new types of oppression...
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Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
> Boston Globe, 9/29/2002
> Lavatory and Liberty
>
> The secret history of the bathroom break
>
> By Corey Robin
>
> IN HIS NEVER-ENDING quest for control of the workplace, Henry Ford
> confronted many foes, but none as wily or rebellious as the
> human digestive
> tract. Hoping to tame what he called the body's ''disassembly
> line,'' Ford
> wheeled lunch wagons into his auto plant in Highland Park, Mich., and
> forced workers to wolf down a 10-minute sandwich on the job. So
> industrialized was ingestion at the plant that workers
> growled about their
> ''Ford stomach.'' But where Ford sought to speed up the
> meal's entrance
> into the body, his successors - from store managers in the Midwest to
> fashion moguls in New York - have concentrated on slowing
> down its exit.
>
> Today's workplace can sometimes seem like a battlefield of
> the bladder. On
> the one side are workers who wanna go when they gotta go; on
> the other are
> employers who want to stop them, sometimes for hours on end.
> Just this past
> month, a Jim Beam bourbon distillery in Clermont, Ky., was
> forced to drop
> its strict bathroom-break policies after the plant's union
> focused negative
> international attention - from ABC News to Australia - on Jim
> Beam and its
> parent company, Fortune Brands, Inc. According to union
> officials, managers
> kept computer spreadsheets monitoring employee use of the
> bathroom, and 45
> employees were disciplined for heeding nature's call outside
> company-approved breaks. Female workers were even told to report the
> beginning of their menstrual cycles to the human resources
> department, said
> one union leader.
>
> In their 1998 book ''Void Where Prohibited: Rest Breaks and
> the Right to
> Urinate on Company Time,'' Marc Linder and Ingrid Nygaard of
> the University
> of Iowa - he's a law professor, she's a urogynecologist -
> trace the long
> and ignoble history of the struggle for the right to pee on
> the job. In
> 1995, for instance, female employees at a Nabisco plant in
> Oxnard, Calif.,
> maker of A-1 steak sauce and the world's supplier of Grey
> Poupon mustard,
> complained in a lawsuit that line supervisors had
> consistently prevented
> them from going to the bathroom. Instructed to urinate into
> their clothes
> or face three days' suspension for unauthorized expeditions
> to the toilet,
> the workers opted for adult diapers. But incontinence pads
> were expensive,
> so many employees downgraded to Kotex and toilet paper, which
> pose severe
> health risks when soaked in urine. Indeed, several workers eventually
> contracted bladder and urinary tract infections. Hearing of
> their plight,
> conservative commentator R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. advised the
> workers to wear
> special diapers used by horses in New York's Central Park
> carriage trade.
>
> How does a country that celebrates the joy of unfettered
> movement tolerate
> such restrictions on this most basic of bodily motions? Why
> do the freedoms
> that we take for granted outside the workplace suddenly
> disappear when we
> enter it? ''Belated Feudalism,'' a study by UCLA political
> scientist Karen
> Orren, suggests a surprising, and shocking, answer. According
> to Orren,
> long after the Bill of Rights was ratified and slavery
> abolished - well
> into the 20th century, in fact - the American workplace
> remained a feudal
> institution. Not metaphorically, but legally. Workers were
> governed by
> statutes originating in the common law of medieval England,
> with precedents
> extending as far back as the year 500. Like their
> counterparts in feudal
> Britain, judges exclusively administered these statutes,
> treating workers
> as the literal property of their employers. Not until 1937, when the
> Supreme Court upheld the Wagner Act, giving workers the right
> to organize
> unions, did the judiciary relinquish political control over
> the workplace
> to Congress.
>
> Prior to the '30s, Orren shows, American judges regularly
> applied the ''law
> of master and servant'' to quell the worker's independent
> will. According
> to one jurist, that law recognized only ''the superiority and
> power'' of
> the master, and the ''duty, subjection, and, as it were,
> allegiance'' of
> the worker. Medieval vagrancy statutes forced able-bodied
> males into the
> workplace, while ancient principles of ''entire'' contract
> kept them there.
> A worker hired for a period of time - often five to 10 years
> and beyond -
> was legally not entitled to any of his earnings unless and until he
> completed the entire term of his contract. When rules of vagrancy and
> entirety failed, judges turned to other precedents, some
> dating from the
> time of Richard II, requiring workers seeking employment to obtain a
> ''testimonial letter'' from their previous employer. Because
> employers were
> under no legal obligation to provide such letters, judges
> could effectively
> stop workers from ever trying to move on.
>
> full:
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/272/focus/Lavatory_and_Liberty+.shtml
