Re: upcoming talk
Michael Yates wrote,
5. Hours of work as low as possible . . .
Michael,
Although I agree whole-heartedly with the goal, I dispute the low
priority. Perhaps having written a book on the topic, you are reluctant to
keep banging your head against that brick wall. Nevertheless, allow me to
1. share with you three encomiums to shorter hours;
2. raise the question of the strategic consequence of a past reluctance
to give top priority to shorter hours and
3. suggest a course of action that could give focus to a major drive for
shorter hours.
**
1. The three encomiums:
"We declare that the limitation of the working day is a preliminary
condition without which all further attempts at improvement and
emancipation must prove abortive."
-- Resolution adopted at the Congress of the International Working Men's
Association, Geneva, 1866.
"On the side of the working population there can be no question respecting
the desirability of fewer hours, from every standpoint. . . A reduction of
hours is the most substantial and permanent gain which labor can secure."
-- Final Report of the U.S. Industrial Commission, 1902.
"Shorter hours are the cause, as well as the result, of increased labor
productivity . . . in order to benefit from the increased output per
man-hour we had to accept part of the gains in the form of shorter working
hours and more leisure time." -- J.F. Dewhurst, America's Needs and
Resources, 1947;
**
2. The strategic consequences of holding off:
Taking the following two statements at face value leads to the conclusion
that between the mid 1950s and the early 1960s, organized labor "held off
as a 'last resort'" a major drive to fulfill a vision of the shorter work
week, which "gripped the imagination of the American people".
Solomon Barkin, December, 1955:
"The vision of the shorter work week has gripped the imagination of the
American people. The pressure has increased measurably. No sacrifice or
slowing up in the rate of improvement of the standard of living will be
accepted. Both the values of greater leisure and higher standards will be
concurrently sought. The development of a schedule for their realization
will be greatly facilitated by continued and intensive study of the
problems and potentialities of such revisions."
AFL-CIO American Federationist, November 1962:
"Organized labor has not made shorter hours its first choice in the
campaign against unemployment. Its first choice has been to apply its most
vigorous efforts, all through the last decade, for a range of other public
and private actions to stimulate a more rapid rate of economic
growth. Shortening of hours has been discussed periodically but a major
drive has been held off as a 'last resort.'"
Meanwhile, the forces opposed to shorter work time have relied on a single
strategy during the entire 20th century. That strategy can be summed up in
two words:
"Not now!"
From a 1904 National Association of Manufacturers pamphlet:
"This arbitrary and destructive proposition deserves to be antagonized in
every legitimate manner by all manufacturers and employers because, in the
first place, it is class legislation; because, in the second place, it
would discriminate against certain Government contractors and
sub-contractors, hundreds of them, and perhaps ruin them; because, third,
its confessed object is to force upon the industries of the country
generally, by act of Congress, a shorter work day; because, fourth, a
sensitive if not dangerous industrial situation demands that, whatever
wild and sumptuary legislation might be discussed in other times, IT IS
NOT THE OCCASION FOR IT NOW [emphasis in original]."
How does that compare with the AFL-CIO strategy of holding off a major
drive for shorter hours as a "last resort?" Or is that a rhetorical
question? ("Oh, please B'rer Meany, don't hold off shorter hours as a
'last resort!'")
That major drive for shorter hours has been holding off some 45 years
now. Over the past 20 years or so the average annual hours worked in the
U.S. have been increasing. If not now, when? (If not now: never.)
**
3. The proposed course of action: to document and publicize the
unrelenting, deceptive, stealthy and effective propaganda
campaign waged against shorter work time by "the plutocratic foes of
labor" and their higher-learning hirelings. In the early years of that
campaign, the rhetoric was forthright, harsh and straight from the captain
of industry's mouth. Since the late 1930s, the propaganda has been
discrete and avuncular in tone -- a fireside chat with a kindly professor.
Compare and contrast the following two statements:
"The 'movement' to limit the hours of labor by law is a part of the
general union program to place various restrictions upon the processes of
industry, so that they, the unionists, as a sort of favored class beyond
the reach of law -- whether moral or economic -- could enjoy a special
Thought and Language. was Re: Capital is wrong
George's problem illustrates an argument I made on lbo a few months ago denying discourse theory (i.e., denying the assumption that all thought is language bound). I gave as an example then the schoolroom syllogism All men are mortal Socrates is a man Therefore Socrates is mortal Suppose someone understood both the major and minor premises, but could not see that *therefore* Socrates is mortal. It would be impossible to explain to him/her the error he/she was making. In other words, part of even understanding a syllogism is extra- verbal, occurs independently of language. That is George's problem. He lacks (or pretends to lack) the minimal intuitive powers it takes to understand a text. Hence nothing anyone can say will make a difference to him. Carrol
Thought and Language, was Re: Capital is wrong
Title: Thought and Language, was Re: Capital is wrong Greetings economists, Carrol Cox wrote here something which had a short while ago been a decisive influence upon me, that is that human thought is not to be confused with language. I thought I would chime in here about Carrol's point because I think this has significance for a left movement in a larger sense than Carrol makes it in this point, Carrol, ...I gave as an example then the schoolroom syllogism All men are mortal Socrates is a man Therefore Socrates is mortal Suppose someone understood both the major and minor premises, but could not see that *therefore* Socrates is mortal. It would be impossible to explain to him/her the error he/she was making. In other words, part of even understanding a syllogism is extra- verbal, occurs independently of language. Doyle This example is probably familiar enough here on this list to not be hard to grasp. That is we can see if we say something to someone else they may not understand our point. Anybody any place can fit that bill since what Carrol is saying while about someone in particular is quite true of all of us. That is in part why the dialectic was important to the Greeks, because people did produce differences which while bridgeable in a synthesis the opposite often happens too. People with entrenched positions do not change in their life times. That could be said of the left, that we don't listen and are set in concrete about our views (though I object to that characterization myself). To summarise, Carrol is pointing not at a sense of a dialectic, but at human thought is not language bound. That is a very significant point in our time. I will use 'anytime anyplace' computing to make that point in a new way. Another way to say 'anytime anyplace' computing is 'ubiquitous' computing. That is an idea that Zerox Parc advanced awhile back. Computing is everywhere, and everyone is part of the networks of computing. The biggest corporations in the U.S. are moving in that direction, primarily through the concept of e-commerce. This moves away from fixed physical sites for making exchange in the market place and toward fixing (stabilizing) the structure of communication throughout the world into a global unified system (of telecommunications). Where Carrol remarks upon someone being impervious to what a language might be conveying has significant structures that 'anytime anyplace' computing will aim at. For example, emotions, or affects can be measured through mice, or head sensors. Human speech is relatively barren of clues about feelings. Hence the primitive concept advanced during the late European ages of rationality or religion oriented mind over body. Feelings are body, mind is rationality in the Platonic sense of trans-essential forms. However, human speech systems arose in conjunction with face to face situations. Deceit in small groups was a tool to gain material advantage, so people used their facial expressions to defy other people understanding how they felt. I raise this because if computing starts measuring emotions through skin processes that are involuntary, or iris opening, or other such measures of states of feeling we know, emotions can no longer be used deceptively by humans, we move decisively beyond primitive methods of deception that makes emotions a hard tool to organize human behavior. Two books that I think are very interesting in regard to emotions are; The Feeling of What Happens, Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, by Antonio Damasio, 1999, Harcourt Brace. This book being a very good description of what is currently in some circles are the basics of the affect system. Where in evolution, where in the brain stem, where in the neo-cortex, what various manifestation might be, etc. The second book, Shame and its Sisters, A Silvan Tomkins Reader, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank Editors, 1995, Duke University press. Describes how Tomkins in emersing himself in emotions moves away from traditional means of judging other people's behavior. This is important in the above example that Carrol gives, because where we might be talking about 'obsessive' and compulsive behavior, we want very much through adding emotions to language structures to not to aim that system toward able bodied people. Able bodied people concepts are structured by rationalism, and essentialist thinking. 'Anytime anyplace' computing moves beyond that and away from language structures as we know them. For example, since the main telecommunications network is visual as well as voice, there is a great need to understand how attention is used in communication. For example, in a nested way, when we drive with a cell phone we need to look at the road and listen to the phone. This is a computing problem of understanding how to make a device fit within those attentional requirements. We can observe for instance in Chinese writing system where phonological ties to the writing system are not
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Re: Why are we so afraid of unemployment?
I re-unsubbed Chang. chang wrote: This message is dedicated to people all over the world. You can print it, forward and post it to other mailing lists/discussion forums as long as its attribution is given to the author and the wording is not altered in any way. Feel free to pass it around to all of your friends and media people. Subject: Why are we so afraid of unemployment? by Juchang He E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Why are we so afraid of unemployment? It is because people are afraid of poverty. Unemployment will bring people poverty. If there weren't poverty, people wouldn't be afraid of unemployment. Therefore, if we can solve the problem of poverty, people won't be afraid of unemployment. (People's living standard can be divided into four grades. The first grade is necessary consumption of education, clothing, food, housing and transportation. The second grade is ordinary consumption, which means buying some more clothes and purchasing TV sets and washers, etc. The third grade is extravagant consumption, which means going to hotels, restaurants and dancing-halls and taking cars, etc. The fourth grade is over-extravagant consumption.) How can the problem of poverty be solved? When there appears inadequate production of consumer goods of the first and second grades, the government should instruct people to produce consumer goods of the first and second grades. In this way, unemployment will be decreased and poverty will be eliminated. Are people who have jobs protected from poverty? Of course not. People with low wages have to face poverty as well. In this case, the government should stipulate a level of the lowest wages in the form of law, and all the wages shouldn't be lower than this level. In this way, the problem of poverty will be solved. Is finding a job the only way to eliminate poverty? Of course not. If there is overproduction of consumer goods of the first and second grades, the government should provide the unemployed with relief funds instead of finding jobs for them, because, at that time, social wealth is adequate, even more than needed. So the unemployed will never live in poverty. Economists simply tell people how to eliminate unemployment, rather than tell people how to eliminate poverty. I think this is unscientific. Their current strategy will conceal the economic condition of a country, so as to make social poverty remain the same year after year in the world. Economists should be aware that poverty is far more harmful than unemployment. It is because people are afraid of poverty that they are afraid of unemployment. Therefore, economists should tell people how to eliminate poverty rather than unemployment. If economists fail to tell people how to eliminate poverty, they shouldn't call themselves economists. Sincerely, Juchang He SHENZHEN, P.R. CHINA E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Welcome to My Homepage http://sites.netscape.net/juchang/homepage.html __ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University [EMAIL PROTECTED] Chico, CA 95929 530-898-5321 fax 530-898-5901
upcoming talk
The following is a (very) rough draft of a talk I will give to the officers and national staff of the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America. Comments, suggestions, criticism, etc. are most welcome. Michael Yates The U.S. Labor Movement and the Role of the Left in It by Michael D. Yates I. We live in what might be called a paradoxical situation. That is, in terms of our labor movement there are both signs of hope and signs of despair, existing today together and without resolution. On the one hand, certain recent events give us hope that the labor movement is in the process of being rebuilt after many years of decline. Everyone points to the election of new leadership in the AFL-CIO. Sweeney, Trumka, and Chavez-Thompson certainly represent a break from the thoroughly compromised leadership of the past. They have championed many important changes in the Federation itself and in the member unions. Notably, they have encouraged member unions to make organization a priority, and a few unions have responded positively. They have also taken encouraged steps toward supporting the struggles of women, immigrant, and minority workers. Of great importance, at least symbolically, the have disbanded th notorious International Affairs Department and place a lot more emphasis on showing solidarity with workers in the rest of he world without respect to their political affiliations. Around the world, working people have awakened from their long slumber and begun to actively combat the attack upon working class living standards begun during the first years of the onset of economic crisis in the early 1970s and since developed into the set of corporate and government policies known as neoliberalism. French workers took to the streets in the hundreds of thousands to protest government attempts to curtail the benefits of public employees and social benefits for the general public. Despite being inconvenienced by the stoppage of public transportation, the French rallied around the public employees and forced the government to back down. In the face of political dictatorship and economic depression, militant South Korean workers have forged an independent labor movement to protect and advance the collective power of the workers. Canadian workers, including again thousands of public employees, have staged massive rallies and strikes in protest of neoliberal policies, in a few cases shutting down entire communities for a few days. Of course, we are all encouraged by the many actions in Seattle protesting the WTO, the very symbol of neoliberalism. In Seattle, people from the unions and numerous other social movements actually mobilized against global capitalism itself, expressing their disgust with its seamy but all too visible and universal underside: Widespread unemployment and economic insecurity, even in this booming United States which hides at least its black unemployed in prisons; massive overwork existing side-by-side with rising contingent work (part-time and the like); extreme inequality, recently diminished somewhat in the United States (though not in places like New York City) but growing worldwide to truly obscene proportions, with the world's 225 richest individuals, of whom 60 are Americans with total assets of $311 billion, have a combined wealth of over $1 trillion -- equal to the annual income of the poorest 47 percent of the entire world's population; alienated work, with some of the fastest-growing job categories being retail salespersons, cashiers, light and heavy truck drivers, general office clerks, personal care and home health aides, and teacher assistants; the privatization of public services and the destruction of the already inadequate social safety net; and the despoliation of the very environment in which working people live. The awareness of the Seattle protesters of these things led them to take bold and imaginative actions, and, most remarkably, these actions were successful beyond the dreams of the protesters. Let me conclude this short list of hopeful signs with one of great significance: the survival and growth of your own union. Hounded out of the CIO, raided by AFL and CIO unions, vilified and red-baited, weakened by downsizing and capital mobility in your bastions of strength, your union, the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America has not only survived, but survived with your rank-and-file, democratic, and anti-imperialistic underpinnings intact. I can say that, without a doubt, if every union in the United States were like the UE, the signs of despair I am about to discuss would not exist. The most ominous sign of despair is that despite a considerable economic boom, with the lowest unemployment rates in a generation, and despite all of the good things the AFL-CIO is doing, the U.S. labor movement cannot really be said to be in a period of
Desk Set
Made in 1957, "Desk Set" has the distinction of being the last comedy that Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy costarred in. It is also one of the first movies (and probably the last) that tackled the subject of computers and unemployment. Tracy plays Richard Sumner, an MIT graduate and computer expert who is consulting with a huge media corporation in order to introduce Emilac into their research department. That department is run by Bunny Watson, played by Hepburn. She and her staff--all women--would seem to be resistant to any kind of drastic technological innovations. First of all, the questions that are put to them over the phone each day would seem resistant to automation: "What is the tonnage of the planet Earth?"; "Who are Santa's reindeers?", etc. Second of all, their office evoked a time in the American corporate world where expressions of individuality were tolerated, if not encouraged. For instance, there is a vine in Hepburn's office that snakes wildly across the walls and ceilings, an obvious statement that its owner will not allow herself to be subjected to the right-angled efficiency of Sumner's automation schemes. Once the computer is finally introduced, Hepburn and her staff receive pink slips on the very first payday, courtesy of another Emilac that has been installed in the payroll department. In the climactic scene, when Sumner visits the research department to see how the new computer is working out, all hell is breaking loose. The research department is being deluged with phone calls that the new female and anal retentive operator of Emilac can not process accurately. When she feeds the machine a question as to whether the King of the Watusis drives a car, the machine can only spit out a movie review of "King Solomon's Mines", which included the keyword "Watusi." Sumner implores Hepburn to pitch in and help process the complex queries. Why should she, she asks, since she has just been fired. Fired? That's not possible, he replies, for the research staff was not only meant to be kept on, there were going to be new hires to handle the expected increase in volume, in light of the company's plans to merge with another corporate giant. Just as she shows him her pink slip, the CEO of the company storms into the research office and shows Sumner his own pink slip. It turns out that the payroll computer has screwed up and everybody in the company has been fired. This revelation is accompanied by the sight of Emilac spitting out punch cards across the room like confetti and the sound of agonized electronic burbling as the burden of the complex queries finally proves too much for its logic circuits. The movie ends happily with everybody retaining their job and Tracy and Hepburn (rather elderly at this point in their career) smooching. For those who have not had the pleasure of seeing a Tracy-Hepburn comedy, this may not be the most rewarding of their films. Generally they are cast to type, with Tracy as a gruff, homespun, working class guy, while Hepburn is more refined, gifted with an ironically dry sense of humor. Their films also tend to be observations on society, such as the remarkable 1941 "Woman of the Year". Written by Ring Lardner Jr., it is Hollywood's ideological contribution to the Stalin-Hitler Nonaggression Pact. In this film, Tracy's character believes that the United States should focus on its own problems, while Hepburn is a blueblood activist who is always running around to various meetings concerned with war in peace in some far-off hotspot. Based on a Broadway play by William Marchant, "Desk Set" prefigures concerns that last with us until this day. Will computers throw people out of work? What kind of progress will that be? As I have mentioned previously, the first attempt to come to grips with these sorts of questions in a Marxist framework was found in the pages of The American Socialist, a magazine that lasted from 1954 to 1959 and whose impact and legacy are much greater than would be suggested by its brief life span. In the December 1955 issue, we find a symposium on "What's Ahead for Labor" that tries to assess the impact of automation and mechanization on jobs. Kermit Eby, a professor at the University of Chicago who had begun contributing to the magazine that year, notes that 1.6 million fewer people are engaged in industrial production than at the high point. "These displaced persons, of course, push into the services and displace others. All the time, each is working for lower wages." Anticipating the neo-Luddite protests against automation that surfaced in the 1990s from people like Jeremy Rifkin and Kirkpatrick Sale, Eby defends a socialist perspective. If we can forgive the male chauvinism contained in his observations, there is still much that makes sense: "It is not my thesis that the machine does not liberate, nor do I argue for return to the primitive, as Gandhi did. However, I do insist that man ends are not defined in the volume of goods and
Ritualistic chantings, the stock market, and the right to privacy
I'm looking for readings for an undergraduate course about the link between the social market and social norms about acceptable business behavior in the USA. For instance, I'm interested in analyses of how the change between #1 and #2 occurred: 1) layoffs by businesses during good economic times in the USA where very difficult to justify in the "court of public opinion" (before 1980) 2) layoffs by businesses during good economic times can be socially justified by the ritualistic chanting by the business of "the stock market requires we boost profitability (in the 1990s). Of course social norms about layoffs are only one of many that have changed. Also, is there anything on current tensions about changing social norms for business behavior? For instance, social norms about business's invasion of individuals' right to privacy on the Internet are not a site of conflict. For instance, DoubleClick recently had to back off on their plans to merge various databases holding information about individuals not because it was illegal but because of "public outcry": this behavior violated social norms. However, I would bet that in 20 years this "public outcry" will have become a faint sound as social standards against invasions of privacy by businesses fade away. Is there anything written on this sort of process? Thanks for any help. Eric Nilsson
Re: Ritualistic chantings,the stock market,and the right to privacy
Not really what Eric asked for, but a delightful example of business ethics appeared in the London "Times" in February. The following letter to the Times quotes the essential part. (Stagecoach is a UK-based transnational transport firm with holdings in Sweden, Eastern Europe, Africa, China, New Zealand, and recently the US. It has a particularly unsavoury ethical and industrial record.) Bill Rosenberg Sir, In his report on Stagecoach, Fraser Nelson (Business February 17) quotes the chairman Brian Souter as saying: "If we were to apply the values of the Sermon on the Mount to our business, we would be rooked within six months. Ethics are not irrelevant, but some are incompatible with what we have to do because capitalism is based on greed. We call it a dichotomy, not hypocrisy." This must be a classic of its kind, and represents the ultimate rationalisation of what Cicero meant when he said, over 2,000 years ago, long before the Sermon on the Mount, that "It is the error of men who are not strictly upright to seize upon something that seems to be expedient and straight away to dissociate it from the question of moral right." Yours sincerely, G.S. Guest. Eric Nilsson wrote: I'm looking for readings for an undergraduate course about the link between the social market and social norms about acceptable business behavior in the USA. For instance, I'm interested in analyses of how the change between #1 and #2 occurred: 1) layoffs by businesses during good economic times in the USA where very difficult to justify in the "court of public opinion" (before 1980) 2) layoffs by businesses during good economic times can be socially justified by the ritualistic chanting by the business of "the stock market requires we boost profitability (in the 1990s). Of course social norms about layoffs are only one of many that have changed. Also, is there anything on current tensions about changing social norms for business behavior? For instance, social norms about business's invasion of individuals' right to privacy on the Internet are not a site of conflict. For instance, DoubleClick recently had to back off on their plans to merge various databases holding information about individuals not because it was illegal but because of "public outcry": this behavior violated social norms. However, I would bet that in 20 years this "public outcry" will have become a faint sound as social standards against invasions of privacy by businesses fade away. Is there anything written on this sort of process? Thanks for any help. Eric Nilsson
