LABOR'S "VATICAN II": IN SEARCH OF NEW GOALS, NEW METHODS
Tyler, Gus
Without fanfare, in the recession summer of 1982, the Executive Council of the AFL-CIO appointed a special committee to "review and evaluate changes that are taking place in America in the labor...
...Taxpayer...
...First, because during the 1970s and 1980s the rate of interest was high...
...Some have tried multi-union bargaining...
...Unemployment in the future will be increasingly structural, not arising simply from an imbalance between production and consumption but from the displacement of persons by robots...
...In 1596, the City of Danzig hired an assassin to kill the man who invented a machine to save labor on a ribbon loom...
...Without income redistribution, the system would overtax the state...
...A country like the United States could probably do this on its own...
...What drove the value of the dollar was not trade but capital flows...
...Indeed, in the report there is a special appendix (the only item with an appendix) entitled "Merger Guidelines...
...The most dramatic such change has been the shift 495 from a predominantly goods-producing economy (where unions were strong) to a predominantly service economy (where unions traditionally were weak...
...These suggestions are not edicts...
...By humanization of social policy I mean that the economy should serve the people—and not vice versa...
...You have nothing to lose but your pains and a world to gain...
...The trade deficit was, as an order of magnitude, just about equal to the federal deficit...
...They are all somewhat novel, presented as an agenda for discussion rather than as directions for action...
...But of this there can be no doubt: American unions are desperately in search of new goals and new methods...
...The same technological magic that spawns the "robot" is giving us a world economy in which giant multinational multiproduct corporations need not listen to the plaints of their employees...
...Or consider this: a thousand workers who were members of the steel workers' unions because they were employed in factories making steel are suddenly unemployed—not because of imported steel or even because their corporation opted to move production to another country, but because steel has been replaced by glass, ceramics, plastics, paper, or eeg-wags (gee-gaws spelled backwards...
...What the little corporation mentioned in the frightening fantasy above could do to a union, global corporations could do to nations...
...A new orthodoxy is the precise opposite of the proper approach," notes the report...
...America ran the greatest deficits any nation has ever run and its currency continued to climb...
...To working people, employment—a useful life—is the sine qua non of their existence...
...The essence of the committee's first report in August 1983, entitled "The Future of Work," was the newly developing role of the robot— although it was not stated that way...
...But however working people may feel about a society that carries an ever bigger part of the nation on the dole, the dole per se is bad...
...How, then, does one construct a society in which all those who wish to and can work do work...
...they are outside the mainstream...
...Until now, the pressure of organized labor has resulted in a measure of distributive justice to allow capitalism to balance demand with supply...
...The question is whether there will be, in the future, any force 499 strong enough to play the role that organized labor has played in the past...
...Minimum wage laws, unemployment insurance, social security, housing supplements, and family support were additional ways in which working people were able to lift themselves out of the iron cage...
...The same technology, however, can also pulverize, atomize, prostrate the "working class...
...Troubled Times AUGUST 1982: The economy was in bad shape: the jobless rate was double-digit, real wages for workers were falling, the land was strewn with bankruptcies...
...The Pace of Change WILL LABOR BE ABLE TO PLAY AN EFFECTIVE role in creating an economy that will serve people...
...The employer refuses to go along...
...Ends as well as means, objectives as well as methods, should be reevaluated...
...Since a certain level of unemployment is deemed necessary for the proper functioning of our society, economists no longer speak of a "full employment" society since, by definition, it will induce the inflationary evil...
...A realistic scenario—an agenda for the years from now until the year 2000—falls into two time segments: the near and the distant future...
...And, in doing so, these apologists will be confirming the conclusion of the committee that we are living in a "labor surplus society," that—may I add—is becoming ever more so, not only in the U.S...
...Historically, it has been the way that great and overly rich empires, with income from their external vassals, bought off riots and revolutions at home...
...In our time, such unabashed truculence and righteousness would not be acceptable...
...But if such cuts do not stimulate the economy—in part for reasons already noted—then the government ends up with greater deficits, with an everrising portion of the federal income going to service debts, with rising interest rates, with an overvalued dollar, with falling exports and rising imports, with greater unemployment—in sum, with even more of a "labor surplus society...
...The third Keynesian measure is to reduce taxes to spur buying and investing...
...they are not incremental, they are gross...
...The bad news is that labor does not have the answers to two prime questions: First, what social policies can provide employment to people in a globalized and robotized economy...
...To unions, the term "welfare state" refers to a society that seeks, as the Preamble to the Constitution suggests, to "promote the general welfare" and not to a nation where there is a large and growing portion of the population "on welfare...
...Through his work, the laborer loses his identity...
...On a global scale, there are changes under way that are profound, puzzling, and—in some cases at the moment—imponderable...
...And even a cursory look at past times of adversity would reveal a pattern, the circumstances when unions traditionally have lost ground: 1. When the business cycle turns down, labor is weakened...
...Is this really the future...
...Confronted with this frightening fact, the committee lists its traditional program to cope with unemployment, with proposals ranging from enforcement of the Humphrey-Hawkins Act to a "rational industrial policy...
...Organizing efforts were increasingly fruitless...
...Their ideas are not without merit in the abstract, but difficult to implement in the concrete...
...collective bargaining alone cannot do the big job...
...A society's commitment to care for its unfortunate is what makes a collection of human animals a civilized citizenry...
...But there is another reason why mergers are desirable as well as necessary...
...So the thing to do is to wait for "recovery," or better, to work for national policies to stimulate recovery...
...But what happens from now on...
...While the factory fostered spiritual alienation, it also gave birth to a sense of economic, political, social, and ideological solidarity that—as an active element in a capitalist world—tamed, civilized, modified, and ultimately rescued capitalism from its own suicidal compulsions...
...Put otherwise, the economy has undergone profound changes technologically, geographically, and spiritually...
...Whether the Marxist millennium—the collective commonwealth—was a misreading or not, there can be no denying that capitalism did produce labor movements in every country in the world, and that these labor movements have profoundly affected economic, political, and social relations across the globe...
...Inevitable Adjustments IT IS IN THIS OPEN SPIRIT THAT THE REPORT makes a series of suggestions on organizing, bargaining, internal democratization, and getting the union message out to the public...
...For unions, this means that their potential membership will be dispossessed by electronic gadgets, that governments will be less effective instruments for taming corporate power, and that those who are the working force will be more difficult to compose into an effective social force...
...By classical theory, of course, the U.S...
...The unions were in retreat...
...First that the work he performs is extraneous to the worker, that is, it is not personal to him, is not part of his nature...
...Although NAIRU is one of those givens among policymakers, no economist has even tried to show why NAIRU has risen from 4 percent to 7 percent...
...Should such a worldwide movement of nations in some not too distant future search for a rallying cry, it might try: "Nations of the world unite...
...In 1844, several years before he and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto, Marx noted "The Alienation of Labor" in an essay by that name...
...unionism is as profound as that of Vatican II on the Catholic Church...
...the other 100 are union members...
...If new breeds of immigrants enter the labor force, give them time (and some help) and they will ultimately organize—as did the Irish, Jews, Italians, blacks, Hispanics...
...A global corporation can say to its employees: here are our terms, take them or else...
...The notion of "alienation" at work has been stirred by automation, cybernation, and Charlie Chaplin...
...That old phrase, "industrial democracy," has become an emotional entity at a time when it seems to have lost much of its ideology...
...The employer moves his robots to Portugal...
...Turning to this well-established household remedy would have been the natural thing to do...
...But, as Marx would reason just a few years later in the Manifesto, workers would rediscover their identity as part of a collective in the camaraderie of the work site where they would be compelled to unite...
...The suggestion that seems to get the most attention is the desirability of merger among unions...
...Multinational corporations scour the planet to find out where best to allocate their resources to produce most cheaply, to pay the least taxes, to maximize after-tax returns...
...The public image of unions was unflattering...
...1=1 504...
...For such people, unions were a necessity—the way in which workers could help to define the future—income, work rules, working conditions, leisure, and the securities expressed in fringes...
...But its coming is highly likely and perhaps inevitable...
...Bad times for business have historically been bad times for unions...
...In this spirit, "back to basics" is less a return to some program than a return to the grass roots...
...Since then, every "recovery" has been less of a recovery...
...Budget-badgered governments at all levels are more likely to fire than to hire more employees...
...In the slow growth years of the 1970s and in the real recession years of the early 1980s, unions could expect to suffer...
...Labor's fear is real despite its experience with automation that, contrary to many expectations, did not cause massive unemployment during the 1950s and 1960s...
...Consider a hypothetical circumstance: a company employs 1,000 workers— under union contract...
...A "Labor Surplus Society" LABOR FEARS WHAT THE REPORT calls a "labor surplus society," a fear that seems to be confirmed by trends in unemployment since 1969...
...This allegedly necessary level has been rising since 1970...
...And unless that bothersome fact is recognized, no program to cope with domestic economies is "realistic...
...If an administration is hostile, the thing to do is get out the vote, to reward friends and punish enemies...
...Back then, it was about 4 percent...
...All this would have been inconceivable in 498 the time of Smith and Ricardo, when it was assumed that capital would rarely cross material boundaries...
...History's prescription for the traditional infirmities is to apply the tincture of time—with patience, persistence, and prayer...
...Unorganized workers fear joining a union when unemployment is widespread...
...Not all Luddites act outside the law...
...Part of that program calls for a "realistic trade policy," a euphemism for another euphemism called "fair trade," as distinguished from "free trade...
...The robotized, globalized, atomized society we have under consideration is not with us— not yet...
...They would start buying from us because our goods would be cheap to them, and all would right itself—as Dr...
...The robots run twenty-four hours a day and never strike...
...But this notion is not new...
...Traditionally, unions have been very suspicious of arrangements that come under the rubric of "quality-of-worklife" programs...
...American labor is concerned—as are unions in other countries—for the very obvious reason that it is their very own life that is involved...
...Companies historically identified with a product are no longer producing that product or have taken on a protean existence as they turn out dozens or hundreds of different lines...
...In part, the merger movement is under way because several national unions do not have enough members to justify independent existence or, more pragmatically, to carry the overhead...
...their demand for the buck boosted the price...
...If jobs go South, the unions go South...
...Yet today, the movement of capital across national boundaries is many, many times greater than the movement of goods...
...The old premises of unionism—people with jobs, governments with power to regulate their domestic economies, and individuals with definable "careers"— will be shaken, if not shattered...
...But in the first quarter of the new year, the pace came to a near standstill at 1.3 percent growth...
...In a truly full employment economy there would be a surplus...
...This bit of arcanity, stated simply, decrees that there must be a certain level of unemployment to ward off inflation...
...These robots are set up for flexible manufacture...
...At some point, we could not buy from them because their goods would be too expensive...
...If it is permissible to view much of economics as pure apologia, then it would not be beyond concluding that what some economists do is watch the graphs, note the unemployment rate when the media announce "recovery," and then ordain that the 497 jobless rate at that happy moment is irreducible...
...Indeed, they dare not listen, lest their competitors beat them in the marketplace or pirates drive them from control of their own corporations...
...Labor's Agenda Endangered LABOR'S AGENDA INCLUDES A NATION (a world) where people have jobs—without which life is economically endangered and spiritually tortured...
...Robots in the factory, word processors in the office, scanners at the checkout counter, pushbutton banking, computers in the home, satellites in the sky," the report notes, "remind the nation of the pervasive impact of advancing technology...
...When business goes conglomerate, so must unions...
...They can be moved easily and swiftly...
...they have lower expectations...
...Should any country put a halt to the march of the "robot," it would easily be invaded by the monster as it spewed out its goods in another land whose hunger or ambition made it less sensitive to the macro perils of the mini chip...
...The factors of production are portable: capital, technology, raw materials, and managerial know-how...
...Changing Problems THE 1980s ARE NOT THE 1930s...
...The work force may be scattered and strewn, many workers never leaving their homes if they so choose, many of them paying only casual visits to the workplace...
...In these disquieting days, labor turned to reflection, establishing a committee to do what ceremonial committees usually do not do—to think painfully...
...The Keynesian cure that was effective for nations at a time when, as in the case of the U.S., overseas trade was a minuscule portion of Gross National Product was no longer able to work its magic with nations where trade was one-quarter of their total business...
...They have the power to refuse companies the right to import or export capital, to locate or relocate facilities, to employ labor, to tap raw materials...
...Alienation" and the Worker THE ELIMINATION OF A COUNTERFORCE to capitalist "greed" is more of a possibility today than it has ever been—thanks to the robot and to the globalization of the economy...
...By the early 1980s, workers in the service economy made up 70 percent of the work force...
...He is ready to double the pay of the 100 employees he is retaining...
...If the economy becomes our end and people become our means to satisfy that end, then we will suicidally have reversed ends and means...
...They could dictate both economic and political policies to governments under the threat of removing capital, technology, employment, and sources of revenue from any country that did not do the bidding of the corporate overlords...
...The fourth quarter showed some quickening to 4 percent growth and was hailed as a forerunner of steady and solid growth in 1985...
...The 1980s are not the 1930s in at least three crucial ways...
...they are viewed with suspicion if not distaste, and they view others with diffidence and distrust...
...Pangloss might have told them from the beginning...
...If the government was not to be called upon too often to borrow to save the system, it was necessary to rectify the inherently irrational and inequitable distribution of income under capitalism...
...In the first quarter, the stimulant worked as the economy leaped forward at the brisk pace of 10.4 percent...
...Even those who have a fixed job at a fixed place are not likely to stay there for any great portion of a lifetime...
...A more just distribution was not only desirable for ethical reasons but was necessary for economic reasons...
...What happened...
...While companies move from turf to turf or over many different turfs, unions remain stuck in their jurisdiction...
...unions hesitate to press their demands when firms are infirm...
...The purpose will have been lost and the process will have perverted the purpose...
...Like it or not, the modern economy is international...
...The union solution is to cut work time so that all 1,000 will have jobs...
...Add the high number of transients and part-timers in such an economy— indeed, in our present economy...
...Today, workers want more: "to have a say in the 'how, why, and wherefore' of their work...
...Technology can be transmitted electronically in words and diagrams and codes in a matter of moments...
...The action—for the moment—is to engage in one big pow-wow, a massive discussion about what is to be done...
...In the 1980s, American unions were hit simultaneously by five damaging conditions: recession, governmental animus, the shifts from North to South and from goods to services, the influx of about a million newcomers (legal and illegal) per year...
...Economically, politically, psychologically, and ethically, the dole is bad...
...But even at an earlier time, the Keynesian trio had only limited value—as Keynes himself noted in The General Theory...
...That positive force can be eliminated or, certainly, much lessened by modern technology...
...Because workers displaced by automation from farm and factory could find employment in the service sector, the percentage of unemployment in the total society did not rise...
...should automatically benefit from a reversal of the process, turning deficits into surpluses, because of certain laws of equilibrium held in balance by an invisible hand...
...The "robot" can give us the "labor surplus society...
...New materials, new forms of transportation, new ways of communicating, new ways of building —all of these make entire careers obsolete...
...Who would have suspected that this posse, with the academicsounding name of the Committee on the Evolution of Work, would be the beginning of American labor's Vatican II...
...Other invisible workers are taking orders for products seen on video screens...
...Solutions that were valid fifty years ago are not valid—or equally valid—today, because, in no small measure, the problems have changed...
...A second reading of history might have eased labor's anxieties, for each of these traditional causes of union enervation seemed to contain a self-correcting potential, the seeds of its own resurrection...
...Viewed historically, it is inevitable that there will be macro adjustments in union structure...
...The traditional Keynesian formulas will no longer work in a world where domestic economies are inescapably affected by and dependent on global factors...
...2. Unions find life difficult when a national administration is hostile...
...it worked well for some standardized operations on farms and in factories but was not particularly adept in stores, offices, banks, information processing, or designing...
...The one sentence in the committee's report that caught the most public attention was a blunt admission: "Unions find themselves be502 hind the pace of change...
...From his "bully pulpit" an unfriendly president can poison the atmosphere for unions in the same way that Franklin Roosevelt breathed new life into organized labor...
...they are pleased to have any job...
...To overcome this, some unions have diversified...
...Such workers were prepared to make sacrifices today—even a long strike and major loss of income—to win a better future...
...They are reluctant...
...Since man was made to work, by God's edict after The Fall, anyone who contravened that commandment was a sinner against the Lord and properly condemned to die...
...This time the grand drama will be replayed on a global stage...
...As in the case of Vatican II, the labor movement will—like the church—continue its commitment to its historic principle, without which its soul is lost...
...It was this line in the second report, entitled, "The Changing Situation of Workers and Their Unions," issued in February 1985, that made the headlines and set the heads of labor in motion...
...feels miserable rather than content, cannot freely develop his physical and mental powers, but instead becomes physically exhausted and mentally debased...
...But we do have our legal Luddites who would like to halt or at least brake the onrush of technology...
...If the economy moves from goods to services, the unions merely have to move—as they have done quite impressively—from goods to services...
...In the 1930s, government expenditures for New Deal reconstruction projects went to American residents who, in turn, spent the money to buy things and services from American residents who, in turn, did the same thing...
...But again, as in the case of the church, its soul-searching is likely to unleash forces of unpredictable directions and proportions...
...It was because the American dollar was in demand...
...The reason for the fear is that the robot and the automaton may be kin but they are not the same...
...second, the economy is global...
...But viewed more conceptually and comprehensively, our total society ought to be worried because, in the absence of a presence pushing for distributive justice, we can indeed expect what Marx predicted: an immiserization of the masses that may not end up with socialism but with bloody anarchy...
...Technology is displacing workers and overturning traditional work patterns," says the report...
...The Need for Unions IN THE PAST, MOST WORKERS WERE ATTACHED IO an employer or, at least, to an industry or occupation...
...Two ready answers come to mind: Luddism (antitechnology violence) and the dole...
...Increasingly, the National Labor Relations Act, under the malevolent administration and retrogressive reinterpretation of board and courts, has become—in the eyes of labor—a National Anti-Labor Act...
...But we are not there yet...
...economy are under way...
...Every individual endeavors to employ his capital as near home as he can," noted Smith...
...therefore he does not fulfill himself at work, but actually denies himself...
...When corporations and industries went 503 national, unions went national...
...Still another equally isolated being is keeping the books for a bank where clients are making their daily deposits and withdrawals...
...Since Americans would be demanding goods made overseas, our demand would boost the value of overseas currencies...
...Second, because the U.S...
...Who's the boss...
...A Global Setting CONSIDER WHAT HAPPENS to the simple Keynesian device to stimulate the economy through government expenditures when applied in the current global setting...
...There were several such previous moments...
...The work site would become a community that, in due time, would replace the oppressive domination of that alien being, the capitalist...
...When business was local, unions were local...
...hungry scabs walk through picket lines...
...The opening sentence stated plainly: "Massive changes in the structure of the U.S...
...Ricardo insisted that it would be most imprudent for a merchant to allow his capital to operate out of his sight for any length of time...
...What is an appropriate way to reevaluate...
...But, being good loyal unionists who love their brothers, they do go on strike...
...Workers are whirling specks on huge gears...
...In the following "recovery" (1979) the jobless rate was not back to the original 3.4 or even the subsequent 4.8 but stood at 5.8...
...Report recommendations went beyond urging unions to do what they had always done but to do it better...
...The press, in general, featured the line because, as in the case of Vatican II, a large, established, seemingly rigid organization was issuing a top-down call to its members to think anew...
...First, the robot is here...
...But in the real world of the 1980s—not the Adam Smithian world of the 1780s—things do not necessarily behave as they should...
...The newcomers are fearful...
...Several major unions have developed such [quality-of-worklife] programs and report a positive membership response," notes the committee, that "the labor movement should seek to accelerate their development...
...How does one organize such a protean, elusive, atomized "working class," many of whom—operating out of their own homes—will be legally listed as "independent contractors...
...As I see it—this thought is quite personal and highly tentative—the titanic struggle in the last decade of this century or the first decade of the next will be between megamultinational corporations and sovereign states —not unlike the historical conflict between church and state in the past...
...A return, preferably a handsome return, on investment is...
...now (1985) it is about 7 percent...
...Without fanfare, in the recession summer of 1982, the Executive Council of the AFL-CIO appointed a special committee to "review and evaluate changes that are taking place in America in the labor force, occupations, industries, and technology...
...it is bad for the recipients who are doomed to an empty life of dependence...
...4. Unions are likewise shaken when economic centers move from one part of the country (with a union heritage) to another part (without such a tradition...
...It may take several more years to judge how valuable the initiative of the committee really was...
...In recent years, mountains of manuscripts have described this dehumanization of the person as a process where workers must move to the tempo of the machine, define their chores by the machine, and—now—learn to think like the machine...
...Such schemes were viewed as gimmicks to lure employees away from unions, a view that is now changing...
...Should this fantasy ever become fact, what can nations do...
...Meanwhile, the process is under way—a process that by its generation of new attitudes and acts will change the character of American labor—and, perhaps, of the total society...
...Nineteen eighty-two was, of course, not the first time that the American labor movement found itself on the decline...
...But if nations, large and small, take collective action to defend their sovereignty against the alien dictator, then the world will witness the reenactment of an earlier drama when governments of "industrial democracies" evolved policies to civilize and "socialize" their domestic capitalisms...
...After two years of Nixon, the jobless rate had risen to 5.8...
...Whether this urge to be a "somebody" instead of just a "something" is a revolt against the "dehumanization" of the workplace, or whether it is an expression of a new self-image perceived by this generation, the fact is that working people increasingly do wish to have a greater say over what happens to them on the job...
...Investors holding marks, francs, pounds, or lire wanted to own dollars...
...This plank is but one-half a point in an eleven-point program, but it may be expected that in the coming years labor—and the nation —will have to give more and more attention to the international aspects of our economy...
...And if they do not form unions as a countervailing power to their employers, what force will there be to win a more equitable and rational distribution of income to keep the inverted pyramid of such an unbalanced society from collapsing...
...instead they substitute the phrase "high employment" society— a change that implies a required level of unemployment...
...What then do we mean by the alienation of labor...
...But, in the second quarter, the pace slowed to 8.5...
...The persons who can identify themselves as steel workers, linotypists, designers, or individuals dedicated to any given occupation or line become fewer as the economy finds itself in constant flux...
...Enemies of labor read this to mean that unions were now obsolete...
...For unions, the basic is the worker—his or her needs, wants, desires, hopes, and dreams...
...By 1983, we were in recession again with a jobless rate of 9.5...
...The term "dole" does not refer to assistances extended to persons who are physically, mentally, or otherwise in personal distress...
...This flat statement is timely, coming at a moment when many, if not most, Americans identify "liberalism" with the dole—in whatever form...
...Employment is not their bottom line...
...The so-called "iron law of wages"—a virtual given for Adam Smith and Karl Marx—was repealed by the struggles of unions...
...They do this even when they may not, as patriotic persons, want to do it, for the alternative is to be destroyed by a competitor who has no such qualms...
...The union asks these 100 to strike...
...Automation provided muscle but not brain...
...But how much of a stimulus will such easier credit be if consumers purchase goods made in other countries...
...It took two and a half years for the public— and for the unions—to find out where this committee was headed...
...Bluntly, it states: "We do not accept the dole as a realistic or desirable alternative to gainful employment in productive jobs...
...Numerically they had fallen from representing 45 percent of the eligibles in 1954 to about 30 percent in 1982...
...My guess—perhaps, my unthinking wish— is that they will do what unions have been doing in the past: they will unite...
...The various suggestions of the report are all ways to get labor thinking about how to minimize its losses and maximize its potential, to enable unions to be a reasonably effective voice in the shaping of national economic policies...
...A textbook example is the shift from the Snowbelt to the Sunbelt...
...3. Unions are in trouble when the national economic mix changes, as unionized sectors wane and as unorganized sectors wax...
...In the recovery of 1984-85, unemployment fell to 7.2...
...As Raymond T. Dalio, president of Bridgewater Associates, an economic consulting firm, sees it —according to the New York Times of April 28, 1985—"if the Fed eases credit to spur the economy, it may have limited impacts...
...The work site—as we have come to know it—may no longer be a work site...
...Unions and nations are flat-footed losers in a contest with these fleet-footed financial folk...
...Second, what can labor do right now to conserve or compose the necessary strength to influence future policies...
...The "sovereignties" could lose their sovereignty...
...There, in an exaggerated nutshell, is the problem of a union on a robotized planet...
...in the third quarter to 1.6...
...It could do it better with the help of a few natural allies...
...third, the labor force is elusive...
...We must expand our notions of what it is that workers can do through their unions," says the report...
...Nor can any economist explain why inflation will inevitably follow if the unemployment rate falls to 2 percent, or 1 percent, or zero...
...But it was, and the potential impact on U.S...
...A second Keynesian measure for stimulating the economy is to have the central bank—the Federal Reserve Board in the United States— loosen the money supply...
...Some hundred years ago, when the American Federation of Labor was founded, those animal impulses and human aspirations found expression in the ancient trinity of "wages, hours, and working conditions...
...This recommendation, as well as others, however, are all issued with a caveat...
...The whole world could just be a colony ruled by corporations headquartered in the Cayman Islands, Crete, or the Isle of Man...
...The poor are too poor to pay taxes and the rich too smart to pay taxes, so the working stiffs—in the final analysis—are Mr...
...and Ms...
...What happened was that government stimulants were being poured into a leaky bucket...
...But an economy so structured that it turns to a dole to "take care of" an ever-growing horde of jobless in a "labor surplus society" is doomed...
...By 1975, we were in deep recession with a jobless rate of 8.3...
...friends of labor read this to mean that unions would now become more relevant than ever...
...But if workers do not see themselves attached to anything for any length of time, and if, in addition, there are few if any opportunities for emplcyees to meet, why and how would they form a union...
...Instead the AFL-CIO chose the hard path, really two paths—one leading outward and the other inward—and with reason...
...It becomes economically impossible when the burden gets too heavy...
...5. Finally, unions are discomfited by any heavy influx of immigrants...
...To do so the forty-hour work week will have to be cut to the four-hour work week, or something like that, without a reduction in weekly pay...
...In the distant future, we will be confronted with a social order fraught with the problems of robotization, globalization, and atomization...
...They can produce a variety of products since, upon instruction, they can drop some tools and pick up other ones...
...Givebacks were the order of the day...
...Since foreign markets would not be buying our wares, the value of our currency would fall...
...Others have merged...
...Humanizing" is not used here as an act of noblesse oblige, compassion, or charity...
...The "alienation" of labor was the loss of identity by workers as "spiritual" (a word that Marx would have abhorred) beings...
...it could handle big lots but not small ones...
...Graphs of the economy and of union power are almost parallel lines...
...In the twentieth century, the phrase "comparative advantage" has lost just about all its meaning, if viewed in terms of the "natural attributes" of a nation...
...The differences that have developed over a half century are not quantitative alone, they are qualitative...
...Labor's Power A DEGREE OF SUCH REDISTRIBUTION has taken place in the capitalist world because of the economic and political presence and power of organized labor...
...And in the interim, as we slip toward such a new world, what shall labor do so that it can be an effective voice, both economically and politically, in humanizing the necessary changes...
...Consumers may borrow more money, but—with the dollar still strong—spend more on imports...
...The giants who grew horizontally have gone vertical and conglomerate...
...These smart little inorganic imps respond quickly and cleverly to instructions that are fed into the "factory" from a 500 terminal operated by a woman in another county or another country...
...Is there anything that can be done to bring order to a future economy in which a large portion of the population, possibly a majority, will be without work or will be suffering with work in isolation in good times, and in which "good times" will be brief and repeatedly disrupted by massive economic crises and social anarchy...
...In the ingenious ways of some more imaginative economists, this frightening trend, an ever larger portion of the population without jobs, has been rationalized into a virtue—or at least a necessary evil...
...The trio of Keynesian cures was prescribed for domestic economies that were, molt or less, self-contained...
...The answer: back to basics...
...Extend the paradigm: in some other part of the world, another person is operating a telephone "central" from home, a job requiring not much more skill than that of the old-fashioned telephone "operator...
...Indeed, capital—whether in the form of an industrial producer or in liquid form—can play the same game with governments: do as we say —or else...
...After all, who supports the people on the dole if not working people...
...Industries and occupations are changing...
...Managers can be transported physically to the other side of the globe within twenty-four hours...
...Within the unions, changes are also under way—sly, subtle, unintentional, and insinuating changes —that are making unions much different from what they set out to be or what they presently believe themselves to be...
...The rationale goes by the name of NAIRU, an acronym for Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment...
...By "technology" is meant: the new microtechnology with its information communications potential [that] is bringing 496 change which is perhaps more revolutionary than the industrial revolution brought by the steam engine in the nineteenth century and the transportation revolution brought by the internal combustion engine earlier in the twentieth century...
...The impact of each dollar spent by Uncle Sam was multiplied as the dollar moved through the system...
...Why...
...NAIRU is the ritualized apologia for a society that may soon announce that its economy is in a state of "recovery" although the unemployment rate is double-digit...
...When Lyndon Johnson left office (1969) the unemployment rate was 3.4 percent...
...The federal government poured money out to its residents who, in turn, bought items made overseas...
...Above all else, they have the power to close their markets—to both goods and services emanating from hostile exploiters...
...By 1973, after the application of a few stimulants, the jobless rate was cut back— not to the original 3.4, but to 4.8 (unemployment was rising in good times...
...In 1984, the federal government ran a deficit of some $200 billion—a spur that should have driven the economy forward at a breakneck pace...
...For the owners of the economy this is not an important question...
...The other alternative—the dole—is rejected forthrightly by the Committee on the Evolution of Work in its first report...
...Even public employment—about one-third of the service sector—is not likely to rush to the rescue...
...The company can always relocate, labor cannot...
...Having such input, however, does not mean that labor and labor alone will be able to grapple with the metamacro challenge of a robotized globe...
...For such people, the phrase "wel501 fare state" refers to a society in which many people are "on welfare...
...but in the world...
...Thus when Washington economists speak of a "structural deficit," they mean a budget deficit in a "high employment economy," which—at the time of this writing—is about 7 percent unemployment, a level that costs the federal treasury about $245 billion a year in lost income and associated expenditures...
...The idea is for the leadership to put its ear to the ground: to talk less and to listen more, to be less oral and more aural, to find out how workers feel and think and act—whether unionized or nonunion...
...A merger offers the advantages of large-scale economies...
...If unions go down when the "cycle" goes down, then unions will go up when the "cycle" turns up...
...Consider this possibility: two hundred machines are packed tightly into an underground box where there is no light, no space for humans, no need for steady ventilation...
...At expiration, the company introduces robots and discharges 900 workers...
...While the remedies are not totally invalid for countries today, they have lost much of their ealier potency...
...In sum, because the hard-core unemployment rate has been rising steadily for a decade and a half, what would have been called a deep recession (almost a depression) in the early 1970s is now called "recovery...
...Billions of dollars can be moved from one nation to another in a few seconds with a few taps on the keys of a terminal...
...Capitalism would bring workers together under one roof where they would experience a common life, express common complaints, develop common aspirations, organize common voices in the form of unions and political parties...
...The political atmosphere—for unions—was hostile: the first union president ever to become president of the United States was making a religion of his apostasy by appointing people to the Labor Department, the National Labor Relations Board, and the federal courts, who would reverse the labormanagement trends of half a century...
...But when the "chip" invades the service sector, then where shall the displaced go...
...The macro solutions will have to be political...
...was a political safehaven— as contrasted with the rest of the world...
...The key word to remember is "structure...
...The good news is that labor knows what it doesn't know and, in this act of wisdom, has undertaken an inquiry into its necessary, proper, and feasible role in the coming decades...
...Capital, Labor, Mobility THIS INTERNATIONALIZATION OF THE ECONOMY gives capital an almost unbeatable advantage over labor: the former is mobile, the latter is not...
Vol. 33 • September 1986 • No. 4
