Civility and Labor Relations

...The largest factor in the cost of both supplies and finished goods is the cost of labor...

...Davidson is describing the rational actions of civilized businessmen, and Galbraith is prescribing rational actions for a civilized society...

...A few quotations may dramatize the reasoning behind the Business Round-table way: "With increasing productiveness of labor, the power of sudden expansion also grows, because the technical conditions now admit of rapid transformation into additional means of production...

...Efficient planning...

...That we react with amazement to such accounts points to the fact that some things are better now than they were 150 years ago...

...In all such cases, there must be the possibility of employing masses of men suddenly without injury to other spheres...

...Slavery and peonage are of course illegal, but the industrial reserve army is a more convenient means to the same end...

...Toiling in a neighboring vineyard, John Kenneth Galbraith, professor emeritus of economics at Harvard, has argued in The Affluent Society that modern industry is so productive it does not have to coerce workers (as Victorian industry perhaps had to) by keeping them in squalor and threatening them with starvation...

...Why should life be intolerable to make things of small urgency...

...splendid examples of Victorian industrial architecture...

...He observes the money and effort modern business puts into advertising and selling, and concludes that the things produced must be little needed if finding buyers requires such expenditure...

...At the time those factories were built, Marx reports, Bristol was notorious for "the misery of its dwellings...

...As I noted recently in this space ("Voodoo on the Primary Trail," NL, April 30), many labor leaders were confident of the dawn of an era of good feelings...

...For convenience we may call it the Business Roundtable way...

...Investment in the means of production and the productiveness of labor means that the labor force increases more rapidly than the need for workers...

...It is, in truth, difficult to fault Marx on his analysis, and impossible to fault him on his passionate attack on the abuses he observed...

...And as a matter of fact it was possible, only a few years ago, to hope that such obvious logic and reasonableness were beginning to break through the age-old barriers of greed and fear...

...Given the nature of that vision, this is a blessing...

...Only the other day, as the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson unfolded under the supervision of Joseph Califano, it seemed that, likeso much of Marx, the industrial reserve army was specific to the 19th century and consequently destined to be discarded in the last half of the 20th...

...According to The Blue Guide: England, Bristol today "preserves...

...Industry still needs to plan ahead, as Davidson says, and planning still depends on the availability of adequate labor at foreseeable wages...

...The usefulness of this massive army that already exists lies in its very lack of organization...

...We had better get on with it...

...Taking them as a whole, the general movements of wages are regulated by the expansion and contraction of the unemployed...

...Nothing inevitably comes to pass, for there is nothing either good or bad but doing makes it so...

...That some things are better now points to the fact that Marx was mistaken in thinking his dialectics of materialism would inevitably bring his apocalyptic vision to pass...

...And besides the 8 million in the domestic divisions, there are uncounted millions in the Orient and in the Third World generally...

...Marx recognized that, too...

...There is, indeed, another way of looking at the economy that is as up-to-date as neoconservatism or neoliberalism, and is now generally accepted in the boardrooms of our great corporations...

...The productiveness of labor increases the supply of labor...

...As a result, the world-wide industrial reserve army can be expected to be mobilized to exert a steady downward pressure on wages and working conditions . If wages are falling, and potential scabs are plentiful, business has a greatly reduced incentive to contract for "regular employment and fair treatment for labor over time...

...Davidson is a civilized as well as a rational man...

...Under these circumstances, the relation of the modern corporation to the people it comprises—their chance for dignity, individuality and full development of personality—may be at least as important as its efficiency...

...To be sure of adequate materials at acceptable prices, manufacturers enter into contracts with their suppliers for future delivery...

...But the Business Roundtable way concludes from these observations that the smart thing to do is to stabilize labor costs at the minimum, and that a whiff of unemployment is a mighty convincing stabilizer...

...Whether we move ahead into the rational and civilized world described by Davidson and Gal-braith, or fall back into the brutal and degrading world described by Marx and complacently accepted by the Business Roundtable—whichever we do, it will be our doing...

...Its deliberate exploitation has so changed labor relations that rational analyses like Davidson's of the need for civilized labor contracts are being brushed aside as irritatingly idealistic...

...Industry progressively replaces skilled laborers by less skilled, mature by immature, male by female...

...But instead we have been discarding the Great Society, while the industrial reserve army is still with us, 8 million strong...

...Consequently he sees a stable labor market as one in which labor is fairly paid and decently treated...

...But as Marx said, and the Business Roundtable agrees, productivity is a euphemism for employing less skilled and less well-paid labor...

...There is no doubt that the recent depression and the so-called recovery, with 8 million men and women still unemployed, have been deliberately stage-managed accordingly...

...In both cases, he is explaining that industrial production takes time, requiring industry to plan for weeks, months or even years ahead...

...What is done—or not done—is our doing...

...And this one chapter of Capital has 72 pages of similar details...

...We are not, however, beneficiaries of any law guaranteeing that either businessmen or their society will be rational or civilized...

...where in one neighborhood there were 223 houses sheltering 1,450 inhabitants, but with only 435 beds (many of them merely "an armful of shavings") and 36 privies, or one for every 40 people...

...The original versions can be found in Chapter XXV—"The General Law of Capital Accumulation"—where Marx develops his notion that what he cleverly calls the industrial reserve army is necessary to the capitalist system...

...in a world where slavery and peonage are illegal," he says, "requires contractual commitments for...

...Overwork of employed labor swells the ranks of the unemployed, while the latter, by their competition with the employed, force them to submit to harder work and lower wages...

...As a military commander uses a reserve army to exploit sudden openings or reinforce sudden weaknesses, so, Marx says, capitalists use the industrial army of the unemployed...

...regular (non-casual) employment and fair treatment for labor over time...

...The Dismal Science CIVILITY AND LABOR RELATIONS BY GEORGE P. BROCKWAY In two mind-opening books on money (Money and the Real World and International Money and the Real World) Paul Davidson, professor of economics at Rutgers University, has occasion to use the phrase "in a world where slavery and peonage are illegal...

...From this "it follows," he explains, "that the efficiency of the process by which they are produced ceases to be an overriding consideration...

...We read with horror of Bradford, a Yorkshire worsted-mill city, where as many as 18 people—for the most part regularly employed workers—lived crowded into a single room...

...The foregoing passages, which accurately enough represent the thinking of the Business Roundtable, are of course somewhat edited and sanitized quotations from Capital by Karl Marx...

...therefore, Davidson argues, stable labor contracts are in the interest of modern industry...

...This starts, as do Davidson and Galbraith, with the observations that labor is the largest single cost of production, and that we don't need all the labor available to us in order to maintain ourselves in the style to which we have become accustomed...

...Evidently the unions, in seeking to make life tolerable on the job, were being governed by a sound instinct...

...This proposition will surely commend itself to other civilized and rational individuals...