-----Original Message-----
From: Rakesh Bhandari <bhandari at phoenix.Princeton.EDU>
To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>
>Workers no longer alienate their labor power only; they must also
>re-alienate their brains upon switching employers to avoid legal
>harrasment.
>Research and development is fully socialized; the development of ever
>greater productive forces requires public subsidization of both science and
>technology and the participation of talent the world over. We then allow
>new knowlege to be commercialized and turned to private profit for
>companies and nations.
>The gains of new knowledge are thus dissipated in the
>unproductive expenditures required to maintain private appropriation
>against further leaps in social production.
Funny you should mention this Rakesh. My personal research right now is on the legal status of trade-secret and non-compete clauses for employees in enforcing intellectual property rights against employees. There are some real fundamental issues here that go to the heart of reconceiving the whole employment relationship.
Ironically, the very social creation of knowledge makes collective bargaining even more compelling, since no individual contract can capture what is at stake. When workers sign over their IP rights the day they take a job, they are essentially bargaining for undetermined knowledge of undetermined value for an undetermined amount of time -- a travesty that makes the traditional but defined exploitation of labor time seem rational in comparison.
I am framing the whole research in terms of why unions make even more sense in the information age than they did in the industrial age - a fun counterintuitive hook for highlighting all the nasty issues of exploitation involved in intellectual property in the employment situation. The problem is that almost all IP law treats firms as "black boxes" with little concern for the social processes of how it is acquired, whether from publicly subsidized resources or privately exploited labor.
In the legal realm, it is amazingly unplowed territory. The scary thing is how quickly legal sanction is moving down the skill ladder to deprive workers of the right to engage in further employment in their occupation. Trade secret laws and related IP restraints on labor will emerge more and more as the main weapons of anti-labor attack in coming years. Even as collective bargaining rights have been legally eroded, we now see even the right to quit under assault through such restraints.
There does need to be broad new analyses of the cycles of wealth creation and appropriation related to intellectual property versus the more traditional appropriations of physical capital appropriation. The cycles have both similarities and key differences that will effect worker strategies in significant ways in the future.
--Nathan Newman