> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
> [mailto:owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com]On Behalf Of Michael Perelman
> Sent: Saturday, May 29, 1999 2:46 PM
> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
> Subject: cognative slavery
>
>
> Ian referred to cognative slavery. Here is part of a section of
> my book, Class
> Warfare in the Information Age.
>
>
> Chain Gangs and Cat Litter
> Kenneth Arrow recently noted:
> The information base embedded in production workers, managers,
> and technical
> personnel is an important part of the market's valuation of the
> capital of a
> firm. An extreme case is the valuation of computer software
> firms, some of which
> have become giants comparable to large industrial organization,
> at least as
> measured by the stock markets. Essentially, their physical
> assets and indeed
> their marginal cost of production is trivial. Their expenditures are for
> acquisition of information, but much of this information is held
> essentially in
> the minds of their employees. It has to be asked why the forces
> of competition
> do not erode the profits and therefore the value of these firms.
> [Arrow 1996, p.
> 126]
> Arrow continued with the observation that treating "embedded
> information ... [as]
> capital depends on slow mobility of information-rich labor”
> (ibid., p. 127).
> Why, then, should labor be slow to take its information to the
> highest bidder?
> Should we not applaud workers who act according to the much
> vaunted logic of
> profit maximization?
> The answer is that corporations mobilize all the powers at their
> disposal to
> limit what workers can do with their information. In effect, the
> granting of
> property rights to information means that the corporations need
> to control the
> people in whose brains that information resides.
> Consider the case of Petr Taborsky, an undergraduate college student in
> chemistry and biology, who took a job as a laboratory assistant
> at the University
> of South Florida College of Engineering in 1987. The lab
> employed him to do
> testing for a project studying methods to make sewage treatment
> cheaper and more
> efficient (Anon. 1996b).
> On his own, Mr. Taborsky discovered a way to turn a clay-like
> compound, similar
> to cat litter, into a reusable cleanser of sewage, a process that has many
> potentially valuable applications. He said that he made his
> discovery after the
> project had ended and that he did conduct any of his experiments
> as part of his
> job.
> The project's principal investigator, Robert P. Carnahan,
> maintains that Mr.
> Taborsky was part of a research team and that the discovery
> stemmed from the
> team's decisions. The university said the sponsor of the
> project, a subsidiary
> of Florida Progress, a utility holding company, had all rights to
> the research.
> A jury convicted Mr. Taborsky of grand theft of trade secrets in
> 1990. He was
> sentenced to a year's house arrest, a suspended prison term of 3
> 1/2 years and
> probation for 11 1/2 years, as well as 500 hours of community
> service. Mr.
> Taborsky violated the terms of his sentence when he obtained three patents
> related to the research. He was assigned to chain-gang duty for
> two months,
> although he was transferred later to a work-release center in Tampa.
> The litigation continues. Mr. Taborsky still faces civil and
> criminal charges.
> In addition, the ownership of the three patents is still in dispute.
> This case has ominous overtones. The university seems to accept that Mr.
> Taborsky made the discovery on his own. If he had done so at the
> behest of the
> project management, his employers would have ample documentation
> to invalidate
> Mr. Taborsky's claim to intellectual property. In addition, had
> Mr. Taborsky's
> employers been aware of any great expertise on his part, they
> probably would have
> paid him more than his minimal salary of $8 per hour.
> The case seems to revolve around the question of who owns the
> rights to Mr.
> Taborsky's brain. I suspect that Mr. Taborsky would not have
> taken an interest
> in the subject of his discovery if had he never been employed by
> the university.
> Even so, if Mr. Taborsky had made the discovery on his own, after
> he ceased
> working for the project, then his claim would seem to be on solid ground.
> How then can employers defend their right to intellectual
> property unless they
> have access to the brains of their employees even after their
> employment has
> ended? So here we have a clever student condemned to laboring on
> a chain gang
> over a dispute about the inner workings of his brain. The
> possibilities for
> panoptic intrusion are limitless.
> In another notable case, IBM fired an employee, Virginia
> Rulon-Miller, a sales
> manager for dating someone who worked for a competitor (Rulon-Miller v.
> International Business Machines 1985). At the time, the courts
> found in favor of
> the employee, but that decision is more than a decade old.
> Today, the courts are
> far more sympathetic to the actions of business. Had she been a
> scientific
> worker, the temptation to terminate her would be even greater.
>
>
> --
> Michael Perelman
> Economics Department
> California State University
> Chico, CA 95929
>
> Tel. 530-898-5321
> E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu
>
>