But that begs the question. Absent growing credibility for programs definable as socialistic, I don't think the positives you cite will have much wider significance and serve to eliminate the entrenched plutocracy that is the source of the worst, most abiding ills in this society. For example, the following is an excerpt from The Atlantic's review of Jill Andresky Fraser's _White-Collar Sweatshop_:
"Compared to their peers thirty years ago, America's 80 million white-collar employees are working longer hours, for the same pay and fewer benefits, at jobs that are markedly less secure, and for corporations that regard firing whole ranks of employees as a way to post paper gains and so win Wall Street's favor. The long arm of the job has reached into employees' homes, their nights, their weekends, and their vacations, as technology designed to make work less onerous has made it more pervasive. America's insecure white-collar workers are victims not of poverty, like the blue- and pink-collar workers Barbara Ehrenreich writes about in Nickel and Dimed (2001), but of progress. They are, Jill Andresky Fraser writes in White-Collar Sweatshop: The Deterioration of Work and Its Rewards in Corporate America, 'suffering the unwanted ... consequences of the nation's recent economic boom.' Her new book raises the question of whether the deterioration of white-collar work is more cause than consequence of that now-fading boom. Is a eupeptic stock market a sign not of new wealth creation but of a redistribution of resources from workers to owners? Or, rather, from workers to their own pension funds? 'We are all devouring ourselves,' an art designer for a major publisher told Fraser. 'We all own stock, and as stockholders, all we care about is profits. So we are the ones who are encouraging the conditions that make our work lives so awful.' Call it cannibalistic capitalism."
[Full text: http://www.theatlantic.com/cgi-bin/o/unbound/polipro/pp2001-06-07.htm]
Carl
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