[lbo-talk] RE: tech jobs abound in India

[Wojtek Sokolowski]

Joanna:
> In the twenty years I spent in the hi-tech industry, I have met with
> some arrogant oafisheness, but this did not come from engineering; the
> greater part came from sales/marketing/upper management. And like I
> said, those people will not lose their jobs. Engineers, given their
> supposedly rosy future, naively believed in it, were fiercely loyal to
> their employers and were super-exploited as a result. 80 hour weeks
were
> and are very common. It's true that this encouraged a libertarian
> politics, that hi-tech workers felt superior to "unions," and believed
> that their education and the ever expanding tech sector would be the
> crest of the wave that would float them above everyone else's
troubles.
> They will now realize that they were nothing more than a privileged
> layer of the working class and now, privileged no more.
> It will be interesting to see what their disillusion leads to. These
are
> intelligent, highly skilled people, some of whom can hack anything
they
> please:)

I share you assessment of the situation.  When I was teaching at
Rutgers, I included Harry Braverman's book on the deskilling of manual
labor.  Virtually no student (except one who worked as a cashier clerk
at a supermarket) believed that the white collar jobs for which they
were grooming themselves would experience the same fate.  These were not
exactly kids born to the privilege, after all Rutgers is not Princeton.
They believed, however, that their current or expected position in
society was earned solely through their effort and skill, that the
system is fair to everyone, and as result, they resented anything
"social."  

My own feelings toward such attitudes are ambiguous.  Sometimes I see
them as mere naïvete that can be changed by proper education, but
sometimes I think it is learned ignorance stemming from
self-righteousness, ethnocentrism and feeling of superiority that needs
to be crushed by any means necessary.  

I also remain pessimistic about the outcomes of the falling from grace
that you describe.  Such downward mobility resulting from devolution
usually breeds fascism not socialism - the latter being a product of
progress and unrealized upward mobility.

Wojtek