I didn't see anything of this sort on this list, but I can address my experiences with it. What I've seen is how contract employees work very hard, hoping they will get permanent on-roll status with a company by proving their value to the employer and the employer leads them to believe that it is possible for them to become permanent. Three years later, they are still working on contract. I've seen it happen dozens of times.
Employers are more than willing to play this game, because 1) it's cheaper and much less hassle to pay temp agencies one lump sum for all the workers they supply than to hire and deal with individual payroll and benefits and 2) those contract employees do bust ass to prove they are worthy of going onroll, while some of the permanent employees do slack off because they made it "in" and know they are harder to fire. I've also seen plenty of slack permanent people. So has management.
>This is just crap, crap, crap and we know it from research! It's fre
> market ideology of the entrepreneurial business man drunk on
> patchouli~!
I suspect the days of permanent employees are becoming numbered and that contract employees will become more frequently the norm, especially for large corporations. Look how well Walmart made it work for them. They got to blame a lot of the illegal workers on temp agencies, though I did hear they also got nabbed with some permanent illegals. But in any case, the temp agencies are doing quite well for themselves and are bound to get larger and wealthier over time, cutting wage allowances even more.
> There was a great study of this type
> of business in a collection of research monographs from Michael
> Burawoy, _Ethnography Unbound_ where, in spite of the collectivist
> practices, there was inequality within the collective.
What makes socialists think that pecking orders won't happen in work places under whatever large gov bureaucracy they envision as being ideal? How could it possibly be avoided?
>Now, you could wish for a state of affairs in which everyone lived
> simply. In which case, many of these small businesses won't be in
> business.
If people lived more simply, perhaps more households could elect to have one person stay home to take care of household duties instead of working outside the home. One less commuter, one potential job opened (or not needed in the market) and the resultant scalebacks could reduce consumption and our dependence on imports.
> If you aren't cultivating any sense that we have
> obligations to a wider society--that there are interdependencies
> (and dependencies!!)--that what matters is not just you and your
> collective of like-minded people living in your lifestyle enclave
> (cf., Robert Bellah et al. in _Habits of the Heart_) then why
> should the people in this future society give a crap about the have
> nots -- those who fall through the cracks of utopia?
Even if people have no sense of caring for others beyond their own families (which appears to be a trait of most Republicans), they often do respond to the reminder that a person with a job is much less likely to make them the victim of crime than one without a job. It also helps to remind them that a college education paid with taxes is cheaper than paying to keep a person in jail. Preventive maintenance is a theme that can resonate with Republicans.
>The thing is, the whole thing can only work with precisely what
> Carrol says is important: organization, social movement, planned
> and coordinated boycotts.
This has been attempted by intense grassroots activism on the left for decades now and the harder the left pushes, the more ground we lose and the further right the nation goes. It's not working, and it hasn't been working for a long time now. How long will it take for us to realize that all those countless hours of hard work in political activism has been a miserable failure? We recognized the failure of the back to the land movement. Why can't we see this?
> Which is to say, if you want it to work,
> you have to proselytize and get mass amounts of people to do it.
This is exactly what we said back in the 60s and the 70's and the 80s and the 90s... Will it take the gov moving completely into fascism for us to realize it didn't work?
>Now, as Dawson points out, the problem with the hippie approach is
> that it's ultimately Republican --or something.
Dawson doesn't understand the difference between hippies and anarchists.
> I see this in the talk of "deadbeats":
You might notice I also said "We must see both sides here." I was showing the point of view of the right in a way that thought made it easier to understand.
>Instead of questioning the ideology of the petty bourgeois business
> owner who sees his taxes being paid to support "deadbeats," it's
> simply uncritically appropriated as a legitimate way to feel!
To the right it is a legitimate way to feel. Just because we don't "feel" the same way doesn't mean we are any more entitled to our opinions than they are.
> WHAT deadbeats exactly?
According to the rightwingers I've heard, its anyone who receives long term assistance of taxpayer money for welfare, foodstamps, or public housing. Temporary assistance is fine, as the need for help getting on one's feet is acceptable to the right. Its the long term use of tax money that has the right going ballistic.
>Do you happen to know someone who could, oh, work 40 hrs a week and
> get by just fine but doesn't so they can collect the Earned Income
> Tax Credit?
I'm getting by just fine on my 6 hour/week, but your concern for me is touching. :/ Why would I want to work a 40 hour week if I don't have to?
>This is precisely what a small business owner would consider a
> deadbeat.
Nah, he's likely to be collecting it and possibly child care credits as well.
> And they denounce it precisely because such things keep
> people out of the labor market, providing them with an alternative
> way to live. And it's precisely those kinds of things, they
> complain, that will force them to pay higher wages to those who are
> competing in the so-called "free market".
Except for minimum wage jobs, we haven't had more workers than jobs in a very long time, at least since women entered the workforce en masse in the 60s.
>lookee, if it's wrong to give incentives to big business, why is it
> "right" to give incentives to "small businesses"?
Who said it was? But why if big business has such huge incentives (not the least of which is wars fought with our money and our children's blood for their market opportunities), shouldn't small business should also get comparable incentives. If small business can't have them, then large business shouldn't either.
>Further, while you may be supporting the "good small businesses"
> you're also supporting the "bad" small businesses with these
> fukcing tax incentives.
To say nothing of the disaster of supporting bad big business. That's why responsible consuming is so important. If bad business has no customers or investment, it won't survive long.
> Besides which, having never bothered to
> question the ideology of the buseiness owner to begin with, the
> successful big business can just say: "freeloader! I pulled myself
> up by my bootstraps, so can you."
There is plenty of that said. With feeling. But it is not directed at small business owners, it is directed at perceived deadbeats.
> And he'd be perfectly legitimate
> in saying so because his way of thinking hasn't been questioned
> from the git-go!
He has the right to think whatever he chooses. And we have the right to refuse to buy from him or to work for him.
>Besides which, if you never bother to question the arguments of the
> petty private property owner -- then you aren't getting at the
> arguments put forth by the not-so-petty-private-property-owner. If
> the petty bourg business owner can feel that it's legitmate not to
> want to support deadbeats, why shouldn't the Big Buoyz do and say
> the same?
They do. Virtually all Republicans I know or have discussed this with think this way. They are proud to donate very generous sums voluntarily to their choice of charitable organizations, but forcing them to pay when they can't choose the recipients, goes against everything they believe in and they will fight it tooth and nail.
> There's nothing that makes the small business owners
> legitmate and those of the big business owner illegitimate.
I can't accept this. For one, big business owners can afford lobbyists and campaign funds and influence that small business can't manage. Big business wields a much heavier stick with city planners and can threaten all sorts of reprisals, including removing their facilities from an area that doesn't provide the incentives they want and moving to a place that will provide the incentives. The more employees a business has, the more hurting they can cause to an area by leaving and so city planners and politicians will often cave in to their demands. Walmart plays this game all the time.
>feh. It all just boils down to a small class of people trying to get
> their way by using the government to make the playing field exist
> on _their_ terms. To line their pockets with the dead body labor
> instead of the other guy's pocket.
I think you've got it backwards. Little business doesn't have the power to do these things. Big business does.
Question. Why do socialists seem to think big gov is so great? Isn't the managing bureaucracy supposed to get smaller over time in Marxist theory? Wasn't the Soviet demise due in part to the unwieldy huge size of its bureaucracy?
And I also don't understand the thinking that big business is the best answer. Wouldn't smaller redundant systems be less risky, more effective, more regionally distributed, and easier to control? Arguments for and against centralization and decentralization are pretty evenly matched.
--tully