I appreciate your thoughtful comments, and I will chew on them. Especially the idea that portable health insurance makes workers more mobile and potentially more militant. A fair point. Do I then agree? Not in the main, but it's a pleasure to have this discussion. Insisting on the correct point of view on something this fertile seems impertinent.
One point: When you write: >>" I disagree that the US labor force was
always this "disciplined." In the
>70's it was famously slack, uninterested in pleasing the employer,
>and strike-prone. It was a golden age by comparison."<<
Only for the first few years of the decade, only episodically, only in some industries and only for younger, largely male and single workers. Those glory days--when Lordstown was the poster child for a new militancy, came to a grand, gear-stripping halt with the oil crisis and the ensuing layoffs. These took the steam out of that healthy bubbling militancy you ascribe to everybody and for the entire decade. By 1975, work hours lost in strikes and job actions were reaching a low ebb. Within two more years the UAW;s Doug Fraser was talking about capital launching a one-sided class war, this while he was sitting on the board of Chrysler. 1977 was also the beginning of the end for full employment in the steel industry, with Youngstown and Cleveland leading the pack. Even by comparison, the decade was no golden age.
Beyond counting work days lost to strikes, I can't think of an objective yardstick that measures relative discipline over the last 30 years, but subjectively the days when fear was not the spur that got people to work and kept them at work seems to me to have been few. You could be right that today's workers are more regimented, but what strikes me are the grim continuities, of how little has changed in working class lives.
Mike Hirsch
At 08:00 PM 9/29/2005, JBrown72073 at cs.com wrote:
> >As for the absence of healthcare being itself a useful tool in keeping
> >the workforce disciplined, are you assuming that they (we) would be
>undisciplined
> >with the introduction of guaranteed access to family healthcare?
>
>We'd be freer to change jobs, go on strike, punch the boss, yeah.
>
> >If you are, that's inputing a lot of control to one set of bad
> policies. I'm
> >old enough to remember when employers were happy to provide a comprehensive
> >package of benefits; it was cheaper than a big wage raise. And the workforce
> >in my long-ago youth was certainly disciplined. Hell, they were job scared,
> >then and now. Fear as an instrument of social control takes many forms;
> >raising a family while one illness away from bankruptcy is just one of
> >them.
>
>I don't think the question is "is labor disciplined or isn't it?" it's HOW
>disciplined, i.e. how scared are we to lose our job? Will we do two people's
>jobs? work more overtime? how about for no pay? And take another pay
>cut? If
>you have a sick child or spouse then probably the answer is you'll do pretty
>much anything to keep your job. And as the proportion of jobs that have
>health insurance decreases, we become even more shackled to those which
>have it,
>which is an advantage those employers gain over us when they want us to be
>"flexible."
>
>I disagree that the US labor force was always this "disciplined." In the
>70's it was famously slack, uninterested in pleasing the employer, and
>strike-prone. It was a golden age by comparison.
>
>Employers won't give a little to keep a lot if they don't have to give
>anything. GM would much rather not pay health benefits at all than pay
>its health
>benefits in the form of taxes. (And exactly when were employers happy to
>provide a comprehensive package of benefits? They were forced into it by
>unions
>and tight job markets.)
>
> >Capitalism won't collapse if the US inaugurates universal health
> >care, though the fight for it can buff up its enemies--especially if those
> >business sectors with no stakes in the present private insurance racket
> >continue to take a pass.
>
>Insurance is a very profitable sector. Capitalism won't collapse, as you say
>(plenty of capitalist countries have national health systems) but a large
>segment of US financial interests would no longer have a product to
>sell. Let's
>not underestimate how hard they'll hold on to the current system. I tend to
>think that until we have some spectacular bankruptcies in that sector the
>opposition will remain formidable. The good news is, we probably won't
>have to
>wait too long.
>
>Jenny Brown
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