if you identify with management and perceive them as protecting you against the people that you feel make your life miserable on a daily basis, then you can see that, on some level, that undermines thinking in terms of class struggle against management. it's especially hard to see when you see that many of your "managers" are people who, 9 months prior, were flipping burgers and folding shirts and restocking shelves.
At 09:25 PM 1/4/2006, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>Statistics doesn't bear out the sort of distinction between service
>and production workers implied by Andy Stern's quip and research
>cited above, as far as unionization is concerned. The remaining
>strongholds of US organized labor in terms of union density are
>service workers in the public sector: police officers, teachers,
>librarians, etc.: "Two occupational groups -- education, training,
>and library occupations and protective service occupations -- had the
>highest unionization rates in 2004, at about 37 percent each.
>Protective service occupations include fire fighters and police
>officers" ("Union Members in 2004," <http://www.bls.gov/news.release/
>union2.nr0.htm>).
>
>Also, in terms of willingness to engage in concerted and even
>militant union activities, too, the recent notable strikes still
>fresh in our memory involved service workers (defying laws against
>strikes in the case of public-sector workers), some of which ended
>relatively successfully for workers involved: TWU Local 100 in NYC;
>teachers in British Columbia; grocery workers in California; etc.
>
>It seems to me that people who have the hardest time getting
>organized are not service workers (not even customer service workers)
>in general but "unskilled" service workers who can be relatively
>easily replaced and who work in the low-profit margin industries in
>the private sector (perhaps the most cutthroat corner of capitalism)
>in particular. That has more to do with objective rather than
>subjective difficulties, though. I doubt that cops, fire fighters,
>teachers, librarians, etc. have a higher level of class consciousness
>than retail workers.
>
>Yoshie Furuhashi
><http://montages.blogspot.com>
><http://monthlyreview.org>
><http://mrzine.org>
>
>
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