[lbo-talk] Unproductive Workers = The Best Organized in the USA

[Mike Ballard]

Yoshie:
> Among the overlapping categories that [WS] listed, the only sector
> that's relatively well organized in America are government
> employees.  According to the BLS, "About 36 percent of government
> workers were union members in 2004, compared with about 8 percent of
> workers in private-sector industries" (at <http://www.bls.gov/
> news.release/union2.nr0.htm>).  That is a huge gap.  When the only
> stronghold of organized labor becomes workers whose wages and
> benefits directly depend on tax dollars, which in turn depend on
> profits produced by the work of unorganized workers, organized labor
> has a big political and economic problem at hand.

yes, it's a problem, but I think it's a mistake to call them
"unproductive." They are directly unproductive in that they don't
contribute directly to individual capitalist profits, but they are
indirectly productive, in that they help the capitalist class as a
whole.

--
Jim Devine

************************

Of course, the working class *is* organized, by the capitalist class for the
uses and needs of the capitalist class.  It is organized for servitude.  For
the most part, the working class believes that it is free and has no need for
bureaucratic structures which sop its wages with more taxes in the form of
dues.  This belief that it is free is fostered by mainstream union organizers
who claim that the workers and bosses have interests in common and that all the
workers want is "a fair day's wage for a fair day's work".  Hardly anyone tells
them anything different, so it's no wonder the working class remains ignorant
of its class interests, organized only for capitalist purposes.  It has to go
on its own instinct for freedom alone.  Sometimes, in some workers, these
instincts flair up in a fit of organizing or striking against their bosses and
for themselves.  But hardly anyone in the existing union movement would try to
fan the flames of class consciouness.  Best to let those embers die out.  And
that is why, IMO, the working class lies dormant, under the volcano, so to
speak.  

Regards,
Mike B)

Read "The Perthian Brickburner":
http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal

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