>On Jul 22, 2009, at 2:36 PM, Matthias Wasser wrote:
>
>>Does "temporary and flexible" neccessarily mean part-time or temp? The
>>number of careers and jobs an American has over her lifetime has
>>increased,
>>for instance.
>
>That's not all that clear either. Here's the history on job tenure.
>Note that the median number of years on the job for men in 2008 was
>about a year below what it was in 1966, but that's offset by an
>increase for women, leaving the overall figure unchanged. Similiarly
>with the share of workers on the same job for 10 years or more -
>though those stats only begin in 1983.
i've been thinking a lot lately about how this concept of post-fordism and the casulaization of the labor force might not capture anything like what's really going on. for one, it always irritated the shit out of me because i came from a world that had so many plant shutdowns, and had had them for decades that the idea that there was such a thing as fordism, ever, was a sick joke.
but, still, I was thinking about this because the people who've often come up with the concepts don't seem to actually work in the workforce that most folks do. (i.e., they are academics or government employees; consultants; own businesses; intellectuals, etc.) they aren't really clued to what's happening on the shop floors or the cewb-farm floors.
It occurred to me that they don't know what they are talking about. ha.
and I say this having spent 6 months inside a subsidiary of AT&T studying what happened to middle management, survivors, after the downsizings of the late 90s. I mean, I was there because there was a lot of anger about Chainsaw Al and his ilk. And before that, I spent two years trailing the trials and tribulations of those who'd fallen from grace -- upper managerial workers and professionals who been dropped from the warm embrace of what they'd thought was going to be lifetime employment.
i was fully klewed to the casualization of labor, post-fordism, etc. just growing up. I was never really on the shop floor or cewb floor myself. I'd been in industries that were already casualized -- indeed, built on the entire premise practically -- or were at least seen as industries people were in and out of, because the work is too physically demanding, dead-end, not conducive to family life to ever be something you could tolerate for decades without your body breaking down from toil and stress.
If not there, then in academia. And if not in academia, I was working for small-time operations -- well, we've discussed why moms and pops are the suckage here before.
because in this workforce these academics say is increasingly subject to casualization, I see it -- but I don't. In other words, as I remember saying even back a decade ago: what was being casualized were certain occupations and industries (e.g., auto) that people had historically seen as places where that wasn't supposed to happen.[1]
as I'm working in the cewb-farm now, what I notice is that, at least with the company I'm working for, they have zero interest in a casualized workplace. Yes, they are fully interested in some aspects of what is called post-fordism.
I think, as I said above, what people observed was certain industries and occupations falling from grace. they no longer occupy a special perch, are no longer the occupations and industries that can help set the rate and standards for what the rest of the peons would get. (see Harper's article on the death of auto industry in this month's ish.)
They're just now experiencing the world that everyone else already experienced -- or occasionally get hit with the brunt of the outsourcing fad - but, really, as a systemic change?
I think they make this goofy mistake because, largely, they are shielded from the very occupations and industries they are trying to describe.
I need to be convinced. Harder.
shag
[1] Once, when I was doing some research on civil society and social movements -- a small uprising against radioactive waste dumps -- i was interviewing someone because a major plant had shut down in the midst of our research project. we were at a community college where the person I was interviewing was taking a night course. sitting there, word had gotten around the cafeteria as to why I was there. I was approached by a bunch of people who'd been laid off from a military base that had been shut down. Again, they were pissed: because who ever thought the government would lay you off. they certainly didn't, that's why they had gone to the trouble to try to get jobs there in the first place!