Now only the married and the over sixty free-lance. The former for the flexibility; the latter because it's hard to find a job if you're over sixty.
Joanna
----- Original Message ----- From: "shag carpet bomb" <shag at cleandraws.com> To: "shag carpet bomb" <shag at cleandraws.com> Cc: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Sent: Tuesday, October 25, 2011 1:26:14 PM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] OWS Demands working group: jobs for all!
The other thing that era did was solidify the casualization of labor: contractors, not full time employees. People who must come with their own health insurance, unemployment insurance, self paid sick leave etc.
That is what a lot of people were doing in the tech bubble. Their labor was casualized and they spent some time moving from job to job, marketing themselves etc. they turned themselves into what Yoshie once called happy little self exploiters. Identification with the boss and disindentification with labor seemed rampant to me at the time.
the idea was that, as a contractor, you were your own little business, manager of your own destiny. Anyone who punched a clock or who talked about getting time and half was seen as mired in union-thinking. At least among tech workers, it was an extremely anti union environment.
shag
>
>> On Mon, Oct 24, 2011 at 1:46 PM, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Yeah, me too. But you seem to be against anything one might do in
>>> this world to get even a few steps closer to it. Is it that a few
>>> steps closer are worse than none? Or what? Or am I missing
>>> something?
>>
>> Two things: First, it's not like I'm taking to the Wall Street
>> Journal
>> editorial page with these arguments, am I? Seems to me that a left
>> space where everyone is on the same side, more or less, is the place
>> to be ruthlessly critical.
>>
>> Second, I did, tentatively, endorse something like a living social
>> wage, which also has problems, instead of full employment. Seems to
>> me
>> to be better, not least because full employment only benefits those
>> that can actually work. Mike and SA say that full employment means
>> more freedom from the boss, which seems ridiculous even beyond the
>> surface level objection that work-is-freedom is a nonsense
>> statement.
>> The full employment argument assumes that once it is achieved, then
>> the next stage of socialist development can begin. It's never worked
>> this way. In fact, the segment of the population that has the best
>> conditions, that has the closest thing to full employment--white
>> males--is also the most reactionary, nasty, vindictive, and
>> punitive.
>
> This reminds me of the 1999 declaration of what freedom-at-work looked
> like. A software developer on an email list engaged in an extended
> argument that programmers had changed the world: they had altered the
> entire landscape of work to include foos ball tables, free gourmet
> lunches, not just casual friday but flip flops, shorts and wrinkled
> t-shirts all day everyday.
>
> In the absence of a unionized collective consciousness, folks came to
> see the ability to job hop and pick and choose where you wanted to
> work, not as the result of collective struggle but as the hard won
> effort of the individual. Anyone who stayed at their job and
> questioned what actually happened in their workplace was chastised as
> a whiner. Don't complain, get another job!
>
> Under these conditions, lots of jobs and plenty of work to be done,
> the result was a sense that the individual was king, maker of his own
> life, boss of his bosses. A place where, as someone once related,
> rebellion was telling your boss, "bwahaha. I have your balls in a
> Mason jar."
>
> I'm wondering how, since I'm sure it's got to be different,
> implementing a full employment program - which supposedly has the same
> salutary effect on worker consciousness does as full employment in the
> late 90s bubble - would foster labor consciousness in a way that isn't
> quite so individualistic.
>
>
-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)
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