Brothers, Where Art Thou?

Most of you know I live in Michigan, and work in the auto industry. I have read and heard for some time now that the decay of the US automobile indistry is due to the union. People argue that unionized workers make too much money and are "lazy", therefore destroying any competitiveness the US companies may have. Because of this, many groups are calling for non-union labor in the industry. Read this from the Wall Street Journal: Wall Street Journal - May 23, 2007...With the collapse of the DaimlerChrysler experiment, it might be useful to stop referring to "domestic" and "foreign" auto makers. The important distinction is between auto makers bound by UAW contracts and those that aren't. Chrysler's labor costs are $30 an hour higher than Toyota's, headed fora gap of $45 by 2009. Chrysler pays the same wage to UAW janitors and skilled craftsmen. It carries idle workers on its books when no jobs are available. Most of all, it's on the hook for the untrammeled health-care spending of 134,000 unionized workers, retirees and dependents --an $18 billion liability that Toyota, Honda and Nissan don't face. This alone adds a cost of $1,500 per car. How it got this way is no longer interesting -- the tired debate over which stick figure, "labor" or "management," is responsible forDetroit's uncompetitive labor deals. Both operated under the incentives of the Wagner Act, the 1935 labor law that entrenched the UAW as the monopoly labor supplier to the Big Three. Detroit draws on the same talent pool as the rest of global industry,and must pay a competitive wage. Its executives are no more overpaid or incompetent than anybody else's. Nor is it necessary to rub its face inthe superiority of the Toyota Camry and Honda Accord. No car company could humanly hope to compete in the basic sedan segment with a deadweight cost disadvantage of thousands of dollars per car. Detroit would be foolish to try... I feel that commentary on this is in order. Both Plato and Xenophon share with Socrates an awareness of the destructive effects of work on the worker as a human being. Herodotus identified contempt for work as an attribute of the classical Greeks. To take a Roman example, Cicero said that “whoever gives his labor for money sells himself and puts himself in the rank of slaves.” In our "free, democratic" society, approximately 95% of us work for someone else - we give our labor for money. Whether it is done under contract (union), by the hour, by the job, or at a flat rate (salary), 95% of the workforce is in the same proverbial boat: we are subject to the whims and interests of the other 5%. That 5% sees the other 95% as "resources" - we are even taught to refer to people as "resources" in business education. A "resource" is like a "commodity" in the sense that it has a particular cost. The lower that cost, the better. Better for whom? A small portion of the 95% workforce mentioned above is unionized. Unions have (comparitvely) strong defenses against the leadership 5%. Amazingly however, we see the rest of the 95% working to help eliminate the union, or to lessen it's influence. I am reminded of a quote by Rev. Martin Niemoller regarding the Nazi's ability to eliminate many different groups, and the populace's seeming indifference to it: First they came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up, because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me. I am not suggesting any Nazi influences, merely this: If the 5% is successful in destroying the unions, who do you suppose will be next? In my industry, it is the non-union hourly workers. Employees who run the computer design terminals where cars are created are being eliminated in favor of low cost replacements in foreign countries. With no union to defend them, it is happening quite quickly. The quixotic phenomenon of worker against worker appears again: the next level of worker, the engineer, derides the designer as lazy and inefficient, and assists the 5% in eliminating the function. Following Niemoller's logic, who do the engineers think will be next?? Not surprisingly, the elimination of engineering jobs is occuring in the same manner as the design jobs, where they are moved to lower cost countries. Incidently, it is not just technical jobs that are being moved. If a computer can write a book, what chance does a high-paid writer have? The response of each of the eliminated groups is the same: 1. Securtiy - "They can't do that to us, we're too valuable! If they try it, they'll be sorry!" 2. Concern - "Could they really do it?" 3. Anger - "They can't do this! I've given the best years of my life to this company!" 4. Pleading - "Don't they know how inefficient this will be??" (Note the use of the term efficient) 5. Dispair - "What am I going to do?" Remember that all "resources" are replacable. What will they do, indeed... Again, it is important to note that the only groups fighting are the ones that are being eliminated. The rest of the 95% is surprisingly indifferent (at best), or even complicit in the elimination (who do you suppose develops and implements the plans?). Why should the 95% allow the 5% to divide us and then, little by little, replace us with low cost versions of ourselves? In many cases, we even happily train our eventual replacements! I have discussed the underlying reasons for this before in my posts Fear, Education, and Indoctrination as well as Educational Self-Esteem. If you haven't read them, it all boils down to this: We are trained, from our earliest educational experiences, to do certian things. We are told that this training is about intellectual development, but it is not. This is not learning, it is training. Part of this training is to learn what skills are "valuable". Children are marched off to camps called “schools,” primarily to keep them out of Mom’s hair andunder control, but incidentally to acquire the habits of obedience and punctuality required of workers. The development of any actual understanding of the lessons taught is secondary to the instillment of "discipline". It is done with such unrelenting consistency and repetitiveness that it is almost impossible to resist. The degradation which most workers experience on the job is “discipline.” Foucault explains this phenomenon. Discipline consists of the totality of controls at the workplace - surveillance, rotework, imposed work tempos, production quotas, etc. Discipline is what the factory and the office share with the prison and the school and the mental hospital - except that the workers are supposedly "free". Many workers will complain bitterly about the indignity of it all, and then fall right back into their indoctrinated training - often without even realizing it. Again referring to Cicero's slave analogy, 17th century presidential hopeful Horace Greeley had this to say regarding slavery and "free" labor: "We have stricken the shackles from 4,000,000 human beings and brought all labourers to a common level, but not so much by the elevation of former slaves as by reducing the whole working population, white and black, to a condition of serfdom. While boasting of our noble deeds, we are careful to conceal the ugly fact that by our iniquitous money system we have manipulated a system of oppression which, though more refined, is no less cruel than the old system of chattel slavery" So, from all of this, we have a "me first" attitude that permeates the capitalistic system, coupled with unrelentingly repetitive "discipline" in the form of subjugation to authority. When the 5% (the authority) shows us the carrot of personal gain - perhaps the promise of a "stronger economy" - and then withholds it and blames the withholding on a small subset of the 95% (auto unions, perhaps), we all do what we are supposed to do - we attack the subset. We loathe it, we seek to eliminate it. We accuse it of sloth and deceit. We celebrate its destruction. We had better hope that the next subset is not our own.