(no subject)
This is worth reading.
Why American Workers Stay Off the Streets While Europeans Proteest
The workers and other protesters who gathered en masse at the Group of 20 summit meeting last week in London were continuing a time-honored European tradition of taking their grievances into the streets.
Two weeks earlier, more than a million workers in France demonstrated against layoffs and the government’s handling of the economic crisis, and in the last month alone, French workers took their bosses hostage four times in various labor disputes. When General Motors recently announced huge job cuts worldwide, 15,000 workers demonstrated at the company’s German headquarters.
But in the United States, where G.M. plans its biggest layoffs, union members have seemed passive in comparison. They may yell at the television news, but that’s about all. Unlike their European counterparts, American workers have largely stayed off the streets, even as unemployment soars and companies cut wages and benefits.
Why might this be?
Leo Gerard, president of the United Steelworkers, said there were smarter things to do than demonstrating against layoffs - for instance, pushing Congress and the states to make sure the stimulus plan creates the maximum number of jobs in the United States.
“I actually believe that Americans believe in their political system more than workers do in other parts of the world,” Mr. Gerard said. He said large labor demonstrations are often warranted in Canada and European countries to pressure parliamentary leaders. Demonstrations are less needed in the United States, he said, because often all that is needed is some expert lobbying in Washington to line up the support of a half-dozen senators.
Well, that's one view, I guess. And this view, stated by the president of one of the most prominent U.S. unions, is echoed in the fact that:
...American labor leaders, once up-from-the-street rabble-rousers, now often work hand-in-hand with C.E.O.’s to improve corporate competitiveness to protect jobs and pensions, and try to sideline activists who support a hard line.
“You have a general diminution of union leadership that was focused on defending workers by any means necessary,” said Jerry Tucker, a longtime U.A.W. militant. “The message from the union leadership nowadays often is, ‘We don’t have any choice, we have to go down this concessionary road to see if we can do damage control,’ ” he said.
In the case of the Detroit automakers, a strike might not only hasten their demise but infuriate many Americans who already view auto workers as overpaid. It might also make Washington less receptive to a bailout.
Labor’s aggressiveness has also been sapped by its declining numbers. Unions represent just 7.4 percent of private-sector workers today.
But, perhaps more importantly, there's also this:
David Kennedy, a Stanford historian and author of “Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945,” says that America’s individualist streak is a major reason for this reluctance to take to the streets. Citing a 1940 study by the social psychologist Mirra Komarovsky, he said her interviews of the Depression-era unemployed found “the psychological reaction was to feel guilty and ashamed, that they had failed personally.”
Taken together, guilt, shame and individualism undercut any impulse to collective action, then as now, Professor Kennedy said. Noting that Americans felt stunned and desperately insecure during the Depression’s early years, he wrote: “What struck most observers, and mystified them, was the eerie docility of the American people, their stoic passivity as the Depression grindstone rolled over them.”
It probably goes further than just this attitude towards unemployment or poverty, though. Even among the employed, there is a corporate culture that brainwashes American workers with such pseudo-values as "having a positive attitude" and "being a team player," and thereby places a stigma on protest and activism as a form of "negativity." If you have a problem with someone at work, they say, it is no one's responsibility but your own to deal with it, either by privately discussing the issue with your manager, or by adjusting your attitude to be more positive. And if the problem persists, it must be your own fault for not doing something "positive" about it. Any kind of collective action among workers is suspect as a form of "complaining." The notion of the good of the workers as individuals becomes subsumed by the much more collectivist notion of "the good of the company," in which "complainers" and non-"team players" have no role.
This combination of the prosperity theology attitude of poor Americans towards their own poverty, and the "positive attitude" guilt machine that keeps the corporate drones docile provides an excellent example of what Ayn Rand called the "sanction of the victim." In Rand's worldview, evil is essentially impotent, and can have power over the world only to the extent that it persuades good people not to act against it. A key means by which this is achieved is by persuading people that they deserve to suffer under an evil that masquerades as the good. This state can only persist, however, as long as the victims accept the moral principle that places this blame on them; if they withdraw their sanction from that principle, then they can easily recognize the pointlessness of their suffering and act to end it. Atlas Shrugged is really all about raising this class consciousness in society's producers.
It is time that productive Americans stop blaming themselves for poverty, unemployment, and the conditions of labor. They are the consequences of economic forces well beyond the control of any individual, and individual action has practically no power to bring about a general improvement. It is only if they reject the morality that places this blame upon them and organize as a class that they can exert sufficient social pressure to produce change on a large scale. Europeans have known this for a long time, and that's why they have things like universal health care and shorter work weeks. The Americans of the early 20th century had the same knowledge, and they brought us many of those same benefits before our culture of protest was derailed. We in America today have a great deal to learn from today's European radicals, and from the activists of the early labor movement.
Why American Workers Stay Off the Streets While Europeans Proteest
The workers and other protesters who gathered en masse at the Group of 20 summit meeting last week in London were continuing a time-honored European tradition of taking their grievances into the streets.
Two weeks earlier, more than a million workers in France demonstrated against layoffs and the government’s handling of the economic crisis, and in the last month alone, French workers took their bosses hostage four times in various labor disputes. When General Motors recently announced huge job cuts worldwide, 15,000 workers demonstrated at the company’s German headquarters.
But in the United States, where G.M. plans its biggest layoffs, union members have seemed passive in comparison. They may yell at the television news, but that’s about all. Unlike their European counterparts, American workers have largely stayed off the streets, even as unemployment soars and companies cut wages and benefits.
Why might this be?
Leo Gerard, president of the United Steelworkers, said there were smarter things to do than demonstrating against layoffs - for instance, pushing Congress and the states to make sure the stimulus plan creates the maximum number of jobs in the United States.
“I actually believe that Americans believe in their political system more than workers do in other parts of the world,” Mr. Gerard said. He said large labor demonstrations are often warranted in Canada and European countries to pressure parliamentary leaders. Demonstrations are less needed in the United States, he said, because often all that is needed is some expert lobbying in Washington to line up the support of a half-dozen senators.
Well, that's one view, I guess. And this view, stated by the president of one of the most prominent U.S. unions, is echoed in the fact that:
...American labor leaders, once up-from-the-street rabble-rousers, now often work hand-in-hand with C.E.O.’s to improve corporate competitiveness to protect jobs and pensions, and try to sideline activists who support a hard line.
“You have a general diminution of union leadership that was focused on defending workers by any means necessary,” said Jerry Tucker, a longtime U.A.W. militant. “The message from the union leadership nowadays often is, ‘We don’t have any choice, we have to go down this concessionary road to see if we can do damage control,’ ” he said.
In the case of the Detroit automakers, a strike might not only hasten their demise but infuriate many Americans who already view auto workers as overpaid. It might also make Washington less receptive to a bailout.
Labor’s aggressiveness has also been sapped by its declining numbers. Unions represent just 7.4 percent of private-sector workers today.
But, perhaps more importantly, there's also this:
David Kennedy, a Stanford historian and author of “Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945,” says that America’s individualist streak is a major reason for this reluctance to take to the streets. Citing a 1940 study by the social psychologist Mirra Komarovsky, he said her interviews of the Depression-era unemployed found “the psychological reaction was to feel guilty and ashamed, that they had failed personally.”
Taken together, guilt, shame and individualism undercut any impulse to collective action, then as now, Professor Kennedy said. Noting that Americans felt stunned and desperately insecure during the Depression’s early years, he wrote: “What struck most observers, and mystified them, was the eerie docility of the American people, their stoic passivity as the Depression grindstone rolled over them.”
It probably goes further than just this attitude towards unemployment or poverty, though. Even among the employed, there is a corporate culture that brainwashes American workers with such pseudo-values as "having a positive attitude" and "being a team player," and thereby places a stigma on protest and activism as a form of "negativity." If you have a problem with someone at work, they say, it is no one's responsibility but your own to deal with it, either by privately discussing the issue with your manager, or by adjusting your attitude to be more positive. And if the problem persists, it must be your own fault for not doing something "positive" about it. Any kind of collective action among workers is suspect as a form of "complaining." The notion of the good of the workers as individuals becomes subsumed by the much more collectivist notion of "the good of the company," in which "complainers" and non-"team players" have no role.
This combination of the prosperity theology attitude of poor Americans towards their own poverty, and the "positive attitude" guilt machine that keeps the corporate drones docile provides an excellent example of what Ayn Rand called the "sanction of the victim." In Rand's worldview, evil is essentially impotent, and can have power over the world only to the extent that it persuades good people not to act against it. A key means by which this is achieved is by persuading people that they deserve to suffer under an evil that masquerades as the good. This state can only persist, however, as long as the victims accept the moral principle that places this blame on them; if they withdraw their sanction from that principle, then they can easily recognize the pointlessness of their suffering and act to end it. Atlas Shrugged is really all about raising this class consciousness in society's producers.
It is time that productive Americans stop blaming themselves for poverty, unemployment, and the conditions of labor. They are the consequences of economic forces well beyond the control of any individual, and individual action has practically no power to bring about a general improvement. It is only if they reject the morality that places this blame upon them and organize as a class that they can exert sufficient social pressure to produce change on a large scale. Europeans have known this for a long time, and that's why they have things like universal health care and shorter work weeks. The Americans of the early 20th century had the same knowledge, and they brought us many of those same benefits before our culture of protest was derailed. We in America today have a great deal to learn from today's European radicals, and from the activists of the early labor movement.