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Created: November 25, 2003
Latest Update: November 25, 2003
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Threats to Sophisticated Labor

Site Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, November 2003.
"Fair use" encouraged.

This essay is based on a New York Times article in Sunday, November 23's Business Section: The War Between Street and Floor, by Landon Thomas, Jr. At p. BU1.

I wanted to bring this up in relation to the supermarket strike. Many of us have remained aloof from that strike, sympathizing, especially with the health care issues and the bottom-line emphasis on maximal profit no matter what inherited from the Wal Mart phlosophy, but somehow we've managed enough denial to tell ourselves that this could never happen to us, and the government will take care of any real problems.

So I figure now is the time to discuss more fully responsibility. Don't kid yourself that our government will provide adequate safety nets for anyone who needs them. For business, to assure healthy trade, yes. So agribusiness gets saftey nets. But for common workers, no. And who are common workers? You and me, folks.

Several months ago on the Habermas list, I spoke of myself as a blue collar worker. A colleague on the list suggested that my perceptions of that were wrong and might even be offensive to real blue collar workers. Merriam Webster says blue collar means: "of, relating to, or constituting the class of wage earners whose duties call for the wearing of work clothes or protective clothing." I guess I challenge that definition. My work as an attorney requires the wearing of a navy blue suit. Don't believe me? Go down to the courts and take a look at the clothes. Are those clothes protective? Well, of my admittance into the inclusive group of attorneys, yes.

My work as a teacher requires that I wear clothes recognizable as informal professional. That's a uniform. And my violation of that uniform is noted, and costs me points on inclusion. For lo these many years, I would have argued that I am a professional, and so not a blue collar worker. But what really was the difference? I had control over my work schedule and procedure; I had decision-making power with respect to my professional decisions. I operated more by a code of ethics than by supervision. And I was not alienated from the end product of my work.

Today, that is less and less true. More colleges are going to what they call distance learning, which is a mapping of a single curriculum for many courses. More colleges depend more and more on testing than on my judgment of the professionalism I pass on to my students. I still have a great deal of control over my work schedule and procedure; but that is increasingly not the case with younger professors. And I am held less and less to my own code of professional ethics, and more and more to supervision. All this moves me closer to sharing the dilemma of the blue collar worker.

With increasing exposure to education, the blue collar worker has also changed. She is no longer content to be excluded from decision-making over the rules that control her life. Today she calls it structural violence when her salary at Wal Mart does not provide her with enough of a basic salary to support her family above the poverty level. Today she has learned, through her school and her community, that someone is taking the surplus profit from her work, and leaving her to poverty. She may have to feed her children, so she may not be able to walk out on Wal Mart, but she knows and feels her exploitation.

The supermarkets in L.A., driven to match Wal Mart's profits, has refused negotiation, and shown little willingness to listen in good faith to the worker's dilemma. Somehow, I don't expect my dilemma as a professor to be heard with much greater good faith. It will be a little longer before I grow as desperate as the grocery clerks, but the time will come when we all suffer equally the costs of such exploitation.

Too many of us are responding in the fast paced world of today with an exhausted wail that there's really not much we can do. Yes, there is much that we can do. Break the silence. Express your anger. Express an understanding of where such exploitation leads. Express it to your friends, to your family, to the local store clerk, to the local store manager (if she doesn't scare you); express it at your church, at your kids' school, at your local city council meeting. Such grave indifference to the well being of our fellow citizens is a terrible thing. It needs to be held up constantly to public ridicule in every social and political situation available to us.

People cannot be forced to work for subhuman wages if we all raise our voices. You can't raise your voice unless you understand the issues, of both sides. Learn. Listen. Take the counsel of your religious or political leaders, imams, rabbis, priests, and teachers. Ask questions. And remember the second world war saying: When first they came for the Jews, and I wasn't a jew, I said nothing. Then they came for the homosexuals, and I wasn't a homosexual, so I said nothing. Then they came for the gypsies, and I wasn't a gypsy, so I said nothing. And on and on, until when they came for me, there was no one left to turn to for help and support.

In learning, who do you listen to? Someone who, as a person, you can admire for the right reasons. Not because she's rich, or famous, or powerful; but because she acts on and believes in the same values of respect for human beings and human rights that you do. When I say right reasons, you know there are no right answers, so what do I mean? I mean that in the paradigm I believe in, one should not exploit another because one can, one should not profit at the expense of another who is less aggressive or crafty or "with it." That's because I want to live in a world where there is no group of people exploited because they have less of anything than another group. I mean that one should not harm another if such harm can possibly be avoided, for the Other is human, too. I mean that one should listen in good faith to the Other, for I believe in answerability.

There is no right answer. I cannot tell you that my way is best. That's the trouble with a paradigm. But I can tell you that you should be aware when you choose who to listen to, that you are deciding for yourself the values in which you believe, and that somehow, in some way you will have to take responsibility for those values.

Taking refuge at this point in the social distance we may feel from the plight of the supermarket workers may come back to bit us in the tush, when we discover that our own jobs are really not at all unlike theirs. The former president of this college informed faculty repeatedly that we just cost too much and he needed to cut those costs. Now, how's that different from the food workers???

And in the New York Times article that prompted this essay, Wall Street financial advisors, big money professionals, are discovering, if they read carefully between the lines, that their jobs aren't so different from ours.

"Like other firms, Goldman has discovered that the equities business model does not work anymore," said John Hewitt, a former top executive in the Goldman Sachs electronic trading group. He said that in his opinion, a billion-dollar research organization was too expensive to support. "Traditionally this business has been supported by business and banking,'' he said. "But on the banking side there is insufficient business, and on the transaction side, there are not enough trades at a nickel a share to support a billion dollars of anything." At p. 9.

Sounds an awful lot like my former president saying that faculty cost too much. Sounds like financial researchers cost too much, too. Whenever the bottom line is permitted to rule, with little or no regard to the structural violence that such profit mongering engenders, we all become blue collar workers. We may not need protective gear for our work, but we sure will for our survival.

I leave you with the message that silence is complicity. No, that doesn't mean you have to picket or speak to the manager or write to the president of whatever. It means that you must not be silent within yourself, for you have the gift of answerability. And it means that you must work hard at learning to use that gift effectively in the interest of all humankind. It also means you'll need to think deeply about the values you believe in, in the interest of all humankind.