The Peripatetic Philosopher reflects on:

The Great Giveaway!

The Complicit Con of Workers and Labor Unions!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© July 21, 2015

In the United States, the assimilation of labor to capital became apparent after the grand bargain of labor unions for workers of the 1950s, when unions in the steel and car industries traded their control over the shop floor for security and steady wages.

Steven Fraser, “The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power" (2015)

When I was a lad in the 1950s, I would spend part of every summer in Detroit, Michigan where my uncle, Dr. Leonard M. Ekland, was Chairman of the Department of Finance and Commerce at the University of Detroit. 

My uncle had a nice home but I noticed that hourly workers in the Detroit automotive industry, kids I played baseball with, had nicer homes with more amenities.  

My teammates lived in neighborhoods in which everyone in the extended family to grandparents worked at General Motors, Ford or Chrysler, and none of the boys I played with planned to go to college, bragging they could make more money building cars than a doctor of medicine could make with eight years of college.

I asked my Uncle Leonard about this, and he said, “Your friends exaggerate a little but not by much.”  He then told me how workers had forfeited their power for cash, and that ultimately they would be the losers in the bargain.

From that point forward, I was something of a student of the working man having a father with only a seventh grade education barely making a living, while myself feeling somewhat envious of these families in my summers in Detroit. 

By the accident of circumstances, I would work as a laborer in the summers of the 1950s in a large refinery that turned Iowa corn into starch, gluten, sugar, lactic acid and syrup, receiving the same wages as other workingmen in that work, which provided me with sufficient funds to acquire a college education.  

I remember from those days my uncle remarking that workers had no power, but many perks because they belonged to a shortsighted union that mirrored Detroit's automotive management's greed.  This made no sense to me at the time.   

It was the gravy train years of labor with the gratuitous magnanimity of management as benefactor.  

By the 1960s, a professional class of workers was inching its way into the workforce.  It was also the post-WWII days of management euphoria.

Prudence was put aside with management voting itself more and more of the economic pie while solidifying its power and dominance over labor.  

Little did I know that one day I would participate in this economic holocaust of the workers' status quo.  

However, I have never been comfortable with this.  After all, I came out of the labor working class and took no comfort watching it become the underclass.

Not being an academic, economist or historian, perhaps in my directness, I have come off more angry and agitated than persuasive.  

Whatever the perception, for the past quarter century, I have written a series of books and scores of articles with the central theme of workers' acquiescence or compliance in the face of their eroding power and dignity.

Compounding the problem the professional working class out of which I came is behaving precisely the same and has been doing so since the 1970s.

Today, management is anachronistic (see Work Without Managers (1991, 2^nd edition 2014) and managers are atavistic (see The Worker, Alone! (1995, 2^nd edition 2015), while compensation and perks no longer enjoy any equity with either blue-collar or white collar workers as senior management has come to exercise a greed never before imagined (see Corporate Sin (2000, 2^nd edition 2014).

Paradoxically, what is abominable about this is that 90 percent of the workforce in the United States today is professional with a clear intellectual edge with a knowledge power that far exceeds the relevance or efficacy of management’s position power.

Yet, workers, college trained or not, are behaving obeisantly to management's demands as if work is in a time warp of the 1950s.

A HISTORIAN WEIGHS IN ON THE PROBLEM

Labor historian Steve Fraser’s “The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power” argues that deepening economic hardship for workers combined with management’s “insatiable lust for excess” that resembles a Second Gilded Age with the wealth stratification of the Age of the Robber Barons (i.e., Rockefeller, Mellon, Pullman and Carnegie).

As Fraser forcefully shows, during the First Gilded Age, loosely defined between the end of the Civil War and the Stock Market Crash of 1929, American elites were threatened with more than embarrassing statistics.  

They endured a frontal attack from labor with workers fighting and dying when police, the army and thugs dispersed them when they collectively fought for and won substantially higher wages, better workplace conditions, progressive taxation and, ultimately, the modern welfare state.

To solve the mystery of why sustained resistance to wealth inequality has gone missing in the United States ever since, Fraser devotes the first half of the book to documenting the cut and thrust of the First Gilded Age.  He writes: 

The mass movement strikes that shut down cities and enjoyed the support of much of the population; the Eight Hour Leagues that dramatically cut the length of the workday, fighting for the universal right to leisure and time “for what we will”; the vision of a “ ‘cooperative commonwealth’ in place of the Hobbesian nightmare that Progress had become.”

He reminds readers that although “class war” is considered un-American today, bracing populist rhetoric was once the lingua franca of the nation. 

American presidents’ bashed “economic royalists,” and immigrant garment workers demanded not just “bread and roses” but threatened “bread or blood.”

It is inconceivable in these complacent times to imagine this, especially when workers, professional or not, turn the other cheek to have it slapped rather than to put up their hands and fight.  That was not the case in the 1930s and 1940s in the United States.

Of course violence went both ways. Protests and strikes consistently faced bloody attacks from both state forces (National Guard and State Police) and hired guns (thugs).  This prompted the formation of various armed worker militias. Populists and socialists were attacked as “ungrateful hyenas” or “mad dogs,” while conservative newspapers openly called on the state to “exterminate” the “mob.”

Workers ignored this abuse and pushed courageously forward.

The class war, in other words, was no mere metaphor with workers willing to spill blood so that workers in the future would have some kind of life.

Fraser offers several explanations for this wave of the post-Civil War bold labor resistance, including the intellectual legacy of the abolition movement.

Think of it.  The workers' dilemma in their eyes was comparable to slavery.  The fight against slavery had emboldened a radical component of the labor movement to show that the barbarianism of slavery and the market’s capacity of capitalism to enslave workers was equally inhumane.

With bonded labor now illegal, the target pivoted to factory “wage slavery.” This comparison sounds strange to contemporary ears, but as Fraser reminds us, for European peasants and artisans, as well as American homesteaders, the idea of selling one’s labor for money was profoundly alien.

This is key to Fraser’s thesis.

What ­fueled the resistance to the First Gilded Age, he argues, was the fact that many Americans had a recent memory of a different kind of economic system, whether in America or back in Europe.

Many at the forefront of the resistance were actively fighting to protect a way of life, whether it was the family farm that was being lost to predatory creditors or small-scale artisans being wiped out by industrial capitalism. Having known something different from their grim present, they were capable of imagining and fighting for a radically better future.

It is this imaginative capacity that is missing from our Second Gilded Age, a theme to which Fraser returns again and again.

The latest inequality chasm for the professional workforce as well as the underclass of poorly educated workers has opened up at a time when there is no popular memory of another kind of economic system.

As an organizational development (OD) psychologist, I found professionals as reactive and passive, complacent and as accommodating to management as blue-collar workers.

These professionals forget that they have weapons in knowledge and skills, vision and perception, cunning and resilience never before possessed by workers as a collective body, but, alas, they are only schooled in an economic system of compliance and conformity to the demands of management.

Stated another way, they have the intellectual capital that the organization needs and doesn’t have for it doesn't exist in management.

Whereas the activists and agitators of the First Gilded Age straddled two worlds, professionals find themselves fully within capitalism’s matrix. 

So while we can demand slight improvements to our current conditions, we have a great deal of trouble believing in something else entirely.

Fraser devotes several chapters to outlining the key “fables” which, he argues, have served as particularly effective ­resistance-avoidance tools. 

These range from the billionaire as rebel to the supposedly democratizing impact of mass stock ownership to the idea that contract work is a form of liberation. Professionals have bought this con and it is palpable in all their dealings.

Fraser also explores various forces that have a “self-policing” impact from mass indebtedness to mass incarceration; from the fear of having your job deported to the fear of having yourself deported.

Fear is the elixir of control and subliminal spin the mechanism to inculcate the idea of consumerism and capitalism as the natural order of things.  

This growing shift away from responsible challenge of the system towards what Fraser calls “a sensibility of irony and even cynical disengagement rather than a morally charged universe of utopian yearnings and dystopian forebodings” is pervasive. 

With this catalog of disempowerment, which I and other authors have recorded in depressing detail, it has not deterred the production economy from being uncoupled from the financial economy. 

In the Second Gilded Age profitability has depended on the cannibalizing of the industrial factory system erected during the First Gilded Age.  Exporting production and jobs has resulted in capital liquidation to the four corners of the globe. 

Put another way, this dialectic of accumulation and disaccumulation that has become global has hollowed out our American cities and ravaged the lives of our American workers. 

High finance has been allowed to gut the American heartland while layoffs, redundant exercises and reengineering of corporate enterprise has become the runaway key to enhancing Dow Jones Industrials and shareholder value.

Fraser writes:

“What was getting bought, stripped and closed up during the late 20^th century, was the flesh and bone of a century and a half of American manufacturing.”

By the 1990s, for the first time in more than a century, the life expectancy among the less well educated declined and upward mobility shifted into reverse.      

 AN EXISTENTIAL JOURNEY THAT CONFIRMS BUT QUESTIONS THE EFFICACY OF FRASER’S THESIS

It has been the nature of my life and work that not only have I spent much of my time in the climate of Steven Fraser’s thesis, but I have worked or been involved in virtually every aspect of American society.  Many of my generation can claim the same.

This is from being a student in parochial and public schools, land grant and private universities:

Then a laborer in a manufacturing facility, a chemist in R&D, chemical sales engineer, line manager in the field and an executive in the corporation, working internationally, among which included the facilitating of the formation of a new company in South Africa.

It also involved acting as consultant to Fortune 500 companies, then in a staff function as an OD psychologist in a Fortune 100 company, and later a staff executive in its international division.

A stint followed as an academic in the role of an adjunct professor, and finally as a lecturer, keynote speaker, and author of fiction and nonfiction books in the genre of work, workers and the workplace.

Working five summers as a laborer I found workers complained but never to the boss.  When I was an R&D chemist in the same company, technicians and chemist behaved the same.  

I saw passive behaviors as a chemical sales engineer and consultant to Fortune 100 companies, and as a field manager and international executive.   

Later, in the process of acquiring my Ph.D., I saw academics behaving just as childish as laborers and chemists.  Indeed, I found academia resembled a factory more than any other type. 

Then as a consultant to Fortune 500 companies and a contract consultant to The American Management Association, I saw the same behavior with private as well as public sector employees.  

Everywhere in every situation I found those employed acquiescing to the demands of those in charge with nary a protest except amongst themselves.  

Steven Fraser sees the climate I describe here as ripe for rebellion and transformation but this rings hollow to this observer. 

Professional workers are still acting like lapdogs.  

Fraser mentions the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, but that tiger had no teeth. 

We are a leaderless society with dissonant workers, but armed with college degrees, which, incidentally, was a modified version of the subtitle of my book, Corporate Sin (2000, 2^nd edition 2014). 

We hear absolutely nothing directly from the leaders of contemporary movements, all of whom are struggling daily with the questions at the heart of this book.

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