On the Job Treadmill in a Corporate Cage
Prisoners used
to know all about treadmills. They were big wheels, like old-fashioned
water wheels, powered by the weight of prisoners endlessly walking
forward and, of course, getting nowhere.
The turning wheel held several prisoners, all treading forward for hours on end. It was used to power other machines.
But really it was a form of punishment.
Has much changed? Today we're virtual prisoners, chained in our cubicles, toiling for 'the man'.
We're replacable pawns to further profits. Yet, there's no revolution,
no anger, no challenge to the status quo. We accept our lot, programmed
to obey authority.
Wasn't that what school was all about? Sitting behind a desk for six
hours, mindlessly bored. Just being 'trained' to fit into the new-style
treadmill of work.
Got to work hard in school and get good grades so you can get a good
job so you can buy everything you want... and if you don't get a
'proper' job, you're a 'failure'.
To compensate for the boredom and futility of work we chase the
'rewards' of consumerism, borrow more money to buy status symbols, and
then have to work harder to pay off our debts. Life is a bitch and then
you die. [1]
Management by Stress
Bosses and neoliberal ideologues tell us modern capitalism has changed our lives and the way that we work.
According to them, the world of work has changed dramatically since the
years of poverty, lack of control and constant work that characterised
the lives of workers at the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
But the world of work hasn't changed that much, as many workers could testify.
How many of us have had to put up with Human Resource Management?
Workers have become used to "key performance indicators", "team
working', "appraisals" and a whole battery of measures that go under
the rubric of "flexibility" and "modernisation".
Modernisation means more exploitation. Karl Marx described this process
as the bosses' desire to "fill up the pores of the working day".
He wrote in the mid-19th century about the brutal effect this has on
people's lives: "It steals the time required for the consumption of
fresh air and sunlight.
"It haggles over a mealtime, incorporating it where possible with the
process of production itself. It reduces the sound sleep to just so
many hours of torpor as the revival of an organism, absolutely
exhausted, renders essential."
That is a description which is just as relevant today, whether you are
a slave to a factory production line or to a computer in a call centre.
[2]
The World Isn't Flat
The vision of the globalized world that Thomas Friedman offers in his book [
The World is Flat - A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century] is a rose-tinted, cheery, bullish version, one that has little to do with reality, according to the authors.
Friedman's 'golf course account' of globalization revels in accounts of
successful businesses and people. Friedman proffers a vision of a
globalized world that has an essentially 'flat' meritocratic global
playing field, and provides limitless opportunities for profit for
people who are intelligent or who choose to invest in schooling.
He seasons his 'analysis' with accounts of his unmitigated fascination
with gadgetry, and unbridled confidence in technology. Friedman's
conjuring of this globalized world is in fact so utopic that even the
familiar hindersome 'olive tree' is missing.
Only rearing up its head in the Middle East to let you in on the fact
that its only the backward culture that's holding the Arab civilization
back from the wonderful riches of the flat world.
There are no losers in Friedman's flat world - only people for whom it
may take a little longer to get their piece of the pie, for example the
Chinese sweatshop worker who saves up to educate his kids who then go
on to get better jobs and better pay. Of course, Friedman is wrong.
Globalization is a highly complex interaction of forces. Not only does
it exhibit integration, it also exhibits disintegration. It is rooted
in cooperation--and it is rooted in violence.
For some, it represents the triumph of free-market capitalism over
communism, ushering in democracy, world peace and universal prosperity.
For others, it represents conflict, unbridled greed, deregulated corporate power, and an utter disregard for humanity."
There are the shrinking white collar jobs, the vanishing health and
retirement benefits, and the simultaneous mass exploitation of the poor
in the global third world.
This attrition, this slide to the bottom, on both sides of the globe,
argue the authors, is due to one single mechanism - the transnational
corporations whose gargantuan profits have been fuelled by leeching the
job security from the white collar workers in the west and extorting
labor and resources from the unprivileged. [3]
The Profits of Exploitation
Wal-Mart—the largest private retailer in the United States—is about to
completely change the system it uses for scheduling workers’ shifts.
Last year, the company implemented the new system for a portion of its
workers, including cashiers and office personnel. This year, Wal-Mart
will begin using the system for all of its 1.3 million workers.
The system, developed by Kronos Inc., uses data from previous years
along with new information on individual store sales, transactions,
units sold and customer traffic to create a "cost-cutting" schedule.
Workers will now be asked to work shifts during those times in which potential profits are the highest.
Wal-Mart is not alone in implementing the so-called scheduling
optimization system. Payless Shoe Source expects to have this system in
300 of its 4,000 stores by the end of January 2007. RadioShack and
Mervyns are also implementing the new system.
Nikki Baird of Forrester Research said, "There's been a new push for labor optimization."
"Labor optimization" is a euphemism for an attack on worker rights.
While the implementation of this system is a new tactic in the bosses’
constant drive to increase the exploitation of workers, it is anything
but a new push.
The bosses must compete with each other to constantly increase the rate
of profit. They consistently work to undermine workers’ job stability,
wages and benefits while increasing their workloads.
Wal-Mart is also an example of the criminality of the entire capitalist
class. Along with hundreds of other companies like it, Wal-Mart is
guilty of stealing millions of dollars in unpaid wages and benefits
from workers. [4]
The Corporate Cube-Farm
It is the right of working people to have jobs free of exploitation.
The sweat shop of old has now become the corporate cube-farm where
employees are still required to work long hours without sufficient pay.
Instead of paying workers by the hour, the corporations came up with
the ego-assuaging idea of designating nearly all positions as
"salaried" which means they are free of overtime costs.
Workers are laid off, their pensions diverted to deceptive "401K" plans
that often means they will not be free to retire ~ ever.
CEOs of corporations drive Jaguars and send their kids to Harvard while
low-wage workers wonder how to feed their kids and get medical care.
Most people at all ranges of the socio-economic scale work long hours,
denying them adequate time to nurture their family lives.
Kids are stuck in impersonal day care centers where mothers and fathers
have little input into their upbringing. Day care workers promote
capitalistic and consumerist values to the children.
Now we go into the next phase of worker exploitation called
"globalization". Worker security is forfeited in the name of corporate
profit while workers in third world countries are exploited without
even the minimal protections of workers in the US.
The propaganda machine cranks out endless justifications, all of them
cloaked in positive language, to make this sound like "progress". [5]
The Unending Benefits of Capitalism [for a Few]
In December, 2006, Goldman Sachs, a Wall Street financial services
company, announced a sixteen and a half billion dollar bonus for its
26,500 employees, an average of $623,418 per employee. Their newly
appointed CEO received a bonus of $52,000,000.
With the rain of riches falling upon Wall Street these days, the
practice of distributing rewards at the top is picking up steam.
CEOs and executives at Lehman Brothers and Morgan Stanley are receiving
bonuses as high as $60 million. The manna from heaven continues to
fall, and the optimists just want to let the good times roll. They see
the benefits of Capitalism unending. Halleluiah! We're on a bonus march!
If Karl Marx were alive and well today, and living in America, he might
not even recognize the economic system that he critiqued and analyzed
in Das Kapital, when he wrote it in 1867. It wasn't a bad call.
Starting with primitive capital accumulation to feed the Industrial
Revolution, small commodity production developed. It was a snowball
rolling down hill. Mergers and acquisitions were the inevitable result.
Monopoly, imperialism and war followed, stimulated by the grab for raw
materials from less developed areas around the world. The creation of
surplus value and profit, of course, was the key to it all.
Marx might not have believed the working class would have allowed it to
have gotten this bad. The amount of profit being raked in by the
corporate class is obscene. It certainly would have boggled his mind.
The coming world economic crisis is long past due. It wouldn't be just
a stock market crash. It would be the total collapse of the
house-of-cards still called "capitalism" today.
All that is needed is a single spark-like China calling in its
paper-the debt that the US has accumulated to finance the Iraq war and
other catastrophes.
When the collapse comes, the question is, will there be enough time and
enough of the natural world left to start rebuilding a new kind of
society that has been demonized for generations called "socialism". [6]
[1]
Ed Strong
[2]
Socialist Worker
[3]
Desicritics
[4]
Nathalie Hrizi
[5]
Chani
[6]
Stephen Fleischman
Writings 
In reality there is nothing "modern" about the concept. It is as old as capitalism. Its real meaning is the same as it always has been "You have to work harder and longer."
Subscribe to this comment's feed
