Waiting For Flying Saucers

Live Bait and Ammo #160: Waiting for Flying Saucers ?

UAW President Bob King and his corporate partners at GM, Ford, and Chrysler-Fiat will blame the competition they’ve rigged on workers and relentlessly degrade them into believing they are worth less and less as profits rise. That’s not a guess, it’s the drill.

History lessons must be revised before the profiteers of war and labor are able to con workers with the same old lies. We have to be literally vigilant. The most common words in the con man’s lingo are “free” and “lucky”. As in, you are lucky to have a job but you are free to quit if you don’t like it. Unless, of course, you’re enlisted. In which case, you defend freedom while the lucky sit home and collect dividends. The only reason we have enough volunteers in Afghanistan today is because there isn’t enough opportunity in the land of the free. It’s an old story.

When the Confederacy failed to acquire enough volunteers, they instituted conscription with exemptions for important people. Slave owners decided slave owners were too important to fight in the war to defend slavery. The Confederacy granted one exemption for every twenty slaves owned. Thus, a plantation master with one hundred slaves could have an exemption for himself, his three sons, and a nephew. It was, as workers said back then, “A rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.” Men who refused conscription were hung. Their property was confiscated and friends and neighbors were warned not to help the draft dodgers’ women and children. 

Today, working people in the south commonly sport the rebel flag. They’ve been conned into believing that the Civil War was about some principle other than the privileges of slave owners. Through a revision of history, they’ve come to believe that defending slavery was a war for freedom. In fact, the only thing free was labor. Slavery, which provided free labor for the rich, depressed wages for all workers regardless of color. White southern workers not only got screwed, they fought for the honor of getting screwed, and some of them are still defending that honor.

Sometimes the truth is too painful to admit. When facts defy our cherished beliefs, something has to give. We can reject the beliefs we were taught, or we can reject the facts and alter evidence to sustain beliefs that bolster a more glorious version of events.

On December 21, 1954 Marian Keech and a small cult of followers gathered on a hill expecting that the world was going to end and that they, the true believers, would be rescued by flying saucers. When the world didn’t end and flying saucers didn’t appear, Marian and her followers claimed that their faith had saved the world from destruction. Faith can dominate experience because beliefs are not bound by hard facts or natural law. The supremacy of belief over reality is self perpetuating.

We have our own true believers in the UAW. They still believe Bob King and his enforcers have our best interests at heart when they claim that concessions save jobs and workers have to be more competitive. UAW members who believe this Concession Caucus boilerplate are like the workers who fought to defend slavery while the slave owners drank sweet tea on the verandah and cheered them on. One has to wonder where they’ve been for the past thirty years. 

How many more times will American workers be conned into “A rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight?” 

A goldfish lacks foresight because a goldfish doesn’t have any memory. Every time he swims around the bowl, the view is brand new. The struggle against oppression is a struggle against denial and the tendency to forget painful memories. America invaded Iraq because America forgot the Gulf of Tonkin.

- Gregg Shotwell

What Happened?

Some Assembly Required 

by Gregg Shotwell, 1996

“All possible brain work should be removed from the shop floor,” said Frederick Taylor in 1903. As industrialized workers race headlong into the 21st century we seem to be gazing into a rearview mirror where our future recedes before our eyes. We’re on a fast track backward.

Look around. Take your eyes off your repetitive task, your keyboard, your instrument panel, your personal row of buttons. Set your screw driver down and look around.

Have you noticed the high-tech, high-skill jobs disappearing from your plant? Have you observed the actual manufacturing capability of your facility reduced? Piece by piece?

More and more factories have basically become screw driver plants. That is, assembly plants with very little in-house manufacturing and jobs with “no experience required”. We are not only losing jobs, we are losing skills, knowledge, expertise, and ultimately our bargaining power. The less you know, the less value you hold.

While corporations promote countless new programs touting teamwork, progress, and people friendly slogans, the old fashion Taylor System of Scientific Management continues to dominate corporate strategy and accelerate the brain drain.

A key feature of the Taylor system was the dummy down approach. Make every job as stupid as possible. Simplify and standardize procedures into mindless tasks that require minimum (but highly repetitive) motion. Reduce workers’ power by depleting skill, craft, knowledge, and expertise. Minimize individuality. Erase personal pride in the job. Liquidate all sense of ownership. Make workers generic, interchangeable, and replaceable as component parts. Merge classifications. Blur the lines of demarcation.

The current application of Taylorism further depreciates worker value, advances the de-skilling of America, and disassembles solidarity by applying the reduction principle to whole factories. Each manufacturing facility is broken down to its simplest function. Piece by piece, work is removed from the bargaining unit and out sourced to ever smaller and more specialized nonunion suppliers. Even component plants are increasingly dependent on outside suppliers. The strip down process emasculates workers. After ten years in an auto plant you have no marketable skills.

The shakedown process is lubed with sweet talk and enticements. The familiar come-on inviting us to be “partners in the business” is worth less than a pimp’s promise. Wake up. The first indication you’re about to be date raped is an appeal for cooperation.

Once the union/management team is cozily ensconced in the back seat, company con men present the villainous competitive bid, “If we want to save jobs, we have to be competitive. How can we get the cost down?” Boogie. “Now we don’t have room for all the equipment this new product requires. How can we create more space?” Cha-cha. 

The union isn’t busted, it’s disrobed. One piece at a time. Slowly. It’s almost painless.

Have you noticed all the new products require more equipment, less jobs, and lots of out sourcing? (Oh yeah, teamwork too!) The union is gradually reduced by attrition. As the manufacturing process is fragmented, scattered, and decentralized, union shops become smaller and more isolated. Pattern bargaining is shattered. Breaking with tradition the national contract is ratified before local agreements are signed. The solidarity with other plants is broken. Then the isolated victims are whipsawed into cowering shadows of their old confrontational selves.

Skilled trades have not escaped the erosion of skills. The new system contracts out work that requires more knowledge, planning, and experience, such as major construction, complex repairs, and the set up of new machinery. Service reps and engineers set up the new high-tech machines. Skilled trades are left in the dark and reduced to performing simple standard maintenance procedures that require minimal knowledge, ingenuity, troubleshooting savvy, or skill. 

Unions have gradually become smaller and weaker. The UAW has literally been cut in half. How is the leadership responding? With mergers. A strategy gleaned from the CEO’s they play golf with while we are at work. The merger of Auto, Steel, and Machinist unions is a massive cover up for a failure to organize. It won’t stop the out sourcing or the de-skilling of America. It won’t increase union membership. It won’t leverage our bargaining power. It will only conceal the losses a little longer.

Union leaders are busy cutting deals that protect the privileged few at the expense of new hires. The two tier wage system is now an accepted practice. The corporations will build on it. Pattern bargaining is a thing of the past. When Chrysler workers get $7000 bonuses and GM workers get $300, parity is trashed. The UAW has agreed to accept new parts plants at prevailing wage. Welcome Delphi, the whipsawing has just begun. 

We need to take a tip from the CAW. Create a culture of struggle, not cooperation. Stop union shops from competing to see who can bend over the farthest. Make solidarity an action, not a slogan. Promote democracy within the union and demand accountability from the leadership. Be proactive. Take a stand for job ownership. Stop talking about the Flint sit down in ‘37 and take over a plant. Don’t roll over. Fight back. 

Stay Solid, Gregg Shotwell, 1996

Live Bait and Ammo #127

A visit from one of the most insightful writer on workers in America today:

Live Bait & Ammo #127: Two Tiered Too Long

The credit crisis jammed the automakers’ restructuring plan like a semi jackknifed on the highway. But the rescue plan reveals a more insidious malady than credit default swaps and pimped out politicians. Two tier.

Two tier has morphed from a union concession in collective bargaining to a standard American bias. Two tier is a whopping bonus to the rich and a moral hazard whip to the poor. Two tier delivers bailouts to the investor class and foreclosures to the outsourced class. Two tier is not a cure, it’s a curse.

Two tier demands more jails and less schools; more arsenals and less tools; more greed and less kindness; more revenge and less justice.

Two tier is not a solution to economic crisis. Two tier is a symptom of social decadence.

Master Madoff couldn’t devise a more sinister method of bankrupting a family every hour of every day than our two tier system of health insurance. But health care for profit is just another symptom of social decay in the land of the free marketeer and the home of the wage slave.

People express outrage when executives at AIG are rewarded for failure but Delphi workers are used to it. Every three months for the last three years Judge Drain has awarded millions of dollars in bonuses to the very executives whose mismanagement and fraud drove Delphi into a J.P. Morgan financed bankruptcy.

Who believes the government will manage GM and Chrysler differently in a so called “surgical bankruptcy”?

We know where all the cuts will come.

Workers take pay cuts, job cuts, benefit cuts. Executives take home cash in wheel barrows. The crisis in manufacturing can’t be quarantined in Detroit or amputated with buy outs. Every manufacturer in America is on the gurney. We are merging into the ranks of nations who are neither self-sufficient nor independently wealthy. No one needs or desires to import our financial wizardry.

Manufacturing in the US hasn’t failed from a lack of skills or productivity. It was waylaid by a lack of political will to provide (1) universal single payer health care and (2) investment in products that confront the dual challenge of environmental crisis and energy independence.

Government support for more concessions rather than long term investment means more of the same. Two tier is the predicate of class conflict.

A society that degrades rather than rewards labor is self destructive, not competitive. Two tier may prevail in the precincts of law and yellow dog contracts, but sooner or later the underclass will push the pendulum back. Some of us aren’t waiting for leaders to emerge.

When Magna Inc. and their UAW partners presented workers at New Process Gear in Syracuse, NY with an ultimatum—accept more concessions or the plant will close—workers voted to close. Twice. Within weeks of the first vote Magna was back with another offer, but workers had had enough. 

Every crisis has a bottom.

Bottom isn’t a wage cut, a speed up, or an unfair labor practice. Bottom is the point at which one worker says to another worker, “Enough is enough”, and together they begin pushing back. Are we there yet? Are we ready for a national strike? Are citizens ready to defy the corporate state? To occupy Congress?

Not just yet, but I wouldn’t park on the tracks.

Our soldiers are coming home and they’ve been two tiered too long.

sos, Gregg Shotwell