Author: john mcgowan

On Unions

Boltanski and Chiapello (B&C hereafter) devote a whole chapter to the decline of labor unions. Contrary to what I believed, labor unions are, in fact, very weak in France and have been getting weaker steadily since the 1960s. Their weakness is measured in the steep decline of the number of strike days imposed on capitalist enterprises each year and in rapidly declining membership.

Of course, strikes have become almost non-existent in the US. France, at least, has a tradition of “general strikes,” i.e. of people taking to the street to protest various government policies. The French demonstrations have some bite because, unlike American demonstrations, they do not take place on weekends and thus actually—and sometimes seriously—disrupt business as usual. At the very least, I’d say, you have to have a significant number of workers not showing up for work for a demonstration to have any leverage on either the economic or political powers that be.

In short, only actions that impact the bottom line will garner a response. Witness the power of a firm like Marriott when it weighs in against discriminatory legislation against gays. Making such legislation carry an economic cost—as happened in both Arizona and North Carolina—has been just about the only effective strategy against right-wing legislation over the past ten years.

B&C’s question is why the transition to neoliberalism occurred without very much being mounted in the way of resistance. “Changes in the world of work during this period continued to prompt complaints or indignation. But the institutions traditionally responsible for transforming complaint—a way of expressing discontent that remains attached to people in their particularity—into a general condemnation and public protest were widely discredited and/or paralysed at the time” (273).

The particular institution that had been dismantled was the union. I want to dwell for a moment on the general point—and it is my disagreement with Occupy and Hardt/Negri. Getting people out onto the street via Twitter cannot substitute for having the institutions that will translate that expressed discontent into power that can be brought to bear against the opposing powers that are exploiting people.

It is, of course, an old story in the US, one that dates back to the 1950s (but not to the 1930s): the quiescence of the workers. Why do they let themselves be mistreated? It is certainly not that they don’t see the mistreatment. It is because they don’t see an alternative, a truly effective way to force a change in the conditions of work.

In the 1950s were pretty bad, the 2000s are much worse. Now there are no strikes at all, and just about no collective bargaining. Each worker is on his or her own, negotiating for herself in terms of salary, and subject to workplace rules that are simply imposed from above and against which she waives all rights of appeal upon signing the work contract. In the state employment system in which I oversaw a staff of seven, it was the worst of both worlds for my staff members. They were constrained by the salary ranges within a job “band” (hence a collectively designated wage), but got none of the benefits of being part of a collective because all of the details of working conditions, as well as the established salaries for each band, were not a product of or subject to collective bargaining. It was take it or leave it.

B&C give a meticulous account of the multiple causes of deunionization. The economic causes—subcontracting, the movement to part-time or short-term contracts, rising unemployment, smaller, integrated (i.e. mixing levels of workers) work teams that had the effect of isolating workers from one another, individualized performance reviews and bonuses that differentiate among workers doing the same jobs—are many and powerful. Some of them were deliberately adopted to weaken the strength of unions. Others were driven more by the new management ideas about how to increase productivity. Others still (like rising unemployment and the downward pressure on wages) could be linked to macro-economic factors beyond any firm’s or even any state’s (simple or obvious) control.

But they also insist on the affective dimension. Here’s what I take to be the most plausible case to be made along those lines; I am inspired here by B&C but not following them exactly. My account is more my way of making sense of the transformation. And here academia seems pretty much in line with the rest of the economic world. The key is the fairly rigid distinction between permanent employees and those who are non-permanent. On the one hand, the insiders (those with tenure in the academy, or the essential workers who are central to a firm’s “core mission”) are given a ladder to climb—one that makes it imperative to manage one’s career, to enhance (at every turn) one’s “human capital.” In the business world, this becomes in B&C’s terms, the “projective” model. One attaches oneself to successive projects—and networks out from them to the next project. The workers who show an ability to bring projects to successful completion become highly prized—and efforts are made to “retain” them. The winners in this contest are those who develop—and show off—rare and valuable skills.

The losers, on the other hand, are those who do something that lots of other people can also do. They are easily replaceable (given high rates of unemployment) and, thus, need not be retained on long-term contracts. The firm gains much needed “flexibility” by having workers it can easily let go when economic conditions demand, while it can also save money by outsourcing non-core functions to subcontractors, who (inevitably) pay workers less and offer little to nothing in the way of benefits. (Of course, the benefits debacle is fairly unique to the US. Health benefits are not tied to employment elsewhere.)

How does this connect to the decline of unions? Pretty straightforwardly. The winners have nothing that the want or could get from a union. Their leverage against an employer is entirely individual. They can threaten to take their skills elsewhere—the infamous “outside offer” of academia. They are their own best advocates—and they are negotiating with the employer for something for themselves, not for any collective, not for colleagues and fellow workers.

Once shorn of these highly prized workers, the winners that the enterprise sees as vital to its success, the union loses much power. And when the firm outsources to subcontractors (who are, invariably, nonunion shops), the union even loses the workers who would find a union crucial to their interests. For the lower level workers still left in the firm, their loyalty to the union is undermined by the union’s impotence. The union has done—and seems incapable of doing—anything for them; it cannot prevent outsourcing and it hasn’t the strength to either win significant wage increases or improved working conditions in negotiations in which management seems to hold all the trump cards. Instead, the union (where it still exists) negotiates a set of “concessions” that make working conditions and wages worse in order to protect the existence of what jobs still remain. And going on strike is off the table because the union isn’t strong enough to make a strike actually effective.

No wonder, then, that any affective connection to the union is lost. All the union has ever done is to agree to “concessions” and it is taking my money while proving spectacularly ineffective in promoting or protecting my interests.

Thus, the decline of unions is easy to understand. But that decline has had disastrous consequences. It has left workers utterly naked in the face of neoliberalism. The obvious question, then, is what institution can provide that crucial transition (that B&C identify) from randomized complaints/discontent to effective transformation of the causes of those complaints?

Frankly, I don’t see any alternative to the state as that institution. So that’s where I will go in subsequent posts.

The New Spirit of Capitalism

I am 270 pages into Boltanski and Chiapello’s The New Spirit of Capitalism and hopelessly behind on the list of topics raised by the book that I’d like to write blog posts about.

The book is nothing less than an attempt to update Max Weber for neoliberalism. What is the spirit of capitalism—the ethos that provides justifications and motivations—for the individuals who live and work under capitalism’s current regime? The argument, then, like Weber’s is that economic determinism is not sufficient for an explanation of why prevailing capitalist practices change. The move from Keynesian welfare-state capitalism to neo-liberalism is not solely motivated by a response to shifting “objective” conditions: i.e. the 1970s oil shock, globalization, the new digital technologies. Boltanski and Chiapello by no means ignore those factors, but insist that “spiritual” changes in mind-set and ideas of justice and of the “good life” also play a role. Concretely, they argue that “critiques” of capitalism have an impact—and that capitalism shifts its practices to respond to and disarm those critiques. Capitalism, in other words, must align itself, at least to some extent, to the desires enunciated in critique if it expects to find willing adherents, productive and engaged workers. A capitalism that simply exploited workers outright without offering any plausible justification of its practices (in terms of claims that those practices are just and redound to the common good, and in terms of personal satisfactions that it can offer individuals within a capitalist society), they claim, would be unsustainable.

I am not utterly convinced. Sheer economic need is a powerful motivator—and when combined with powerlessness can lead people to acquiesce (however reluctantly) in a social and economic system that can also recognize as oppressive. There is every evidence that slaves in the American South hated the conditions under which their lives were lived, but failed to rebel because rebellion seemed futile. They didn’t like the life they had, but recognized no realizable alternative to it. Surely many in the world today experience their lives similarly.

But—and this is the great strength of this remarkable book—any large-scale change in social (think of changing definitions of marriage), political (think of the transition from monarchies to democracies), or economic (think of the transition from Keynesian to neo-liberal regimes) practices will be accompanied by lots and lots of words. Those words are the ideological explanations/justifications of the shift: why it is necessary, desirable, deplorable, to be resisted, to be assisted. Boltanski and Chiapello (in ways I full-heartedly endorse) want to use the term “ideology” as a completely neutral designator. An ideology is simply the discursive justification of, along with an attempt to understand, a particular social formation. Whether that ideology is true or false, plausible or risible, is a separate matter. All sides to the issue will produce their ideological account of it. They want to reserve judgment to a second stage of evaluation. At the outset, all ideologies are created equal; all are aiming for the same thing: to justify and motivate.

So, for today at least, let me just focus on one concrete example of their approach at work. Trade unions. Without a doubt, there has been an aggressive assault upon unions by the forces of neoliberalism. Equally without a doubt, the decline of unions has been an almost completely unmitigated disaster for under-skilled and under-educated workers. What B and C call the “casualization” of work—and what more recent writers have begun to call the “precariat”—has been enabled by the destruction of unions able to pose a credible threat to employers’ undermining job security.

At its most moralistic and nostalgic, leftists bemoaning this shift will locate its ideological component as the shift from collectivism to individualism. (Often, of course, this is identified as a particular sin/failing of Americans. But B & C document the same shift in France.) Union workers understood that they held their fate in common. They steadfastly refused to jettison their “solidarity.” But a new selfishness has allowed a “divide and conquer” strategy on the part of the evil capitalists to win.

Such denunciatory readings of the situation fail, however, to capture the ways in which individualism is plausible and motivating. Any teacher who has asked students to do “group work” knows the problem. I also encountered it in concrete terms when I managed a staff of seven at the university. Because my staff existed within a “step system,” the best workers could not be rewarded with a pay raise, since all employees who shared a certain job designation/description received the same pay. The inevitable result was that my best workers were constantly looking for new jobs as a means to getting a higher salary, while my mediocre workers stayed put. I could not keep good staff. It made perfect sense for those who could to seek higher paying jobs.

In other words, worker solidarity only makes sense when there is a very large group of workers who are all essentially doing the same work, with the same level of skill required. Even there, annoyance (or worse) directed at the incompetent or the lazy will arise. But in any organization where there are many different skill levels needed, where a path for advancement to a higher level job is relatively open, solidarity doesn’t only lose its appeal. It doesn’t even make much sense. I am not a worker on the factory line today and expect to be one come thirty years from today. Rather, I am in a position that I assume that I will grow out of—and do not want to be tied down to someone who is content in the position I also, for this moment, occupy.

Certainly, we can bemoan the worker’s ambition, the mindset that has her focused on how she will advance over her lifetime to better jobs than her current one. But can we really say she would be better off without that mind set? Do we really want to tie her to one job for life? With all my leftist sympathies, I couldn’t possibly advise my young, ambitious staff to do anything but continue to look for paths to advancement. I had no right to stand in their way in the name of an ideal of worker solidarity.

And it is precisely that—the feeling that there is only one obvious response, only one ethical path—when faced with a situation that defines a “spirit.” Theoretically supportive of unions, I could intellectually understand the basis of the step system under which my staff operated. But practically, on the ground, as a matter of practical reason (in precisely the Aristotelian and Kantian sense), I could only recommend behavior that undermined that system. That’s what it means to say there is a “new spirit” in town.

Unintelligible

The world no longer makes sense to me. Boltanski and Chiapello (in their superb book, The New Spirit of Capitalism [Verso, 2005]) talk about the need for intelligibility and, crucially, insist that intelligibility, which underwrites motivation, must include some standard of justice. Only such a standard makes judgment possible, thus creating ways to select between possible courses of action and different assessments of people. Justice is not the only standard. Efficiency and profit (cost/benefits analysis) are also standards employed in making decisions. But pure cynicism is very, very rare. Some notion of justice always acts as a “constraint” upon efficiency and profit. Pure greed is not a motive many are willing to embrace—and fewer are willing to publicly announce as their sole purpose. Crucially, Boltanski and Chiapello insist that the standards of justice provide real and effective brakes on capitalism’s search for profit. It is not true that anything goes. Some kind of working compromise—one that is intelligible and deemed legitimate—between justice and capitalist exigencies has to be in place.

Just what compromise exists at any given moment varies. That is the burden of their book. The think that we have, since 1990 (or so), entered a new “spirit of capitalism,” a new way of understanding (and internalizing) its justificatory bases. The justification of capitalism is both the way it publicly explains itself and the source of personal motivation for individual actors.

And here is where I run into my current trouble. In terms of the academy, the demand of “publish or perish,” and the assignment of status (among other rewards) on those who publish the most, now seems to me insane. Society is paying for us (the academics) to fill up libraries with books and journals that are mostly not read and which are incredibly redundant. The only possible justifications that I can see are: 1. You need to seed the field prodigally in order to get the 2-3% of work that represents real advancements of knowledge. Research is just inherently a very wasteful process, and we should just accept that fact—although it is one that is almost never acknowledged. And certainly this justification of the whole academic edifice is never offered in public as the primary one. 2. You need to have all that mediocre research in order that educators remain up to date with the advancement of knowledge in their fields. Since it is important for the educated (i.e. our students) to know what is the current best knowledge, their teachers have to be au currant.

I really don’t see any other convincing account of the whole research apparatus of the universities. In my field especially, picking over the carcass of Moby Dick seems particularly pointless—even while having students read Moby Dick still seems to me a very good idea. Which means we have our priorities exactly backwards, emphasizing the “research” over the teaching.

At the societal level, it seems to me that we have entered an age of cynicism that calls Boltanski and Chiapello’s view of justice as a real constraint overly optimistic. What has been so discouraging about the past year (from the election through to the efforts to repeal Obama-care and alter the tax code to favor the rich and corporations) is that appeals to justice are simply off the table. “Winning” is enough justification. We need to make America “more competitive” and we need to insure that we are economically better off and militarily stronger than every other nation. This looks like fascism because the average citizen is expected to identify with the nation’s “win” even when no benefits of that winning accrue to him. It’s sacrifice for the average Joe in order to secure the national victory.

Sure, there is some claptrap about freedom and some gestures toward meritocracy. But they are so obviously claptrap (how is getting cancer a matter of merit, of failed individual effort?; for that matter, what did the laid-off worker do to deserve her fate?) that no one, in this age of cynicism, is taken in. Rather, it is sauve qui peut and the devil take the hindmost. And that’s why the world no longer makes sense to me. Such naked disregard for others, such straight-forward hostility to any notions of justice or of the common good are, quite simply, incredible. Especially since people, in their face-to-face interactions, don’t act this way. Yet they vote for politicians whose cynicism and venery, whose lack of commitment to the people they are supposed to serve, are on vivid display every day.

All the polls show that people want government guaranteed health care, want the rich taxed more heavily, want the “dreamers” granted legal status, want sensible gun control. But then they vote for representatives who refuse to deliver any of those things. That makes no sense to me. I don’t understand this world anymore.