Your's is one example of how individual workers are being taken advantage of
in all kinds of work, and of how the customer or the client or the patient, is
short changed. The same kind of thing is happening to younger doctors,
dentists, lawyers, and certainly to teachers, social workers, rehab workers.
The changes over the past 40 years are so extreme and there is so much lying
about the reality, that's being done by mainstream media, that people really
don't understand what is happening. I suppose that's why Trump manages to have
a 40% approval rating.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Monday, January 14, 2019 2:28 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The 'Private Governments' That Subjugate U.S.
Workers
For some years I've been concerned that American Workers were becoming the
"Subjects" of International Corporate Conglomerates. Not only does the Worker
agree to the job duties, he/she also agrees to other conditions that control
much of the Worker's private life.
For example, I remember when Taxi Cab Companies owned their fleet of cabs, and
hired drivers as company employees. Logging companies hired their crews,
provided them housing and other supplies, depending on the company, and bought
their fleet of logging trucks and hired the drivers. Today all such expenses
are passed onto the workers.
Cabbies and long haul truckers buy their own cabs and trucks. They work under
contract, with all of the overhead being covered by the contract money.
In our case, our employer is the Department of Services for the Blind.
But the DSB contracts with the University of Washington, and the University
contracts with the Rehab Teachers. Although government contracts are not
usually as restrictive as those in the private sector, there does not exist any
ability to negotiate the terms. It's called a contract, but it is more like a
job performance. We are offered a set dollar figure, out of which we agree to
a list of job performances, pay all expenses, licenses, taxes, operating
overhead and client supplies. No sick leave. No vacation leave. No
retirement. With very careful management we usually could count on roughly
half of the contract money for our time. So contracting for
$80,000 for one year, meant that we might realize $40,000 as our gross profit.
While this was a great benefit to the State Agency, the contractors and the
clients were short changed.
Carl Jarvis
On 1/14/19, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The 'Private Governments' That Subjugate U.S. Workers
Truthdig
Corporate dictatorships-which strip employees of fundamental
constitutional rights, including free speech, and which increasingly
rely on temp or contract employees who receive no benefits and have no
job security-rule the lives of perhaps 80 percent of working
Americans. These corporations, with little or no oversight, surveil
and monitor their workforces. They conduct random drug testing, impose
punishing quotas and targets, routinely engage in wage theft, injure
workers and then refuse to make compensation, and ignore reports of
sexual harassment, assault and rape. They use managerial harassment,
psychological manipulation-including the pseudo-science of positive
psychology-and intimidation to ensure obedience. They fire workers for
expressing leftist political opinions on social media or at public
events during their off-hours. They terminate those who file
complaints or publicly voice criticism about working conditions. They
thwart attempts to organize unions, callously dismiss older workers and
impose "non-compete"
contract clauses, meaning that if workers leave they are unable to use
their skills and human capital to work for other employers in the same
industry.
Nearly half of all technical professions now require workers to sign
non-compete clauses, and this practice has spread to low-wage jobs
including those in hair salons and restaurants.
The lower the wages the more abusive the conditions. Workers in the
food and hotel industries, agriculture, construction, domestic
service, call centers, the garment industry, warehouses, retail sales,
lawn service, prisons, and health and elder care suffer the most.
Walmart, for example, which employs nearly 1 percent of the U.S. labor
force (1.4 million workers), prohibits casual conversation, which it
describes as "time theft." The food industry giant Tyson prevents its
workers from taking toilet breaks, causing many to urinate on
themselves; as a result, some workers must wear diapers. The older,
itinerant workers that Amazon often employs are subjected to grueling
12-hour shifts in which the company electronically monitors every
action to make sure hourly quotas are met. Some Amazon workers walk
for miles on concrete floors each shift and repeatedly get down on
their hands and knees to perform their jobs. They frequently suffer
crippling injuries. The company makes injured employees, whom it
fires, sign releases saying the injuries are not work-related.
Two-thirds of workers in low-wage industries are victims of wage
theft, losing an amount estimated to be as high as $50 billion a year.
From 4 million to 14 million American workers, under threat of wage
cuts, plant shutdowns or dismissal, have been pressured by their employers to
support pro-corporate political candidates and causes.
The corporations that in effect rule the lives of American workers
constitute what University of Michigan philosophy professor Elizabeth
Anderson refers to as "private governments." These "workplace governments,"
she writes, are "dictatorships, in which bosses govern in ways that
are largely unaccountable to those who are governed. They don't merely
govern
workers: they dominate them." These corporations have the legal
authority, she writes, "to regulate workers' off-hour lives as
well-their political activities, speech, choice of sexual partner, use
of recreational drugs, alcohol, smoking, and exercise. Because most
employers exercise this off-hours authority irregularly, and without
warning, most workers are unaware of how sweeping it is."
"If the U.S. government imposed such regulations on us, we would
rightly protest that our constitutional rights were being violated,"
Anderson writes in her book "Private Government: How Employers Rule
Our Lives (and Why We Don't Talk About It)." "But American workers
have no such rights against their bosses. Even speaking out against
such constraints can get them fired.
So most keep silent."
Once workers sign contracts they essentially cede their rights as
citizens to the corporations, except the few rights guaranteed by law,
for the duration of the contracts. "Employers' authority over
workers," Anderson writes, "outside of collective bargaining and a few
other contexts, such as university professors' tenure, is sweeping,
arbitrary, and unaccountable-not subject to notice, process, or
appeal. The state has established the constitution of the government
of the workplace; it is a form of private government." These
corporations, by law, can "impose a far more minute, exacting, and
sweeping regulation of employees than democratic states do in any
domain outside of prisons and the military."
These myriad corporate dictatorships, or private governments, ensure
American workers are docile and compliant as the superstructure of the
corporate state cements into place a species of corporate totalitarianism.
The ruling ideology of neoliberalism and libertarianism, used to
justify the corporate domination and social inequality that afflict
us, sells itself as the protector of freedom and liberty. It does this
by subterfuge. It claims workers have the freedom to enter into
employment contracts and terminate them, while ignoring the near-total
suspension of rights during the period of employment. It pretends that
workers and corporations function as independent and autonomous
sellers and buyers, with workers selling their labor freely and
corporate owners buying this labor.
This neoliberal economic model, however, is defective. The
relationship between the corporation and the worker is not the same as
the relationship between a self-employed baker, for example, and his
customers. The self-employed baker and those who buy the bread appeal
to mutual self-interest in the exchange. "The buyer is not an
inferior, begging for a favor," Anderson writes. "Equally importantly,
the buyer is not a superior who is entitled to order the butcher, the
brewer, or the baker to hand over the fruits of his labor. Buyers must
address themselves to the other's interests. The parties each
undertake the exchange with their dignity, their standing, and their
personal independence affirmed by the other. This is a model of social
relations between free and equal persons." (Emphasis by the
author.)
Once a worker is bonded to a corporation, however, he or she instantly
loses this dignity, standing and personal independence, especially if
the job is temporary, entry-level or menial. Relations are no longer
free and equal.
"When workers sell their labor to an employer, they have to hand
themselves over to their boss, who then gets to order them around," Anderson
writes.
"The labor contract, instead of leaving the seller free as before,
puts the seller under the authority of their boss." The worker either
fulfills the demands of management, which he or she has little ability
to question or formulate, or is reprimanded, demoted, sanctioned or
fired. The corporate manager wields total authority over the worker.
"The performance of the contract embodies a profound asymmetry in
whose interests count," Anderson writes, "henceforth, the worker will
be required to toil under conditions that pay no regard to his
interests, and every regard for the capitalist's profits."
Neoliberalism posits that the choice is between a free market and
state control, whereas, as Anderson writes, "most adults live their
working lives under a third thing entirely: private government."
Neoliberalism argues that the essence of freedom is free enterprise,
while never addressing workers'
surrender of basic freedoms. Neoliberalism holds out the promise,
which has not been true since before the Industrial Revolution, that
workers can become self-employed if they are hardworking and
innovative. We all have the ability to achieve economic independence
or become industry leaders if we draw on our inner resources,
according to the neoliberal mantra, one popularized by mass culture.
The neoliberal ideologues' solution to the cannibalization of the
economy is to call for fostering a nation of entrepreneurs. This is a
con. Corporations and their lobbyists write the laws and the
legislation, creating a two-tiered legal system in which poverty is
criminalized and we are controlled, taxed and punished. The corporate
oligarchs, however, live in a world where monopoly, fraud and other
financial wrongdoing are legal or rarely punished and taxes are
minimal or nonexistent. Among the population, only a tiny
percentage-most of whom come from inherited wealth and have been
groomed in elitist, plutocratic universities and institutions-dominate
the corporate hierarchy.
Public discourse, controlled by corporate power, ignores this
one-sided power arrangement. It cannot address a problem it refuses to
acknowledge.
Subjugation is freedom.
Anderson calls this corporate economic system communist-that's
communist with a small "c"-because these private governments "own all
the nonlabor means of production in the society it governs. It
organizes production by means of central planning. The form of the
government is a dictatorship. In some cases, the dictator is appointed
by an oligarchy. In other cases, the dictator is self-appointed."
Private governments, their sanctioning powers lacking the state's
ability to imprison or execute (although they often have internal
security forces with the power to arrest), ensure compliance by using
wholesale surveillance and the threats of demotion and exile, plus the
potential rewards of salary raises and promotions. Also, there usually
is a steady barrage of company propaganda.
"We have the language of fairness and distributive justice to talk
about low wages and inadequate benefits, we know how to talk about the
Fight for $15, whatever side of this issue you are on," Anderson
writes. "But we don't have good ways to talk about the way bosses rule
workers' lives."
American workers have never achieved the array of rights won by
workers in other industrialized countries. At the height of union
representation in 1954, only 28.3 percent of American workers were
union members. This number has fallen to 11.1 percent, with only 6.6
percent of private-sector workers belonging to unions. Wages have for
decades declined or been stagnant. Half of all U.S. workers make less
than $29,000 a year, effectively putting their families in poverty.
Workers, lacking unions and the ability to pressure management through
collective bargaining, have no say in their working conditions. If
they choose to leave abusive employment, where do they go? The
inequalities and the workers' loss of liberty and agency are embedded
within the corporate structure. It is impossible, as Anderson warns,
to build a free, democratic society dominated by private governments.
As these private governments merge into the superstructure of the
corporate state we are cementing into place an unassailable corporate
tyranny. It is a race against time. Our remaining freedoms are being
rapidly extinguished. These omnipotent dictatorships must be
destroyed, and they will only be destroyed by sustained popular
protest such as we see in the streets of Paris. Otherwise, we will be
shackled in 21st-century chains.
Chris Hedges
Columnist
Chris Hedges is a Truthdig columnist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning
journalist, a New York Times best-selling author, a professor in the
college degree program offered to New Jersey state prisoners by
Rutgers.
