Slashdot Mirror
Sociologist: Job Insecurity Is the New Normal
Mr.Intel writes: Allison Pugh, professor of Sociology at University of Virginia, and author of The Tumbleweed Society: Working and Caring in an Age of Insecurity, says workers in the U.S. are caught up in a "one-way honor system," in which workers are beholden to employers. She says that the golden era when Americans could get a job, keep it, and expect to retire with an adequate pension are over. JP Morgan Chase has cut 20,000 from its workforce in the past 5 years, last year HP cut 34,000 jobs, and many others have announced layoffs. In this interview Pugh talks about the social effects of this "insecurity culture."
How about a blast from the past.. "within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness of labour are brought about at the cost of the individual labourer; all means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital."
Karl Marx, Capital, Vol 1: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production
Consumers want more product for less money: Greedy.
Companies want higher profit margins off their products: Greedy.
Investors want higher returns on investment: Greedy.
Upper management sees that there is no way to fulfil all of the above and still give themselves huge pay rises without laying off half the riff-raff and making the other half work twice as hard for half as much: Greedy
Cue ever-decreasing circle as consumers earn less and want even more for it, in the hope of compensating for their shrinking earnings, thus repeating the circle. No single tier here is to blame; we ALL are in a more abstract manner. The blame lies squarely with basic human nature and the words "I want".
It's not a surprise really. Right now, unless you happen to live in one of the few states where companies are required to offer you more than simply at-will employment, or you're one of the few people still in a union, you pretty much have few protections against the company deciding to fire you tomorrow, whether in the name of downsizing, outsourcing, or just deciding that they don't want to pay someone with your level of experience instead of getting some fresh undergrad desperate to pay off student loans who'll work for a fraction of your salary.
And yes, as much as people decry unions, and the abuses that comes with unions, that's your answer in terms of balancing the power. One person alone just doesn't have the power, unless they're being hired for an executive/C-level position. Can unions abuse their power? Absolutely, so stay involved, vote in your union elections, make sure your union reps are doing their jobs. It's sometimes easier said than done, but it can be better than the alternative. That's what we had to do the last time things were like this, roughly 100 years or so ago.
The big corporations have bought enough presidents and members of congress (in BOTH parties) who allow them to violate the rules of the marketplace. We no longer live in the American free market place, we live in a split economy run by cronies. The average person lives in the consumer half, foreign workers live in the producer half, and the big corporations, investor class, and politicians live astride those two halves (enjoying the benefits of each half and dodging the downsides of each half). This is absolutely NOT free market capitalism.
These corporations demand all the protections of the American marketplace (including things like large consistent marketplace, a stable legal system, stable banking system, intellectual property laws that are actually enforced, and more) but then when the natural laws of supply and demand would hurt them (in labor costs) they ship work out of that market or import cheaper workers into it thereby escaping the rules of the marketplace. BOTH parties let them do it in exchange for "campaign contributions".
Do not vote "R" or "D". Vote for the individual, of whatever party and stop letting them destroy the middle class by using "wedge issues" to distract you. They want you to vote R or D to "protect choice" or to "stop abortion", or to "protect marriage equality" or to "preserve traditional marriage" but the reality is that these things are all being decided by judges in courts and the politicians on both sides have no intention of solving any of them (solving them would remove the issue and eliminate a tool for motivating the party base). What is CERTAIN, however, is that most of these politicians on BOTH sides of the aisle will do whatever the wall st investment bankers who fund their campaigns tell them to do (i.e. continue the destruction of the middle class). There is a reason why the establishment candidates of BOTH parties ("->Hillary" and "Jeb!") share so many Wall St banker backers.
I don't know if this is representative, but I've found that employees who are treated as disposable often treat their jobs at disposable. In other words, job hopping is often at the employee's initiative. They are ready to look for new work the minute their old job feels a bit more insecure, and are ready to jump at a new job if they are offered new benefits. Note that I said benefits, not security. It is assumed that job security does not exist so it is not something that is worthwhile seeking.
The sad thing is that it hurts employers as much as it hurts employees. It costs money to look for new employees. It costs money to vet new employees. It costs money to train new employees. It costs money to terminate employees or have employees resign. It also costs money in lost productivity in the intervening period. It also adds a great deal of risk, since there is no guarantee that the new employee will be of any value or, if they are of value, that they will be a good fit. Yet a lot of businesses don't seem to realize the impact on the bottom line because churn is not broken out when the accounting is done. Rather, it is a bunch of different expenses that fall in different categories -- if they are even recognized as expenses to start with.
Some decades ago, the multinational I worked for was all excited to get us to work like the Japanese, who were so gungho that they gathered before work to sing the company song. We responded that we would gladly do that in return for guaranteed lifetime job security. (Crickets.)
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
GP said, " Name one country, where the people have moved UP in life, that runs under socialism"
My post accomplished that, simply raising the bar in order to try and prove some other point that the answer was not intended for is just an exercise in public masturbation
Wherever You Go, There You Are
Do not confuse Stalinism or Maoism with socialism, those first two where strictly police states with the masquerade of what ever political system they were pretending to be. This being no different to Nazism.
So want to see socialism, first the psychopaths have to go, quite simply they will corrupt any ism they are a part of, attempt to turn it into an authoritarian state where they have control and can dominate and exploit the citizens of that society.
Socialism is the system that the majority of people were born into, the family unit, a socialist government is basically about expanding the socialism of the family unit into the greater community to gain the all to obvious outcomes, a caring and sharing society of human beings and the extended family concept.
The 'Free Market' is straight up marketing lie because it is wholly and totally dependent upon nothing in that market ever being Free, everything 'owned' and 'controlled', so that those with the most can control and exploit those with the least. With everything that can be owned being owned, including all of the essentials to life, so that denial of life becomes the tool of exploitation of the not free at all market place of human lives.
Either we shift to socialism or die as a species, that is the choice, suck it up.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
I arrived at America in the 1970's, and immediately plunged into the job market (Chinatown) because I practically had no money with me
After schooling and so on (paid for with the slave wages I got from working in Chinatown and other places) I 'upgraded' my career into research institutions
After that I was (repeatedly) head-hunted and ended up working in a string of tech companies
None of the places I worked had any of the 'job security' clause in the agreement - and in fact, more than one time I've seen long-time employees being escorted by security guards out of the building, with only an envelop with the pink-slip inside and a cardboard carton of personal belongings cleansed out of the cubicle of that employee
I do not know where the that 'sociologist' got his 'new norm" from, but in the good ol' U. S. of A., I never had any sense of 'job security' since 1970's, at least not until I started my own businesses
Unlike research papers dealing with real science, many of the 'research reports' from those 'sociologists' make no freaking sense whatsoever
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
So, we mustn't heed Karl Marx's analysis of the problems of capitalism, because his proposed solution has never been successfully implemented? Does that also mean we should disregard Dr. Robert Gallo's discovery of the HIV virus, because it has not been cured yet?
weinersmith
See the thing is, it's not a choice between extremes. In fact we have socialist institutions right here in the US that are incredibly popular.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
I've been to Soviet Russia (Stalingrad (now St. Petersberg)) and lived in it personally, first hand.` Have you? I agree with the poster who said he'd take free market capitalism over socialism ANY DAY.
And I having been to Leningrad (now St. PetersbUrg) call bullshit on your post. Not only you haven't lived there but you are off by 1000 miles in your geography. I also doubt that you are old enough to have actually lived in Stalingrad and being able to tell about it on Slashdot. Stalingrad was renamed to Volgograd back in 1961. You can say anything about USSR, but they made damn sure they taught their geography and history at school. There is no way for somebody who has lived in USSR to mix Leningrad with Stalingrad. So stop trolling please.
Uber only works when there are lots of drivers who used to have good jobs or who had family that had good jobs. That's because the $15/hr that Uber drivers max out at (if you account for gas & maintenance) isn't enough to buy a new car when the old one starts falling about at 200k miles. Maybe in a country w/o safety regulations, professional drivers insurance and emission standards Uber could work. But again, it all falls apart as soon as Uber stops externalizing it's costs onto either the driver, their family or society at large.
Uber isn't a solution. It's a symptom of a very diseased and dysfunctional system that'll eventually collapse in on itself.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The difference is that Dr. Gallo both never claimed to have a cure and never had that cure fail repeatedly and spectacularly in the real world.
Again, what does the cure have to do with the critique? Had Dr. Gallo proposed a cure that was shown not to work, would you be barebacking Nigerian prostitutes?
The obvious rebuttal is that the premises are false. For example, labor unions are a typical social construct in capitalism that doesn't result in the claimed consequences.
I don't even know how to begin responding to this. Labor unions grew out of socialist movements in order to organize workers against capitalist forces. In the analogy, claiming that labor unions somehow disprove Marx's observations regarding capitalism is like claiming that condoms disprove AIDS. And that's without even mentioning the fact that Marx would have been very much pro-union, despite your claim of "the abject failure of Marx's solutions". It's just that he knew capitalist forces would continuously fight to erode the power of workers, even unionized ones, which, again, is exactly what's happened in the US from the 70's onward.
Or consider job search engines. Are workers worse off because the hiring process has been improved a bit? Are we, workers worse off due to technological improvements to worker productivity like computers or air conditioning?
You can certainly cherry pick examples of technological improvements which seem to have benefited workers (though in the case of hiring practices, I'd argue most recent changes have been horrible for workers), but that's not what the quote is about. The claim in the quote is that the more industrialized production becomes, the less the power of the worker, and the larger the alienation of the worker from the fruits of their labor. The massive increase in prevalence of high turnover, low-wage, low-skill jobs in the US over the last several decades is stark evidence that what Marx was talking about is still happening to this day. This isn't some sort of hypothetical, many people can see that this is happening and it's being discussed heavily in society, especially since the recession. Hell, the very article whose comment section we're in right now is about this!
weinersmith
Unfortunately, unions in the USA managed to becomes completely self-interested and corrupt institutions. This is partly due to lack of competition: in most of the rest of the world you have a choice of at least a couple of unions to join, so if your union isn't representing your interests you can switch to another one. Partly due to the ties between unions and organised crime in the USA coming out of the prohibition era. Partly due to the demonisation of anything vaguely socialist during the Cold War, which reduced employee involvement in unions (and if most people aren't involved in the union, then the few that are have disproportionate influence).
Even this has been somewhat eroded by automation. If you're replacing 1,000 employees with robots and 100 workers, then a union's threat to have 600 people go on strike doesn't mean much and even when it does it's very hard to persuade those 600 that striking won't mean that they're moved to the top of the to-be-redundant list.
But, back to my original point: lack of jobs for life isn't the real problem. A large imbalance in negotiating power between companies and employees is. When employees are in a stronger negotiating position, companies will favour keeping existing employees because it's cheaper than hiring new ones.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
A couple jobs ago I was chatting with another employee, we were discussing some "ominous signs" such as HR shredding documents like she was preparing for a parade. The topic of "giving notice" came up. The other guy said that if he found a good job somewhere else he'd walk with zero notice.
The manager overheard this and stepped in on the conversation, trying to berate us with "that's not how it's done in business, I expect you to give me at least two weeks' notice if you're going to quit!" I turned to him and said "so, how much notice will you give ME if you're going to lay me off or fire me?" (huff) (huff) (snort) is about all I got back, he couldn't even form words let alone a coherant sentence to respond to that. So I added, "I'll give you as much notice as I believe you'll give me." So rather than answer me, he just stomped away.
I don't think they consider just how much more inconvenient being unemployed is, compared to having to hire someone to replace a single employee that departs unexpectedly. For the boss, it's inconvenient. For the employee, suddenly losing their income, possibly the only income for an entire family, can be devastating. And yet they expect to be provided with notice, while providing none themselves. Sselfish, arrogant, and inconsiderate!
So everyone with a clue began job hunting. I had found new work, it wasn't nearly what I had now, but the writing was on the wall in pretty bold print at this point, so I accepted it. I showed up on a Thursday evening to start my (3rd) shift, and the gal from HR was in the parking lot with her hatch open, handing out unemployment packets. The entire center had been closed, everyone there got laid off that day, no one even was offered a transfer. I found out later that our manager had known this was going to happen for months.
My new job started on Monday. (total time unemployed - two days) Unfortunately, that's how they play the game, so that's how I have to play it too. If they don't like that, they have no one to blame but themselves, I'm just playing by their rules.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.