Do Work, Son (But Don't Get Paid For It)

Via Digby and Corrente, we see logical endpoint of the Katrina response shock doctrine as applied to California's budget disaster: It's your fault for being poor in California. You should have known you were living in a budget disaster prone area. We're not going to help you.

Al-Jazeera's report on California is eye-opening to say the least. Part 1 of the report:



And here's part 2:



As Amanda Marcotte notes in the NY Times article on California state workers having to increasingly work through furloughs without pay, there's a very real cautionary lesson coming down the pike on California's response.

Now that the threat of being laid off if you don’t work for free is being dangled over people’s heads, you have to wonder how far they’ll take this exciting new libertarian experiment. (And I say libertarian, even though I know I’ll get the “no true Scotsman” whiners who are constantly shifting the definition when it makes them look like monsters, but let’s face it---they’re the ones who’ve been saying forever that we don’t have to worry about management exploiting labor, since labor makes “free” choices.) Libertarians have pinned all their hopes on the pipe dream of getting rid of the minimum wage in order to create an environment where you can pay people nothing and get labor out of them, but this innovation is a much more exciting one, a real example of the ways that crisis can cause creative thinking in the art of oppressing and exploiting the ordinary working stiff.

The one fly in the ointment is that there seems to be a built-in limit on how much work you can force people to do for free in this situation. If you start increasing the number of “furloughs” that are in fact days you have to come to work without getting paid, there’s going to be a point where people aren’t scared to lose their jobs, because they aren’t getting paid that much anyway, and they start quitting. This is an obvious roadblock to the ultimate goal of creating an entirely unpaid labor force, or at least one that only gets token payment to maintain the illusion of free choice.* That said, patience appears to be the key. Think: frog/boiling water. You need to introduce more furlough days slowly, giving people time to get used to having to work more and more unpaid days over a long period of time, with lots of time in between introductions, and they’ll reduce expectations accordingly, and will be much less likely to just quit in frustration. They’re much less likely to start looking for other jobs if they think each salary reduction will be the last, and so every time you do it, you can exploit their desperation to have even more money coming in.

Best part? Once you’ve dramatically reduced huge percentages of the middle class to poverty while getting the same amount of work out of them, that’s going to create more economic collapse, as more mortgages will go into foreclosure and tax revenues continue to soar downwards. Which just means more creative thinking in how to squeeze working people even harder! It’s win/win, as long as you continue to believe that people that have to go work for their paychecks aren’t real people at all.

And there's the rub, of course. The systematic decimation of the labor movement over the last 30 years has brought us to the point where Americans are being told the problem that really created the financial meltdown in California is the fault of state workers earning too high a wage.

All this does of course is give cover to the rest of corprate America to do the same thing to the rest of America's workers. We've been told time and time again especially by the Republican party that big labor is corrupt, it destroys competition, and that it costs jobs, that unions are a gigantic scam to enrich union bosses at the expense of workers. The fact that corporate America has actually been doing the things they accuse the unions of since the Reagan years hasn't occurred to non-union workers.

So now we've come to the point where workers are being asked to make a Hobson's choice between working days with no pay or not having a job at all. After all, if they stay, you can continue to screw them over. Productivity goes up, wages go down. If they quit, you still have the survivors to screw over and they just have more work to do, and the same thing occurs.

It's the shock doctrine in action, Hurricane Katrina writ large. When large segments of the poor and undesirable are in sudden need of a government safety net, make sure the net fails, deride the failed saftey net as inefficient and not worth funding, declare the government is unable to provide the net anymore, then blame anyone who still needs the net as lazy and shiftless. The aim is to rid the state of the most vulnerable and for the rest, well, furloughs certainly are becoming a way of life in the Golden State.

A generation of union-bashing and anti-labor hysteria have gotten the anti-labor forces to the gates of the promised land. We're on the verge of indentured servitude in this country once again as those of us with jobs are being told "Well look how much you'll have to pay to support all those lazy people on welfare with no jobs! Wouldn't it be much better for us to get rid of government help? After all, only the lazy need it. Why enable them? You work hard after all. Why should you have to enable these losers?"

And in the background, the job cuts and the layoffs and the furloughs and the benefit slashing and the wage drops continue, blamed on the increasing number of people being put out of work, while the survivors are told to do more and more work for less money.

Thank you sir, may I have another?