F E A T U R E
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from
T H E J O B S L E T T E R 1 1 3
a subscriber-based letter
published in New Zealand 6 December 1999
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THE ECONOMIC HORROR
French author VIVIANE FORRESTER's book L'horreur
Economique (The Economic Horror) has just been published in an
English edition. The 1996 book is already a huge bestseller in
France, Germany, Italy, Japan and South America, and reviewers
predict that it set to become the biggest economics bestseller since
Das Kapital.
The 72-year old author has become a heroine in France where
unemployment now stands at more than 12%. Young jobless have
taken to photocopying pages from L'horreur - notably those
passages decrying the culture of shame attached to unemployment
- and sticking them up on job centre walls. The author's effigy can
also be found at the front of workers' marches, with banners quoting
from her book.
International financier George Soros was so impressed with
L'horreur that he arranged to meet with the author in Paris. The book
has also been discussed by the Mexican parliament, and politicians
in Peru have invited the author to lecture in Latin America.
This official interest has come despite the author's argument that
there is a conspiracy by "those who control economic power" to
"hide from the workers the truth that they are no longer needed by
the capitalist system" and that we are witnessing "the end of
employment as we have known it."
In this special feature, The Jobs Letter profiles Viviane Forrester
and gives an essential summary of her views on the future of work.
* Viviane Forrester's economics is largely self-taught, and until the
publication of L'horreur, she was better known as a novelist and
literary critic. Yet, according to Ian Cotton of The Guardian Weekly,
Forrester has emerged as "... a fine example of the outsider who
sees things insiders cannot."
Forrester's thesis is that employment as we have known it for three
centuries throughout the West, has had its day and is becoming
less plausible by the year as a way of distributing wealth.
L'horreur also attacks the present policies of Western governments
as it makes ever more desperate attempts to keep the jobs-and-
wages system alive. Forrester cites the constant downsizing of ever
larger numbers of the working and, now, middle classes; the steady
attrition, internationally, of welfare and union rights; and the growing
destabilisation of those in work, let alone of the unemployed.
All this has created an employment and unemployment (and
underemployment) culture that is not merely stressful, regrettable
and unpleasant but has also, according to Forrester, "spawned an
economic world that is an obscenity, an affront to human nature"
and, in the words of the book's title, a "horror".
* Ian Cotton remarks: "This is not a thesis likely to appeal to
Messrs Clinton and Blair. After all, it doesn't square with the fact that
the United States economy is enjoying the longest, strongest
economic boom in post-war history. Or that unemployment in Britain
is at its lowest for 19 years. Yet there is a curious thing about
Forrester's reading of the situation: a vast number of ordinary
people believe it..."
* Forrester finds that the book has certainly struck a nerve: "When I
was promoting the book in South America I'd go to these town
meetings of factory workers, clerks, ordinary people. The cheering
would start before I entered the hall..."
"My book has brought me in touch with the powerful as well as the
poor, and there is this strong feeling among political elites that you
must not tell the people the truth about today's economic realities;
that they just can't take it.
"In fact, I found the opposite: people aren't, in fact, afraid ... but they
are indignant. They're not stupid, they can see what's going on, and
the thing that really angers them is denial. Indeed, it's surprising how
many people have told me that reading my book has actually
reduced their anxieties ...
"Waiters, bankers, housewives, taxi drivers, students, young
unemployed ... they say to me: ''I've had exactly the same thoughts
you wrote in your book myself, for years. But it wasn't until I read
L'horreur that I even realised I'd been thinking them - let alone
started taking such ideas seriously' ... "
* Forrester argues that economic neo-liberalism has introduced a
new economic paradigm: "Increasingly it offers the most vulnerable
in our society a quite new choice - poverty at work or poverty on the
dole..."
For examples, she points to the desperate rush of French
unemployed applying for the Contrat Emploi Solidarite jobs which
pay half the guaranteed minimum wage, and are only part-time. Or
those on workfare programmes in the US who are paid a third of
union rates and have benefits docked if they are late for "work". Or
those in Britain whose special economic horror is to have achieved
invisibility - the "economically inactive" who don't even count as
unemployed for statistical purposes.
Forrester: "The feeling that we must prove ourselves useful to
society, or at least to the market economy, is rooted in the value
system of a world which no longer exists. As we are unlikely ever to
have a culture of full employment again, we need to stop basing our
identities, individually and communally, around the idea of
employment. First and foremost, the new millennium calls out for a
new culture, with a new social structure which is not centred on paid
employment ..."
* Meanwhile, in France, Forrester's book title has become the
catchphrase of all kinds of protest movements. But French
economists have generally been reluctant to discuss the book, with
some describing its arguments as "irrational" and "irrelevant to a
serious discussion of the subject".
The liberal French economist Alain Minc, who is also chairman of Le
Monde, has described the book a "rubbish". He recently told
Forrester: "Your book is a talented opinion poll. It is a publishing
success because it plays on people's fears. But it would have sold
far fewer copies if it had been signed by [Communist party leader]
Robert Hue..."
Minc argues that the prosperous French workers and their unions
have refused to trade some of their benefits for wider employment.
Minc: "Since 1973, average purchasing power has risen by 40 per
cent in real terms in France. If we had accepted a rise of only 35
per cent, there would be a million more jobs..."
Minc nevertheless concedes that Forrester has articulated a popular
feeling which, for him, demonstrates "the confusion in society at
large about current economic developments..."
The Economic Horror
by Viviane Forrester
(pub 1999 by Blackwell )
ISBN 0-745-61994-0
available on www.amazon.com
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0745619940/thejobsres
earctr
VIVIANE FORRESTER
ON A PROFOUND CHANGE
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
* I think that each of us, whatever our walk of life, should feel
concerned about the present state of the world, which is entirely
governed by economics. If Shakespeare were to come back to life
today, I think he would be fascinated by the tragic interplay of
powerful economic forces which are stealthily transforming the lives
and destinies of the citizens - or rather the populations - of all
countries.
* To my mind we are witnessing a profound change, a
transformation of society and civilization, and we are finding it very
hard to accept. How can we say good-bye to a society that was
based on stable jobs that provided a safety net and the basics of a
decent existence? Job security is on the way out.
For the first time in history, the vast majority of human beings are no
longer indispensable to the small number of those who run the
world economy. The economy is increasingly wrapped up in pure
speculation. The working masses and their cost are becoming
superfluous. In other words, there is something worse than actually
being exploited - and that is no longer to be even worth exploiting!
* It is true that this state of affairs is not being concealed, but there
is a tendency to avoid talking about it clearly. In democratic
societies, at any rate, you don't tell people that they are regarded as
superfluous. Under totalitarianism there might be an even worse
danger than joblessness and poverty. Once salaried work has
disappeared, why should a totalitarian regime not simply eliminate
those forces that have become useless?
In democratic countries there is an urgent need for vigilance. It is
often claimed that the industrial age, when a regular wage provided
the means of subsistence, can somehow be patched up. But those
days are over. Wage-earning is disappearing and the panoply of
temporary doles and allowances designed to replace it is shrinking,
something that is nothing less than criminal.
* The managers of the economic machine exploit this situation. Full
employment is a thing of the past, but we still use criteria that were
current in the nineteenth century, or twenty or thirty years ago, when
it still existed. Among other things, this encourages many
unemployed people to feel ashamed of themselves. This shame
has always been absurd but it is even more so today.
It goes hand in hand with the fear felt by the privileged who still have
a paid job and are afraid of losing it. I maintain that this shame and
this fear ought to be quoted on the stock exchange, because they
are major inputs in profit. Once upon a time people pilloried the
alienation caused by work. Today falling labour costs contribute to
the profits of big companies, whose favourite management tool is
sacking workers; when they do this, their stock market value soars.
* Today we hear a lot about "wealth creation". In the past it was
simply known as profit. Today people talk about this wealth as if it
will automatically go straight to the community and create jobs, yet at
the same time we see highly profitable businesses cutting down
heavily on their workforce.
When people talk about society's "movers and shakers", they aren't
talking about the bulk of their country's population but about
business leaders who relocate at the drop of a hat. Politicians make
jobs their priority, but the Stock Exchange is delighted whenever a
big industrial complex fires workers and gets worried whenever
there's the slightest improvement in the unemployment figures. I
wanted to draw people's attention to this paradox. A company's
stock market quotation depends largely on labour costs, and profit
is generated in the last analysis by reducing the numbers of those
who have a job.
* The present situation raises a vital question for the future of the
people of our planet, above all for young people and their future.
Today the great thing is to be "profitable", not "useful". This raises a
very serious question: Should people be profitable in order to
"deserve" the right to live? The commonsense answer is that it is a
good thing to be useful to society. But we are preventing people
from being useful, we are squandering the energies of young
people by regarding profitability as the be-all and end-all.
* Most countries have lost their sense of priorities. There is a
greater and greater need for teachers and medical staff, but
governments are increasingly aggressive towards them. These are
the professions where posts are abolished and funding is cut. Yet
they are indispensable to the welfare and future of humanity. This
confusion between "usefulness" and "profitability" is disastrous for
the future of the planet.
Young people live in a society which still regards salaried
employment as the only acceptable, honest and lawful way of life,
but most of them are deprived of the opportunity to achieve this. In
deprived inner city areas this is a major problem.
At the same time I often meet young people with armfuls of
degrees who are out of work. What inexcusable waste! For
generations study was young people's initiation into social life. I
admire young people today because they go on with their studies
fully aware that they are running the risk of rejection by society.
* Only twenty or thirty years ago, there was still reason to hope that
the relative prosperity of the North would spread all over the world.
Today we are seeing the globalization of poverty. Businesses
based in the North that set up in the so-called "developing"
countries, do not create jobs for the people of those countries but
generally make them work without any kind of social security
protection, in medieval conditions. The reason is that the workforce -
underpaid women and children, as well as prisoners - costs less
than automation would cost in the country of origin. This is
colonization in another, equally heinous, form.
* I am not pessimistic, far from it. The pessimists are those who
say there is no alternative to the present situation, that we have no
choice. My book is an attempt to describe what is going on. It's true
that the situation is dramatic. All the same I am, like many other
people, the citizen of a country whose democratic regime makes it
possible to reflect and freely resist the growing pressure that the
economic factor is exerting on our lives.
* I would like there to be checks and balances, alternative thinking,
conflicts of ideas and interests. Not violent conflict, of course, but
we should wake up and stop being petrified, prisoners of
hackneyed thinking. Already in countries where my book is being
translated-especially in the United States, Brazil, Mexico, Lithuania,
Poland and in others such as the Republic of Korea - it is causing
something of a stir even before publication.
I am neither against the globalization of exchanges, nor the
emergence of new technologies. Such an attitude would be absurd.
But I am against their being taken over by a tiny minority of
economic power centres, often in private hands, whereas entire
populations are excluded from social progress. I am against the
globalization of rejection and poverty and for the globalization of
well-being.
C R E D I T S
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edited by Vivian Hutchinson for the Jobs Research Trust
P.O.Box 428, New Plymouth, New Zealand
phone 06-753-4434 fax 06-759-4648
Internet address -- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
The Jobs Letter -- an essential information and media watch
on jobs, employment, unemployment, the future of work,
and related economic and education issues.
The Jobs Research Trust -- a not-for-profit Charitable Trust
constituted in 1994 to develop and distribute information that
will help our communities create more jobs and reduce
unemployment and poverty in New Zealand.
Our internet website at
http://www.jobsletter.org.nz/
contains our back issues and key papers,
and hotlinks to other internet resources.
ends
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vivian Hutchinson
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
phone 06-753-4434 fax 06-759-4648
P.O.Box 428
New Plymouth, Taranaki, New Zealand
visit The Jobs Research Website
Premier Award Winner of the 1999 Media Peace Awards
http://www.jobsletter.org.nz/
