About 7-8 years ago, a friend of mine and I sat down and compared real hourly
rates. I was a unionized blue collar phone co. technician and she was a digit
head working on wall street writing software for different exchange markets
(mainly commodities). On paper I earned about $20,000 less than she did during
the preceding year. On an hourly rate, I earned more. maggie coleman
Louis Proyect wrote:
> Salon.com
> The age of overwork
>
> The author of "White-Collar Sweatshop" says that toiling in the new
> economy is no way to live.
> - - - - - - - - - - - -
> By Katharine Mieszkowski
>
> March 1, 2001 | There are the sweatshops that make khakis, and then there
> are the sweatshops where the people who wear khakis work.
>
> Jill Andresky Fraser, author of "White-Collar Sweatshop: The Deterioration
> of Work and Its Rewards in Corporate America," charges so-called
> new-economy companies like America Online and Intel (and some old-line
> stalwarts like IBM) with grinding their huge stock market gains out of
> their employees' so-called lives.
>
> And guess what? With the economy and stock market flagging, she contends,
> it's likely to get worse. An editor for Inc. magazine and Bloomberg
> Personal Finance, Fraser revolts against how our new 24/7 work habits are
> ruining our lives.
>
> It's hard to feel sympathy for the plight of people who sit in front of
> computers, talk on the phone and send e-mail for a living. How bad are
> these "sweatshops" really?
>
> To me, what the sweatshop image conveys is very long hours of work, unfair
> compensation, a lack of control over one's work life and a feeling of
> tremendous insecurity. And I think that all of those characteristics are
> very powerfully true in a lot of people's lives.
>
> There are 25 million of us who are putting in more than 10 hours each day
> at the office. And for many people that is the beginning and not the end of
> their workday. They're the ones who are working during their commutes,
> after they put their kids to bed at night, on weekends and while they're
> vacationing. They feel that their jobs can never be done. The workloads
> have gotten so enormous that they're inescapable.
>
> Although we thought technology would make our work lives easier and more
> creative, the real impact of our laptops, our Palm Pilots, our e-mail and
> our cellphones is that we can't ever not work. There's no justification.
>
> A lot of these people are not earning six-figure salaries. They're earning
> $30,000, $40,000, $50,000, $60,000. For all of those people out there who
> are living the 24/7 lifestyle because overwork seems so macho and romantic,
> many more are doing this because they can't figure out a way out.
>
> How has the stock market boom of the past few years contributed to making
> our work lives worse?
>
> During the '90s, many people explicitly believed that there couldn't be
> anything wrong with this system because the stock market was so incredibly
> strong. They bought into the idea that rising stock prices would more than
> compensate them for a whole range of different job-related sacrifices and
> tradeoffs, through stock options -- if you were lucky enough to have them
> -- or through your stock portfolio or your 401K plan. Somehow you were
> going to share in the goodies.
>
> People made what they thought of as short-term sacrifices, which became
> accepted as the way American business has to be in order to be competitive
> in the global marketplace. And then we didn't have any choice anymore.
>
> Weekend getaways are replacing two-week vacations and Fed Ex now delivers
> on Sunday. How did we lose the idea of private time vs. work time?
>
> As recently as the '70s, people really did believe that new technology
> would help us all actually work less. We would put in fewer hours at the
> office, maybe even fewer days each week. Conceivably, we could all retire
> when we're 45 or take three-month summer vacations every year.
>
> But in the '80s, when layoffs started happening, people were very willing
> to work longer and harder. They accepted doing the jobs of two or three
> people with the thought that we would get past this crisis, and yet again
> things were going to get better for all of us. But that didn't really
> happen because through the '90s, when times were really increasingly good,
> whose health insurance didn't consistently get worse year after year after
> year? For most of the '90s, salaries didn't keep up with inflation (until
> the very end of the decade), even though companies were doing great for years.
>
> Full article at www.salon.com
>
> Louis Proyect
> Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org
