Louis: "The acute sense of insecurity uncovererd by the Union of Aerospace Workers' survey is therefore abundantly justified. The jobs of Boeing employees are indeed especially precarious, and if the employees are tossed out they are likely to find themselves unwanted by an oversupplied labor market that offers mainly low-paid service jobs. For the workforce of a premier corporation that pays everyone rather well and also provides good fringe benefits, that is a catastrophic downfall entailing the possible loss of high-mortgage homes, the withdrawal of children from college education, and stress-induced sickness, without Boeing's health-insurance benefits to pay for it (health-cost trauma should become a recognized medical syndrome -- it is certainly more genuine than its Gulf War counterpart). Almost all Boeing employees emphatically view themselves as belonging to the middle class, but that is a conceit as precarious as their jobs. ....Mr. [Robert] Reich and countless others by now have noticed that today's 'turbo-charged' capitalism condemns the less skilled to a lifetime of declining earnings, and that it has eliminated many of the low-paid but respectable jobs that once allowed a striving section of the underclass to rise into the working class. What Reich and others have failed to grasp is that the upheavals and disruptions of 'turbo- charged' capitalism (= accelerated structural change) condemns most working Americans of all skill levels to lives of chronic economic insecurity. As entire industries rise and fall much faster than before, as firms expand, shrink, merge, separate, 'downsize' and restructure at an unprecedented pace, their employees at all but the highest levels must go to work one day without knowing whether they will still have their job the next. That is true of virtually the entire employed middle class, professionals included. Lacking the formal safeguards of European employee- protection laws or prolonged post-employment benefits, lacking the functioning families on which most of the rest of humanity still relies to survive hard times, lacking the substantial liquid savings of their middle-class counterparts in all other developed countries, most working Americans must rely wholly on their jobs for economic security -- and must therefore live in conditions of chronic acute insecurity." (From Edward Luttwak's "Turbo-Charged Capitalism and its Consequences" in the London Review of Books, November 2, 1995. Luttwak is a right-wing intellectual who in the past has written frequently about what he considers the "evils" of Communism. His strong critique of the effects of capitalism today is notable for that reason. While he focuses on the Boeing strike, it seems to have anticipated recent events in France.)
