Techie types are very well organized, just not in unions. They are all over
the net with vehicles for skills transfer and job hunting. WE need to find
ways to tap into what is out there instead of trying to force everyone into
some mythic model of the CIO working in the Fordist factory under a military
Keynesian regime. In the Wages of Whiteness, a study of race and class in the
19th century, David Roediger talks about how white workers often rejected the
concept of wage slavery because they were free men. The CIO emerged because
the AFL was in denial of the reality of mass production. And so it goes.
planbet into direct competition with everyone else. But there real areas where
theret into direct competition with everyone else. But there is a trend to
increase that kind of competition. I recently participated in a study of
Boston area firms. In one of the (not so world class) Boston hospitals a
personnel director told me that during the nursing shortage of the 80s they
pioneered in recruiting nurses from the Philippines which other hospitals
later did as well. Now hospitals are merging and closing and downsizing like
crazy, this cohort is in competition for the work. I don't know to what
extent they are integrated into nursing organizations in the area, or their
expectations have been framed by the standard of living in the US. I don't know
that the impact of this cohort is any different than a cohort defined by some
other characteristic. I do know it exists.
Michael Perelman asked what it's like on the shop floor. I'm a few years
removed from it, but what I know is that on the shop floor I left in 1991,
those people who were left were working along side robots and CNCs assembling
components from all over the world. Meanwhile back on pen-l, a group of highly
intelligent people are conducting a global conversation almost in real time,
the import of which is that none of this really matters.
There's two kinds of people on the shop floors in the US. Older workers (40+)
native to the US or from earlier waves of immigration who have used the
seniority system (a sacred cow if there ever was one - constructed to
counteract abuses by capital in a long gone era, but totally insufficient to
cope with conditions now) to protect their jobs and standard of living, the
rest of the world go hang. The second kind of shop floor workers are
immigrants. Over and over again I listened to managers talk about how hard
working immigrant workers were and how they weren't as "materialistic" as US
workers, didn't need as much, didn't get paid as much.
-------------Laurie
