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Title: Contract Feudalism Update Author: Kevin Carson Date: August 19, 2005 Language: en Topics: capitalism Source: Retrieved on 4th September 2021 from https://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/08/contract-feudalism-update.html
Larry Gambone already mentioned, on the VCM’s discussion list, an NLRB
ruling that permitted employers to prohibit employees from hanging out
off the job. Here, from Confined Space, is the gist of it from a Harold
Meyerson piece at the Washington Post:
On June 7 the three Republican appointees on the five-member board that
regulates employer-employee relations in the United States handed down a
remarkable ruling that expands the rights of employers to muck around in
their workers’ lives when they’re off the job. They upheld the legality
of a regulation for uniformed employees at Guardsmark, a security guard
company, that reads, “[Y]ou must NOT ... fraternize on duty or off duty,
date or become overly friendly with the client’s employees or with
co-employees.”
Meyerson invokes the specter of contract feudalism, without mentioning
the word:
The brave new world that emerges from this ruling looks a lot like the
bad old world where earls and dukes had the power to control the lives
of their serfs — not just when the serfs were out tilling the fields but
when they retired in the evening to the comfort of their hovels.
And of course, the motivation is pretty clear: it’s a lot harder to get
an organizing committee going when workers are forbidden to get together
and talk union off the job. Just like you need a policy against workers
comparing their hourly wage. Same reason plantation owners forbade
slaves to own drums, if you’ve ever read Roots. Nothing good ever comes
of letting workers talk to each other.
My reaction on first seeing the story, as a market anarchist, was that
employers were technically within their rights to make such demands. And
no doubt somebody’s ready to blurt out “but they’re not forced to work
there--if they don’t like it, they can go somewhere else.” As Lionel
Hutz would say, that’s the best kind of true: technically true. As the
vulgar libertarians at ASI and The Freeman never tire of reminding us,
people work in shit conditions because it’s their “best available
option.”
The problem, from my standpoint, was that the bargaining power of labor
in the present labor market lets them get away with it. And the more
I’ve thought about it in recent days, the more it’s occurred to me that
this deserves some comment--not so much on the legal issue of whether
the state should “allow” employers to exercise this kind of control, but
on the question of what kind of allegedly free marketplace would allow
it.
The question is, just how godawful do the other “options” have to be
before somebody’s fucking desperate enough to take a job under such
conditions? How do things get to the point where people are lined up to
compete for jobs where they can be forbidden to associate with coworkers
away from work, where even people in shitty retail jobs are expected to
be on-call 24/7, where they can’t attend political meetings without
keeping an eye out for an informer, where they can’t blog under their
own names without living in fear that they’re a Google away from
termination?
I’m not a friend of federal labor regulations. We shouldn’t need federal
regulations to stop this sort of thing from happening. In a free market
where land and capital weren’t artificially scarce and expensive
compared to labor, jobs should be competing for workers. What’s
remarkable is not that the NLRB would issue such a ruling, but that the
job market is so abysmal that something like this could become an issue
in the first place.
A few decades ago, this wouldn’t have even become an issue in the
average blue collar job, because no self-respecting person would
consider taking a job where the employer claimed such intrusive
authority over his employees’ private lives.
The only area of the job market where such things were expected, before
the 1970s, was the white collar salariat of “professional” employees.
(I’m leaving out anomalies like Southern sharecroppers and workers in
company towns, where employees were considered to be “property” of the
employer to a large extent; but by the middle of the 20^(th) century,
that was looked on as a relic of the past, not the wave of the
future--as it’s becoming now). For a good fictional example, take a look
at Darren Stevens on the TV series Bewitched. He was a white collar
“professional” in the advertising industry. Most of the comic situations
on the show hinged on frequent “visits” to Darren’s house by his boss,
Larry Tate, a partner in the advertising firm, and Darren’s need to
entertain clients at home. Darren was constantly having to explain his
unusual lifestyle to Larry, who obviously felt entitled to an
explanation. And that intrusion in itself wasn’t meant to be viewed as
comical by the audience; it was just a set-up for all the wacky comic
situations resulting from Samantha’s witchcraft. The background itself
was just based on a common understanding of what life was like for the
“organization man.”
And as a comedy of “how the other half lives,” it was especially comical
to the blue-collar manufacturing worker just because it was so unlike
his own way of life. Imagine a master machinist in the IAM tolerating
constant drop-in visits from a foreman, who felt entitled to demand
explanations for this or that odd thing going on in the machinist’s
home! Such demands, to put it mildly, would likely have been met with
corporal rebuke.
But except for a very small and shrinking remnant of unionized
manufacturing workers, “we’re all organization men now.” The ethos of
white collar “professionalism” has contaminated a major part of wage
labor. It even extends to unskilled retail work, as indicated by the
recent example of Wal-Mart.
Workers who have had regular shifts at the store for years now have to
commit to being available for any shift from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m., seven
days a week. If they can’t make the commitment by the end of this week,
they’ll be fired.
“It shouldn’t cause any problem, if they [store employees] are concerned
about their customers,” Knuckles said.
The unskilled service worker is expected to make the welfare of the
customer the focus of his life, on and off the job, to an extent that
only a small proportion of white collar professionals did four decades
ago. The average wage-worker, in an increasing number of service jobs,
is expected to define himself by his job in a way that only a small
number of organization men did back then.
Things didn’t just “get” this way. They had help. The reduced bargaining
power of labor, and the resulting “contract feudalism”--i.e., the
erosion of the traditional boundaries between work and private life, and
increasing management control even of time off the clock--are the result
of concerted political efforts over the past thirty years.