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NEWS & LETTERS, May 2004Workshop TalksOur McFactoriesby Htun Lin When Reagan became President in 1981, I had just graduated from high school. As an immigrant school kid from Southeast Asia, I had been raised on federally-funded school lunches. In one effort to cut the federal budget, Reagan classified ketchup as a "vegetable" for those school lunches. That was one of the first salvos from the godfather of the right-wing corporate crusade against workers in America. That crusade is continuing in 2004 with Bush’s Chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers creatively attempting to re-classify extremely low-wage fast-food restaurant workers as part of the "manufacturing" sector. Now workers "manufacture" French fries to go with Reagan’s "vegetable." One can laugh, but this is not a laughing matter. This bald-faced attempt at reinterpreting the American economy comes on the heels of the very same Bush administration economic adviser arrogantly telling reporters a month ago that American manufacturing jobs going overseas is "a good thing" for the economy. Apparently, the same out-of-touch bureaucrat now feels compelled to re-classify a whole segment of the American working population in order to boost the jobs domestically, which he said he favored going overseas. Free-trade fundamentalists like George Will and Thomas Friedman continue to intone that wholesale disappearance of categories of jobs is a good thing because it’s a trading up to higher-skilled jobs. Higher end jobs require higher school budgets, not less, just when Bush’s policies have resulted in slashed school budgets all across America. The jobs which now remain in America, jobs which have become highly prized, the ones industry observers note are jobs which are difficult to export, are such hands on jobs as cleaning toilets, cooking food, serving food, caring for children, caring for the sick and perhaps even giving birth. This reality is confirmed by Bush’s latest attempt at manipulating these numbers in his version of reality. As Bush substitutes an idea in his head for reality, workers, whose laboring activity does indeed transform reality and create everything out of the natural environment, crises multiply. WAR ON WORKERS That is so in Iraq, where worker-soldiers were sent to war on the false pretext of weapons of mass destruction being there. These soldiers now are basically drafted beyond their commitment and continue to die in an occupation from which they see no exit. That is so among us health care workers who are struggling to provide health care when we are accountable to bean counters. That is so among the legions of manufacturers of hamburgers and pizzas who have to survive on poverty wages. Many of the new "manufacturing workers" come from the ranks of the old well-paid manufacturing workers. Whether the boss is Bush or our immediate boss, what is behind the struggle to reclassify jobs is their ongoing war against workers. In my own shop, for the last two years, when a new mandate to collect health-care co-pays from patient admissions came into effect, we were promised that they would consider re-classifying our jobs. That hasn’t happened. Every time we raise it again with our boss, he promptly dismisses us to inquire with the union. That strategy works for them because our shop is part of a labor-management "partnership." Naturally many economists and business reporters, who have seen the loss of about 3 million manufacturing jobs since August 2000, are up in arms over such a blasphemous interpretation of the dichotomy between manufacturing and service sectors of the economy. They know that one has to have a yardstick to measure economic performance. However, whether they are pure ideologues for capitalism, or interested in reliable statistics, some economists miss the essence of the present proliferation of crises. SQUEEZING WORKERS The ongoing assault on workers’ lives, whether in war, diminishing health care benefits, or a collapsing standard of living, are all part of an ongoing effort to extract more and more unpaid hours out of living labor. That means increasing that unpaid portion of the work day, all the value that is created beyond what the worker gets for his own sustenance. It has become increasingly apparent that what is subtracted from our personal income and well-being is being turned over to the corporate elites’ coffers and Bush’s permanent war. As we continue to suffer, Bush continues to lie to the nation with his version of reality--that his war and his tax cuts are for our benefit. His version of reality is believable in the same way that hamburger-making is manufacturing or that ketchup is a vegetable. It is from this perspective that we have to rethink what constitutes a viable alternative to the present cycle of war and terror. |
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