Dear all,
this is in response to Raju's submission regarding the double freedom
of labour. Techno-glitches meant that it was rejected by the forum
(who may reject it for content-glitches this time). Still, i hope it
does take the debate one small step further.
rhys
> Raju,
>
> regarding the `double-freedom' of labour....
>
> I was trying to reconcile this with my own experiences over twenty
> years of being a Teamster and driving trucks in Canada and the US.
> Initially i had a hard time seeing the "freedom to choose
> employers" as existing.
>
> But remembering back to my days of working out of the Hiring Hall
> in Vancouver, in fact, that freedom could be said to have been
> fully manifest. I would go down to the Hall, sign a board and be
> dispatched to a company, often a different company every day.
> Once at the company i wasn't given a road test or otherwise
> interrogated -- it was assumed that if i was a Teamster, i was a
> competent worker (something, given the state of some of my
> 'brothers' in the Hall, i always marvelled at).
>
> However, that was a brief period during the late Sixties and
> Seventies. It was predicated upon an extremely expansionist
> economy and job market,low unemployment, and upon the presence of
> large, lumbering dinosaurs of Fordist-organised companies -- the
> 'easy targets' of the primary and secondary economic sectors. The
> Recession of the very late Seventies and early Eighties put paid
> to that.
>
> Of course, from an owners point of view, it was not a desirable
> situation, as they had to give up control over the quality of
> the labour they recieved. And so during the breakdown of the
> Recessions, that type of Union labour became one of the first
> targets.
>
> The new productive regimes involved generally non-union and
> specifically non-closed shop labour. Basically, you had to buy
> your own truck if you wanted a job, which made you a contractor,
> not a union employee. Thus, no security, no labour burden
> payments, and, of course, reduced capital costs for the companies.
> Why would anyone borrow 100,000 dollars to operate a business
> which never builds equity -- the customers belong to the company,
> after all, not the driver. [as an aside, i owe my academic career
> to these changes, i would not be here if there still were good
> company jobs back on Vancouver Island]
>
> I took to calling the process that resulted [de-unionisation,
> casualisation, contracting-out, structural unemployment]; the
> 'manufacture of scarcity', because it seemed so apparent that work
> was being done, goods were being transported, but the regime was
> founded upon the replacement of human capital with investment in
> new information systems, and high-tech physical plant.
>
> I think that, within a regime of manufactured scarcity, the double
> freedoms of labour (a dodgy idea at the best of times) have
> evaporated. Also, i think this requires a re-thinking of the
> union situation and process, something which has not particularly
> happened. How can labour redress the imbalance of power now that
> the emphasis is on employment in tertiary and quaternary sectors
> rather than primary or secondary?
>
> Looking forward to your (and others) thoughts on this.
>
> cheers
>
> rhys
>
> ----------------------
> Rhys Evans
> Arkleton Centre For Rural
> Development Research,
> University of Aberdeen
> [log in to unmask]
>
>
>
----------------------
Rhys Evans
Arkleton Centre For Rural
Development Research,
University of Aberdeen
[log in to unmask]
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