Scribblings

The New American Working Class

In a recent Financial Times piece, the columnist Robert Armstrong observed:

… AI companies and their models will follow one rule before all others: they will seek to maximise returns for their shareholders, up to the limits set by law. When the law of profit conflicts with the company’s internal principles, profit will win every time.

I think Armstrong’s comment applies to all market economy companies which are intent on profit maximisation. Call it capitalism, if you will. Outside of China and Russia, and a few other countries such as North Korea, it is the system in which we live.

Compared to previous generations stretching over the centuries, most of us have better lives than our ancestors because of the market economy. Which is not to say that it is not riddled with flaws and inequities, but it is better than any of the other economic models that were or are on offer.

For most market economy companies, labour is a cost that they constantly try to minimise. To be blunt about it, companies are in the business of making profits. They are not in the business of creating jobs.

Nowhere is this truer than in the US where employment is “at will”, which I understand to mean that the employer gives you the job as long as you are of benefit to him or her. Once the work you do is no longer seen as adding value, then it is a very quick goodbye. Clear your desk by the end of the day, as they say in the movies.

Europe is different. Once you have the job, the job is yours, and the employer can only take it away from you by going through legally defined procedures. If the US makes it easy to dismiss workers, Europe makes it hard.

Market economy companies are in the business of business, which means producing products or offering services that customers or clients are willing to pay for. Despite what “mission statements” may say, they are not in the business of social justice, unless there is a business logic to being in the social justice business.

This often disappoints those idealists who join companies which say they have a mission beyond just making money and who are then gutted when they find that, in reality, the companies they joined don’t have a mission beyond making money. As Armstrong says, profits will always come first.

Gushing statements about “bringing your whole self to work” quickly disappear when the presence of your whole self stands in the way of business. At the end of the day, it is the Corleone maxim that prevails: Nothing personal, just business.

These thoughts about “real existing capitalism”, as Marxists might put it, occurred to me as I read Noam Scheiber’s book Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class.

Scheiber writes on labour issues for the New York Times, and I think it would be fair to say, is sympathetic to the labour movement.

Scheiber’s book covers much the same territory as Dave Kamper’s book Who’s Got the Power?: The Resurgence of American Unions, which I wrote about on LinkedIn recently. My answer to Kamper’s question was, well, it is not the unions if you look at the numbers. Union membership in the US is below 10%, and hovers around 6% in the private sector, and most of that membership is in old industries where the unions have been long established.

Scheiber covers the unionisation drives in Starbucks, Apple and at some video games companies, and the strikes in Hollywood of scriptwriters, and the new militancy of the United Auto Workers (UAW) under Shawn Fain. But he does so through telling the stories of individual workers who were involved in these initiatives over several years.

As someone who is steeped in labour relations literature, I found it a compelling read. It has a lightness of touch about it which draws you in and makes you want to continue to read on. It is the work of a top-class journalist, written in clear, simple English, devoid of any sort of academic theorising and empty of jargon. Not that I dislike academic theorising, but this is a book that is better for leaving such theorising to one side.

Scheiber deftly describes the pain and hurt of broken expectations and shattered dreams as the new “college-educated working class” finds that the world is not delivering the jobs and living standards they were led to expect.

Instead of enjoying a pay premium because of their education, they find themselves working in Starbucks coffee shops or Apple stores or waiting around for the next writing gig in Hollywood, which often never comes.

Close your eyes, clap your hands and believe, and it will happen does not happen for them. They do not live in a Peter Pan world. They juggle hours and multiple jobs and still struggle to make rent. Welcome to the college-educated precariat.

Cards on the table. I am an employer-side negotiator dealing with European-level labour relations issues. I have no problem with workers joining unions or with collective bargaining. I have spent much of my life involved in such negotiations, often dealing with union representatives late into the night. It is the nature of the business.

What struck me when reading the book was the naivety of those pushing unions in Starbucks, Apple, and Amazon. At the time of writing this article, the three campaigns have achieved little, though one Apple store did manage to negotiate a collective bargaining agreement, but it did not trigger a tsunami of organising in other Apple stores. There are no union contracts in Starbucks or Amazon in the US.

Collective bargaining is not about whether you have a strong moral case for better pay and conditions. Maybe you do, but it is not going to get you very far. The old manual working class learned that lesson many years ago.

Now, maybe, you can win statutory recognition through procedures provided for in the law, but all that does is to get you in the door and across the table from the employer.

You want a deal? You need leverage, the power to force the employer to offer you terms you can accept. In collective bargaining, that power generally comes down to the ability to call an effective strike, though other “corporate campaign” tactics are available, but these are often dependent on third parties taking action on your behalf.

I know Starbucks workers have called “red cup day” strikes, but when the strike only hits a few hundred shops out of around 16,000, you can hardly say it is effective. The Amazon win at the Staten Island centre died on the vine as those who organised the unionisation drive had no idea how to follow through in bargaining. They thought winning recognition was what it was all about when it was just the first step in a “journey of a thousand miles”.

By way of contrast, the Hollywood strike, even if it went on for months, and the UAW strike against the Detroit auto makers, brought leverage to the table. They hurt the employers’ bottom lines. There was solid organisation on the workers’ side. But that organisation was many years in the making, often forged through past bloody battles. Google “UAW Ford River Rouge” if you want to know more, by way of an example.

The market system is a cruel and unforgiving system. It is profit-oriented. It feels no moral obligation to offer full-time jobs with stable hours and decent hourly pay rates. It will constantly seek to minimise costs and maximise productivity in whatever way it can. There is no point in being blind to that.

It would be socially better if it were otherwise, but this is the reality of the world of the gig economy, and when, to borrow from Yeats, the “rough beast” of AI, its hour come around at last, “slouches” across the land. The Hollywood writers’ strike was about combating the rough beast. The strike may have slowed it, but has it stopped it?

The “social contract” of full-time, well-paid employment, with continually increasing pay packets leading to ever-improving standards of living, defined the thirty to forty years after WWII. We thought it was a forever paradigm. It turns out it was not. It came about because of a unique set of historical circumstances. But even in those unique circumstances, it still took workers to organise to make sure they had a seat at the table.

If, as Scheiber says, the US college-educated are a new working class - the old working class has not gone away, you know - then this new working class will need to figure out for itself how to get organised to defend its interests. I suspect trying to organise Apple store by Apple store, or Starbucks coffee shop by coffee shop will not do it. Even if Scheiber’s book was written to suggest that a new dawn in the US labour movement was breaking, what it really documents is microscopic gains, difficult for the naked eye to see.

Now, before my friends in the US labor movement (I have dropped the “u” from labour for this) say to me, but what about the teachers in Arizona, or gamers at Microsoft, or doctors in some hospital system, or university graduate teachers, yes, I know all about these things. The labour movement has always won some new members here and there as it lost members elsewhere. But the direction of travel is clear. Union membership is in long-term decline.

Maybe, when we reflect on things, unions as we have traditionally known them, will turn out to have been organisations of their time, and that time has passed. But employer-side negotiator and all that I am, I think workers will always want an independent, collective voice in their workplace, a say over their working lives. Who knows what shape that collective voice will take?

Schriber’s book finished abruptly. You turn to the next page, and there is no next page. I suspect that he would have liked to write a next page, but he had no idea what to say on that next page about the future of the US labor movement. His is a book in search of an optimistic ending. But there is no such ending on offer, at least for now.

Maybe some “old heads” from both sides, management and labor, those no longer active in the business, could come together and start a dialogue and explore possibilities. What’s to lose? I’m sure there is some foundation out there that would fund such an effort.

Having entered these caveats, would I recommend Noam Scheiber’s book? Definitely.