Class War in America: the Book |
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to download this material for personal, not-for-profit, use. If you duplicate it for others, attribute it to Charles M. Kelly, and with a link to this site. Print copies are still available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and used copies are widely available on the internet. 6. Guess
What: You* Are Now a “Worker” *Engineer,
Ph.D., computer programmer, professional, scientist—and the
usual others Columnists
and management professionals used to write about “management and workers,”
“professionals and laborers,” and “salaried and hourly.” These terms
distinguished between different categories of corporate personnel and they
had implications for a person’s position in the organizational hierarchy,
as well as for income level, job security, and position in
society. Professionals,
managers, and salaried persons tended not to identify with the interests
of workers and laborers. When bad things started happening to workers, the
elite considered it a sad result of poor education or unfortunate
circumstance. Too
bad. What has been happening
to workers is the result of a planned strategy, and that strategy is now being
applied to everyone who does the hands-on work of our
country. We’d
better start thinking in terms of “wealthy investors” (people who don’t
work, yet make huge amounts of money) and “everyone else” (people who work
because they have to make a living). Worldwide, wealthy investors are
increasing their power to control the incomes of virtually everyone who
has to work to support his family, whether at the poverty level or the
luxury level. Regardless
of his category—scientist, truck driver, assembly line worker, doctor,
engineer, teacher, or what have you—every worker had better inherit money
to invest, or have some strategy in mind to get large sums of money to
invest. If he doesn’t, he’s
going to find it increasingly difficult to have a decent future in the
United States—a country whose leaders believe that actual work deserves no
more than a marginal income. For
example, conservatives have found creative ways to force U.S. Ph.D.s to
compete with scientists from Third World countries and their lower
standards of living. Under the head “Give Me Your Huddled…High-Tech
Ph.D.s,” Business Week reported
a study by the Center for Immigration Studies, which wanted limits on
immigration. It concluded that “11.7% of America’s scientists and
engineers in 1990 were foreign-born professionals—naturalized U.S.
citizens and foreign nationals.”1 The
“National Science Foundation, a neutral source, concurred, reporting that
foreigners made up 49% of Ph.D.s in computer science in 1993, up from
35.5% in 1983.”2 Business
Week concluded
that In
theory, this explosion of foreign high-tech talent shouldn’t be a threat
to Americans. By law, employers can’t petition for either temporary or
permanent immigration visas for foreign workers if they can find a
qualified U.S. citizen for the job. But it’s widely known that employers
often get Labor Dept. approval by tailoring job descriptions to a
particular foreign candidate to make sure that no U.S. candidate can fill
the slot. The most well documented
abuses of the visa system occur in more routine software programming,
where foreigners on so-called temporary H-1B visas clearly have undercut
some U.S. engineers.3 For
the past 20 years, Republicans and conservative Democrats have been
telling us that getting an education and the new information age
technology would save American citizens their standards of living.
Therefore, we shouldn’t worry about losing manual labor jobs. Not true.
Wealthy conservatives have proved that they can destroy or put a lid on anyone’s
income. Conservatives
will correctly argue that scientists, engineers, Ph.D.s and those in the
information industry are among our highest paid professionals. They are,
but relative to the people who
hire them, they are poorly paid.
As with other industries, investors and top executives are the ones
who benefit most from the competition they create for their own
workers. How
do they do it? By “using loopholes in the law,” and classifying jobs in such a
way as to make sure that no U.S. candidates can fill the slots. So, the boss manipulates the
labor market, keeps a lid on salaries (high as they are), and gets
incredibly, fabulously, richer. And
you can count on it: if the technology industry tanks—or our country goes
into a serious recession—those who will lose their jobs, or suffer serious
income reductions, will be the Americans who actually built the industry
to begin with. The
picture gets worse when American corporations totally abandon operations
in this country and contract high-skill projects out to Third World
countries. The Wall Street
Journal was brutally frank when it reported that “High-Tech Firms
Shift Some Skilled Work to Asian Countries; Like Blue-Collar Employees,
West’s Professionals Face Competition Abroad”: American
multinationals such as H-P come to Malaysia mainly for low wages. But in the process they have bred
a fast-growing class of cosmopolitan professionals [in Malaysia]…who have
the kind of high-skilled jobs Americans covet…. It means that some of
America’s most skilled workers are likely to face the same punishing
competition and wage pressures from abroad now felt by blue-collar
workers.… This shift is sending
billions of dollars of capital to countries like Malaysia from the U.S.
and Japan, fueling the growth of high-paying jobs
overseas.4 Conservative
economic policies always benefit wealthy investors first—with only the
promise of “trickle-down” to workers sometime in the vague future. Problem
is, conservative politicians always change the rules to keep the promised
future from happening. Unmanaged
free trade was supposed to eventually benefit workers, especially those
with high skills. Americans would do the skillful
work of the future, and Third World countries would provide the manual
labor. But then, as international trade increasingly became a
reality, §
Third
World countries began to train masses of their own citizens in the same
skills that Americans were famous for. American corporations then began to
shift operations overseas, and used their low wages to intimidate the
skilled American workers who invented and perfected the skills to begin
with. § |