V. The Transformation of Work
Although it has experienced several severe cyclical recessions since the end of the Second World War, 515 by 1996 the economy of the United States was achieving marked increases in productivity through computer-mediated technologies. 516 As a result, many corporations experienced surging profitability. 517 Ominously and unfortunately, however, "the average productivity of American workers increased by more than 30 percent between 1977 and 1992, while the average real wage fell by 13 percent." 518 The purportedly vibrant economy of the mid-1990s, thus, is not witnessing corresponding increases in meaningful employment and wages. Ironically, workers in the United States are now working more and putting in longer hours. 519 While official unemployment is very low, approximately half of the new jobs created since 1980 are "contingent," meaning temporary, 520 without medical insurance or pension plans, and tied to stagnant wage levels. 521 "During the 1980s, temp work grew ten times faster than overall employment; as a result, Manpower Inc., a temporary employment agency with over 500,000 workers, has replaced General Motors as the largest private employer in the United States." 522 Contingent workers may constitute one-half of the work force by the year 2000. 523 While twenty six million jobs were created in the United States between the years 1973-1986, for example, the super-majority of them were low-pay and low-skill positions. 524 Meanwhile, three million workers have been laid off permanently since 1989, 525 55,000 of them occurring in December, 1995 alone. 526
Highly profitable corporations continue to "downsize," ruthlessly terminating entire echelons of workers, including senior managers, far beyond the usual target of blue collar, semi-skilled workers. 527 In 1994, two-thirds of the more than 450,000 persons laid off were college- educated, salaried workers. 528 Likewise, most of the 40,000 employees scheduled for termination by AT&T in 1996 are white collar workers. 529 The organized labor movement, in deep retrenchment since the inception of the Reagan administration in 1981, and now only representing little more than ten percent of the private sector workforce, seeks to consolidate its remaining strength through union mergers. 530
Capital continues to mutate in unprecedented ways that even the most sophisticated capitalists cannot fully comprehend and certainly cannot control. George Soros can make, and lose, hundreds of millions—even billions—of dollars, in one day of international currency market manipulations. 531 Through computer-pervasive technology, massive but ephemeral pools of capital can be dramatically transferred, concentrated, or perhaps most alarmingly, seemingly evaporate, with near-instantaneous speed. President Clinton, frustrated and enraged, confronts the reality that the domestic economic politics of the contemporary nation-states are governed primarily by the whimsy of the international bond markets. 532
Most apocalyptically, through the influence of tremendous productivity increases realized via computer technology, coupled with the relentless capitalist quest for profit maximization, the concept and the reality of meaningful work, as a critical, unifying thread of the social contract, is fraying and unraveling. 533 The dimensions of the problems are thoroughly international, as Jeremy Rifkin 534 expressly situates and describes in the global context of mass unemployment.
Global unemployment has now reached its highest level since the great depression of the 1930s. More than 800 million human beings are now unemployed or underemployed in the world. That figure is likely to rise sharply between now and the turn of the century as millions of new entrants into the workforce find themselves without jobs, many victims of a technology revolution that is fast replacing human beings with machines in virtually every sector and industry of the global economy. After years of wishful forecasts and false starts, the new computer and communications technologies are finally making their long-anticipated impact on the workplace and the economy, throwing the world community into the grip of a third great industrial revolution. Already, millions of workers have been permanently eliminated from the economic process, and whose categories have shrunk, been restructured, or disappeared. 535
These points are also emphasized by Richard Barnet and John Cavanagh in their book, Global Dreams: 536 "[i]n the age of globalization, hundreds of millions of people are waking up to the fact that they are competing for their jobs with people who may live on the other side of the world . . . . [I] ndustrial restructuring is happening on a global scale—and with accelerating speed." 537 Further corroboration is provided by Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio in the Jobless Future, 538 "[t]he tendency of contemporary global economic life is toward the underpaid and unpaid worker. . . . [I]t is clear that jobs are no longer the solution, that we must find another way to ensure a just standard of living for all." 539
In many circumstances, the "workplace" has become an empty place. 540 If there is a physical work place still in literal existence, it is increasingly the home of the telecommuting employee, or the business sites of the customers, clients, and markets of a particular organization. 541
In the modern industrial economy, work has been constructed as a job in a corporate enterprise, consisting of an eight hour day, five day week. 542 The concept and reality of work as a job, is rapidly changing. 543 A century ago, the world of work, and of jobs within that world, had barely evolved from the cottage-industry descendants of the medieval guild systems, with the surplus labor pools largely constituted by the desperately indigent, indentured servants, and newly-freed slaves. 544
Today, the precariously-perched world of work and the political and social premises with which work is inextricably interwoven, are again seismically shifting. The stability of the "eight hour day, five day week" job of the worker in the private industrial, manufacturing, and service sectors is just as rapidly fading from view—as perhaps a brief, exceptional passing moment in a much more grim, Malthusian history. 545 In many western European economies, for example, the intractably high double digit unemployment which has existed for the past two decades 546 has revealed the ugly and alarming reality that, absent thorough social welfare controls, effective unemployment rates could spike much higher. 547 Unemployment in Germany has soared dramatically, reaching almost ten percent by December, 1995. 548 France's unemployment rate, by the same date, had reached over eleven percent. 549 In November 1995, the greatest percentage of Japan's population was out of work since the country began reporting unemployment figures in 1953. 550 Within a decade, less than half of the work force in the industrialized world will hold full time, properly paid jobs. 551
Organized labor unions in the United States now represent little more than one-tenth of the private sector work force, the lowest level of private sector union density since the enactment of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935. 552 Many project that union representation will further erode to seven percent of the private sector work force within the decade. 553 The national political legislative regime, currently in the hands of a Republican group whose political agenda is largely inimical to the objectives of organized labor 554 could, if it remains in power, further attack unions. These matters are eerily reminiscent of the circumstances facing labor in the 1920's, prior to the enactment of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935.
This is a world, at century's end, which is radically different in many ways from that of the 1930's-1960's period familiar to Dorothy Day. What, therefore, might be the possible relevance of her labor praxis and theory for labor and the transformation of work upon the centennial of her birth?
Workers at all levels of the economy, work hierarchies, and in virtually all organizations, are becoming increasingly fractured, isolated, and atomized by technology. As a result, they face the possibility of being rendered helpless in the face of concentrated, often multinational, corporate employer power. The employment relationship at this century's end is often as grotesque and pernicious as a meta-adhesion contract as it was prevalent during the earlier era of the blatant, anti-union yellow-dog contract. The positive potential of the workers' cyberspace computer community has yet to be achieved. 555 It is more imperative than ever that human solidarity, established through the strengthening of both human communities and concern and care for others, is fostered, but not supplanted by, technology. The pace of current change is seemingly ever-accelerating, however the answer for the modern world is not that of the nihilistically desperate, machine-smashing Luddites of England in 1811. 556 Rather, technology must be adapted to the service of human needs. As Dorothy Day consistently taught, communities—and especially communities of organized workers—are best formed around human beings who empathize and reach out to one another and who possess sufficient structure and materials needed to provide the social minima required to live decent and tolerable lives. 557
NOTES
515. See Samuel M. Ehrenhalt, Economic and Demographic Change: The Case of New York City, Monthly Lab. Rev. 40, 41 (Feb. 1993). Recessions occurred in the following post-war periods: 1973-1975, 1980-1982, and 1990-1991. See id. Approximately 1.5 million jobs were lost during the 1990-1991 recession, with one million of the of the jobs from the manufacturing and construction sectors. See Christopher J. Singleton, Industry Employment and the 1990-1991 Recession, Monthly Lab. Rev. 15 (July 1993). The losses were especially severe in New York City. See Kirk Johnson, Evolution of the Workplace Alters Office Relationships, N.Y. Times, Oct. 5, 1994, at B1. In New York City, there was a 10 percent loss of total employment, with disappearance of 350,000 jobs during the 1990-1991 recession. See Ehrenhalt, supra, at 42. Job losses in manufacturing were 20 percent, and in finance, insurance, and real estate, 14 percent, in wholesale and retail trade, 28 percent, of the total job losses during this most recent recession. See Ehrenhalt, supra, at 42. In the first half of 1996, "270,513 layoffs were announced...28% higher than the same period [in 1995]." Beth Belton, Workers Situation Seems to Be Improving, USA Today, Sept. 9, 1996, at 5B. The current trend shows an increase in the number of jobs being created in some parts of the country. See Robert D. Hershey, Jr., Labor Market Tightens but Pay Gains Stay Slim: Concerns Persist About Wage Inflation, N.Y. Times, Sept. 5, 1996, at D1. These replacement jobs are mostly in the service sector and are accompanied by lower wages. See Sara Rimer, The Fraying of Community, in The New York Times, The Downsizing of America 111, 114 (1996).
516. See Bad News for Workers, N.Y. Times, June 24, 1995, at A18 ("The economy has grown steadily for four years. Productivity--output per hour of work--shot up by 2 percent last year by a gaudy 2.7 percent annual rate at the beginning of this year."); Bloomberg Business News, Worker Productivity Up, Costs Down, U.S. Reports, N.Y. Times, Aug. 9, 1995, at D4. ("Growth in worker productivity accelerated during the second quarter as more goods were produced with fewer workers.... 'Computers have replaced people in a lot of jobs.... [P] lus people who have jobs are working harder."'). Although the number of jobs are increasing and workers are working harder their salaries have stagnated. This is attributed to the intense competition from foreign and domestic business. See Robert D. Hershey, Jr., Labor Market Tightens but Pay Gains Stay Slim, Concerns Persist About Wage Inflation, N.Y. Times, Sept. 5, 1996, at D1.
517. See David E. Sanger & Steve Lohr, Searching for Answers, in The New York Times, The Downsizing of America 195, 200 (1996) (reporting that the downsizing of companies creates an increase in the value of their stock. "Three years after they cut their payrolls sharply, the downsized companies had averaged a gain of 4 percent in the value of their shares."). Meanwhile, along with corporate profitability, wealth is perhaps more stratified and concentrated in fewer hands today, than at any other period in our modern history. See Andrew Hacker, Who They Are, N.Y. Times, Nov. 19, 1995, (Magazine) at 71 ("[T]otal household wealth, as distinguished from income, has become even more unevenly distributed. In 1970, the top 1 percent of households owned about 20 percent; in 1989, the top 1 percent held about 36 percent."). By the early 1990s, the top 1 percent of the population held 40 percent of the nation's wealth. See Lester Thurow, Why Their World Might Crumble, N.Y. Times, Nov. 19, 1995, (Magazine) at 78 ("By the early 1990's the share of wealth (more than 40 percent) held by the top 1 percent of the population was essentially double what it had been in the mid-1970's and back to where it was in the late 1920's, before the introduction of progressive taxation."); see also John Cassidy, Who Killed The Middle Class?, New Yorker, Oct. 16, 1995, at 113; Bob Herbert, The Issue Is Jobs, N.Y. Times, May 6, 1995, at A19 ("The top 20 percent of American households have more than 80 percent of the nation's wealth."); Steven Greenhouse, Labor Chief Asks Business For A New Social Compact, N.Y. Times, Dec. 7, 1995, at A20 ("[A]ll of the income growth in our country has gone to the top 40% of households, and nearly all of that, went to the top 20%.").
Between 1980 and 1989, income in the top 1 percent of American families grew by 62.9 percent--amounting to 53.2 percent of all families' income growth in those years--while income in the bottom 60 percent of all families declined. By the end of the decade, the total income of the top 1 percent equaled the total income of the bottom 40 percent.
Albert Shanker, The New Gilded Age, N.Y. Times, Sept. 24, 1995, at E7.
The widening gap between rich and poor is an international trend. See Barbara Crossette, U.N. Survey Finds World Rich Poor Gap Widening, N.Y. Times, July 15, 1996, at A3 ("We still have more than half the people on the planet with incomes of less than $2 a day-more than 3 billion people.").
518. Michael Lind, The Next American Nation 200 (1996).
519. See Scripps Howard, Misery Index Doesn't Feel Our Pain Economy Is Robust, but Workers Suffer, Ariz. Rep., Feb. 11, 1996, at A19 ("[M]aking the United States the workingest industrial power in the world ...."); Stanley Aronowitz & William Difazio, The Jobless Future: Sci-Tech and the Dogma of Work 347 (1994) ("People are laboring their lives away, which, perhaps as much as unemployment and poverty, has resulted in many serious family and health problems. In turn, the lengthening of working hours has contributed to unemployment and poverty among those excluded from the labor system."); Barbara Garson, All the Livelong Day: The Meaning and Demeaning of Routine Work (1975) (reporting on her two years spent examining people engaged in monotonous work); Juliet B. Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (1991) ("Many of us need to relax, to unwind, and yes to work less.").
Long working hours are associated with stress and workplace injuries. The International Labor Office estimated that job stress currently costs the United states $200 billion a year and that stress is "one of the most serious health issues of the twentieth century." Automobile factories in the U.S. which have very high overtime hours, experienced a 460% rise in injuries between 1985 and 1991. The rise in worktime has also led to a pervasive conflict between work and family.
Juliet B. Schor, Worktime In Contemporary Context: Amending the Fair Labor Standards Act, 70 Chi.-Kent L. Rev. 157, 161 (1994).
Professionals work an average of 52 hours a week; college-educated workers in their 20sand 30s work even more. Manufacturing employees in the U.S. work 320 more hours--the equivalent of two months--than their French and German counterparts. National Public Radio recently reported that in the past decade we have added 17 days to the work year.
Jeffrey K. Salkin, Smash the False Gods of Careerism, Wall St. J., Dec. 29, 1994, at A10.
520. See Mark H. Grunewald, The Regulatory Future of Contingent Employment: An Introduction, 52 Wash. & Lee L. Rev. 725 (1995) ("[Contingent employment] is generally understood to include part-time, temporary, seasonal, casual, contract, on-call, and leased employees."); see also Rising Use of Part-Time and Temporary Workers: Who Benefits and Who Loses? Hearing Before the Employment and Housing Subcomm. of the Comm. on Gov't Operations, 100th Cong. 35 (1988); Commission on the Future of Worker-Management Relations, U.S. Dept's Of Labor and Commerce, Report and Recommendations 35-36 (1994) (reporting that many temporary and/or part-time workers are involuntarily underemployed, and that in 1992, 6.5 million of 20.6 million part-time workers were involuntarily relegated to part-time work) [hereinafter Commission]; William Bridges, Jobshift: How to Prosper in a Workplace Without Jobs 5 (1994) (explaining that Toyota Motor Corporation recently created a new employment category, comprised entirely of temporary professional workers on one year contracts, with compensation determined somehow by their individual contributions, rather than via standard salaries); Barry Bluestone & Bennett Harrison, The Deindustrialization of America: Plant Closings, Community Abandonment and the Dismantling of Basic Industry (1982) (determining that the trend toward a contingent workforce has been underway for more than a decade); H. Lane Dennard, Jr., & Herbert R. Northrup, Leased Employment: Character, Numbers, and Labor Law Problems, 28 Ga. L. Rev. 683, 695 (1994) (reporting that the hard, available data on the precise dimensions of the contingent work force is elusive; it is certainly evolving rapidly); David L. Gregory, Company Closings and Community Consequences, 72 U. Det. Mercy L. Rev. 1 (1994); Lesley Alderman, Your Worklife: Your Smartest Moves on the Job, Money Mag., July 1995, at 37 ("Since 1991, a staggering one out of every seven of the 7.5 million jobs created in the country has been a temporary position."); William Bridges, The End of the Job, Fortune, Sept. 19, 1994, at 62 (analyzing the disappearance of the job in the modern work force); Barnaby J. Feder, Bigger Roles for Suppliers of Temporary Workers, N.Y. Times, Apr. 1, 1995, at 37 ("The number of temps supplied by agencies to American companies soared from 500,000 in 1983 to nearly 2 million, or 1.5 percent of the work force, last year."); Laura McClure, Working the Risk Shift, Progressive, Feb. 1994, at 23 (reporting that Manpower, Inc., an employee temporary placement service, is now a larger job source than the General Motors Corporation); John Templeman, A Continent Swarming with Temps, Bus. Wk., Apr. 1996, at 54 (determining that the movement toward a contingent workforce is an international problem).
[C]ontingent arrangements may be introduced simply to reduce the amount of compensation paid by the firm for the same amount and value of work, which raises some serious social questions. This is particularly true because contingent workers are drawn disproportionately from the most vulnerable sectors of the workforce. They often receive less pay and benefits than traditional full-time or "permanent" workers, and they are less likely to benefit from the protections of labor and employment laws. A large percentage of workers who hold part-time or temporary positions do so involuntarily.
Commission, supra, at 35.
Six million Americans hold jobs they do not consider permanent, far fewer than experts expected, the first Government survey of its kind has found.....
Some estimates have placed the share of contingent workers, who are not necessarily part-time employees, as high as 35 percent instead of the 4.9 percent found by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Time Magazine, for example, estimated in a prominent 1993 article entitled "The Temping of America" that contingent workers would make up half of the labor force by the year 2000.
Robert D. Hershey, Jr., Survey Finds 6 Million, Fewer than Thought, in Temporary Jobs, N.Y. Times, Aug. 19, 1995, at 31.
Of 124 million people who were working in May, 8 million--2.2 million more than a decade ago--moonlighted, or held two or more jobs simultaneously. Of 22 million part-timers, 4.5 million wanted full time work and could not get it. The number of temporary workers has tripled in a decade to 2.1 million in May. And the average hourly wage, in terms of what people can buy with it, has been falling since 1973.
Peter T. Kilborn, In New Work World, Employers Call all the Shots, N.Y. Times, July 3, 1995, at A1.
America has entered the age of the contingent or temporary worker, of the consultant and subcontractor, of the just-in-time work force-fluid, flexible, disposable. This is the future.... For good...and ill,...the workers of the future will constantly have to sell their skills, invent new relationships with employers who must, themselves, change and adopt constantly in order to survive in a ruthless global market.
Lance Morrow, The Temping of America, Time, Mar. 29, 1993, at 40.
521. See Robert D. Hershey, Jr., U.S. Wages Up 2.7% in Year, A Record Low, N.Y. Times, Nov. 1, 1995, at A1. The expanding economy that has propelled stock prices to record levels has not spilled over to the paychecks of American workers, whose earnings rose by 2.7 percent in the last 12 months, the smallest amount on record, the Labor Department reported....
....
Since the mid-1980s, the incomes of middle-class households have stagnated.... [E]ven in a year with a solidly expanding economy, a roaring stock market and strong corporate profits, many American workers cannot find perceptible improvements in their earnings.
Id.; see Keith Bradsher, Americans' Real Wages Fell 2.3% in 12-month Period, N.Y. Times, June 23, 1995, at D4 ("[W]ages plunged 2.3% after adjusting for inflation during the 12 months through March. The drop, while not the first, is the largest in the eight years that the Labor Department has calculated these figures."); see also Keith Bradsher, Productivity Is All, but It Doesn't Pay Well, N.Y. Times, June 25, 1995, at E4 (reporting that compensation stagnated, as productivity and profits increased); Nancy Gibbs, Working Hard, Getting Nowhere, Time, July 3, 1995, at 16 ("[D]espite the exuberant stock market and mild inflation, real wages keep on falling."); Steven Rattner, Leaky Boats on the Rising Tide, N.Y. Times, Aug. 29, 1995, at A19 ("Since 1973, annual earnings of the bottom 10 percent of workers have dropped by 24 percent (after adjustment for inflation), while those of the top 20 percent have increased by 10 percent. As a result, the United States--the great egalitarian society--has the widest income disparity of any modern democratic nation.").
United States Secretary of Labor Robert Reich poignantly describes the "anxious class, consisting of million[s] of Americans who no longer can count on having their jobs next year, or next month, and whose wages have stagnated or lost ground to inflation." Louis Uchitelle, The Rise of the Losing Class, N.Y. Times, Nov. 20, 1994, at D1; see Bob Herbert, Strength in Numbers, N.Y. Times, Nov. 3, 1995, at A29 ("[United States] Secretary of Labor Robert Reich said '[t]here is something wrong with rising profits, rising productivity and a soaring stock market, but employee compensation heading nowhere."').
Most recently, an actual shortage of workers has not seen increases in wages. This is attributed to the strong competition created by foreign businesses. See Robert D. Hershey, Labor Market Tightens but Pay Gains Stay Slim, Concerns Persist About Wage Inflation, N.Y. Times, Sept. 5, 1996, at D1.
522. See Patricia Schroeder, Does the Growth in the Contingent Work Force Demand A Change In Federal Policy? 52 Wash. & Lee L. Rev. 731 (1995).
523. See id. at 732.
524. See Stanley Aronowitz & William Difazio, The Jobless Future: Sci-Tech and the Dogma of Work 93 (1994).
525. See Bob Herbert, Firing Their Customers, N.Y. Times, Dec. 29, 1995, at A35. "The number of announced layoffs since 1989 will reach three million by New Year's Eve, according to the outplacement firm, Challenger, Gray & Christmas." id.
526. See Sunday Morning (CBS television broadcast, Jan. 14, 1996).
527. See Alan Downs, Corporate Executions: The Ugly Truth About Layoffs-How Corporate Greed is Shattering Lives, Companies, and Communities (1995) (providing an indepth look at corporate layoffs); Sixty Minutes: White Collar Blues (CBS television broadcast, Jan. 7, 1996).
The hope that higher growth will lift compensation may be of scant comfort to workers worried about keeping their jobs. Even as economic growth remains steady, companies continue to announce plans to shed jobs, the latest being an announcement today that W.R. Grace & Company would cut 800 jobs by the end of next year.The job insecurity bred by such cut backs was cited this month by Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, as a major factor in the slowdown in labor compensation. That fear has doubtless played a significant role in the slowdown in the growth of labor compensation as workers have in effect sought to preserve their jobs by accepting lesser increases in wages ....
Robert D. Hershey, Jr., U.S. Wages Up 2.7% in Latest Year A Record Low, N.Y. Times, Nov. 1, 1995, at A1; see Kenneth N. Gilpin, Lockheed to Eliminate 12,000 Jobs, N.Y. Times, June 27, 1995, at D1 ("The Lockheed Martin Corporation announced a sweeping consolidation plan yesterday that would close plants and field offices, eliminate 12,000 jobs and ultimately save the company $1.8 billion a year."); see also G. Pascal Zachary, Sharp Decline in Job Stability is Found in New Study, Contradicting Prior Data, Wall St. J., June 6, 1995, at A3.
Downsizing as a cost-cutting tool has tremendous momentum now. By one estimate, the number of corporate jobs cut in the first quarter of 1994 averaged 3,106 a day, up 13 percent from the similar 1993 quarter. In the first half of 1994, Nynex, GTE, Pacific Bell and AT&T alone announced a total of more than 59,000 job cuts. By year-end, American Express had cut 5,000 jobs; Eastman Kodak, 10,000; Hughes Aircraft, 4,400; Kidder Peabody, 750; Kmart, nearly 7,000; Northrop Grumman, 3,750, and Roche Holdings, 5,000.
James Drury, Tomorrow's Leaders Sidelined, N.Y. Times, May 14, 1995, at F13; see Matt Murray, Thanks, Goodbye: Amid Record Profits, Companies Continue to Lay Off Employees, W all S t. J., May 4, 1995, at A1 ("Corporate profits rose 11% in 1994, after a 13% rise in 1993....Meanwhile, corporate America cut 516,069 jobs in 1994....That is far more than in the recession year of 1990, when 316,047 jobs were eliminated, and close to the 1991 total of 555,292 jobs.").
[A]s downsizing threatens middle level managers and white collar workers, many "comfortable" job holders live under a "sword of Damocles." In 1994, according to Alan Blinder, downsizing (the other side of the productivity coin) has proceeded at the rate of 240,000 jobs a quarter--almost a million a year. New labor displacing technologies tick away like a time bomb.
Bertram Gross, Civilization and Work, 16 Hum. Rts. Q. 759, 762-63 (1994) (reviewing Richard Lewis Siegel; Employment and Human Rights: The International Dimension (1994) and Sheila D. Collins et al., Jobs for All: A Plan for the Revitalization of America (1994)); see Charles Heckscher, White-collar Blues: Management Loyalties in an Age of Corporate Restructuring (1995); Martin Yate, Beat the Odds: Career Buoyancy Tactics For Today's Turbulent Job Market 54 (1995) (stating that over two million people have been laid off by American corporations since 1990); Margaret O. Kirk, When Surviving Just Isn't Enough, N.Y. Times, June 25, 1995, at F11 (reporting psychological fragility of workers who survive employer downsizing); Maria Mallory et al., Professionals Feel The Heat, U.S. News & World Rep., Apr. 1, 1996, at 44 (tracking pervasive job losses among professionals); McNeil-Lehrer Newshour: Boom or Bust? (PBS television broadcast November 24, 1995) (reporting anxiety among workers at all-time highs).
528. See Alan Downs, Corporate Executions: The Ugly Truth About Layoffs-How Corporate Greed is Shattering Lives, Companies, and Communities 3 (1995).
529. See Edmund L. Andrews, Job Cuts at AT&T Will Total 40,000, 13% of Its Staff, N.Y. Times, Jan. 3, 1996, at A1.
530. Newsweek reports:
Union membership as a percentage of the work force is at the lowest level since the Wagner Act was passed in 1935. (In the six years after that, union membership tripled.) Union membership was 33.2 percent of the workforce in 1955. Today it is 15.5 percent. In the private sector it is 10.9 percent. Since 1979 the United Auto Workers membership has shrunk from 1.5 million to 800,000, the United Steelworkers from 380,000 to 140,000.Only 3 million of the 70 million jobs added to the economy since 1950 have been manufacturing jobs.
George F. Will, ' Arise, Ye Prisoners ...' Newsweek, Nov. 27, 1995, at 98. As Thomas Geoghegan observed, there are consequently about as many strikes each year as there are major prison riots. See David L. Gregory, Working for a Living, 58 Brook. L. Rev. 1355, 1363-64 (1993) (reviewing Thomas Geoghegan, Which Side Are You On? Trying to Be for Labor When its Flat on its Back (1991) and Ben Hamper, Rivethead: Tales From The Assembly Line (1991)).
Major employers continue to break strikes successfully and with impunity and immunity from long-term adverse consequences. See William Glaberson, Striking Newspaper Workers Out in Cold in a Union Town, N.Y. Times, Nov. 11, 1995, at A1. The Gannett Detroit News and the Knight-Ridder Detroit Free Press have successfully replaced most of their striking journalists, and have broken this strike in Detroit, Michigan, the traditional capital of labor. See id. Meanwhile, the long-term strikes by the United Autoworkers Union against the Caterpillar and Staley corporations in Illinois likewise appear to have largely failed. See Warren Cohen, What Have You Done for Us Lately? Labor's New Leaders Confront Old Problems, U.S. News & World Rep., Nov. 6, 1995, at 40; see also Peter T. Kilborn, Union Capitulation Shows Strike Is Now Dull Sword, N.Y. Times, Dec. 5, 1995, at A18; Robert Rose, Caterpillar Continues To Stand Tough as Strikers Return, Wall St. J., Dec. 8, 1995, at B1.
In May, 1995, the United Rubber Workers Union ignominiously declared an unsuccessful end to a ten month strike by 2,300 members against five plants owned by Bridgestone-Firestone, where they have been without a contract since April 23, 1994. See Bridgestone-Firestone Strike Is Called Off, N.Y. Times, May 24, 1995, at A17. Nevertheless, many more workers still wish to join labor unions today, far beyond the numbers of workers who are currently unionized. According to a 1984 survey, a substantial minority of employees, several times the current level of union membership, want to join unions. See Working Under Different Rules 210 (Richard B. Freedman ed., 1994). There are new initiatives to achieve worker coalitions that bridge the traditional divide between the unionized and non-unionized. One such initiative is Working Today, 25 West 43rd Street, New York City, led by Sara Horowitz, an attorney and graduate of the Kennedy School at Harvard. See Bob Herbert, Strength In Numbers, N.Y. Times, Nov. 3, 1995, at A29.
531. See George Soros, Soros on Soros: Staying Ahead of the Curve (1995).
532. See Bob Woodward, The Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House 84 (1994).
533. See G. Pascal Zachary, Study Predicts Rising Global Joblessness, Wall St. J., Feb. 22, 1995, at A2.
A new study on global labor predicts rising unemployment for the rest of this century in most industrialized nations and "endemic" joblessness and "underemployment" in many developing countries..... The ILO, which is issuing its first global job survey, estimates that 30% of the world's labor force of about 2.5 billion people is either unemployed or underemployed.
Id.; see Katherine S. Newman, What Inner-City Jobs For Welfare Moms?, N.Y. Times, May 20, 1995, at A23 ("Inner-city fast-food jobs have become the object of fierce competition. The ratio of job applicants to hires is about 14 to 1."). There is a grimly powerful body of literature devoted to exploring the meaning of the loss of jobs on mass scales. See Stanley Aronowitz & William Difazio, The Jobless Future: Sci-tech and the Dogma of Work (1994); Richard J. Barnet & John Cavanagh, Global Dreams: Imperial Corporations and the New World Order (1994); Peter Kelvin & Joanna E. Jarret, Unemployment: Its Social Psychological Effects (1985); Jeremy Rifkin, The End of Work (1995); Margaret Weir, Politics and Jobs: The Boundaries of Employment Policy in the United States (1992).
534. "Jeremy Rifkin is the author of more than a dozen books on economic trends, and matters relating to science, technology, and culture. He is president of the Foundation on Economic Trends." Jeremy Rifkin, The End of Work cover (1996).
535. Jeremy Rifkin, The End of Work XV (1996).
536. Richard J. Barnet & John Cavanagh, Global Dreams: Imperial Corporations and The New World Order (1994).
537. Id. at 283.
538. Stanley Aronowitz & William Difazio, The Jobless Future: Sci-Tech and the Dogma of Work (1994).
539. Id. at xxi.
540. Joel Kugelmass, Telecommuting: A Manager's Guide to Flexible Work Arrangements (1995) (explaining that due to the rise in the use of computer technology, workers no longer need to perform their duties in the office).
541. See Edward C. Baig, Welcome To The Officeless Office, Bus. Wk., June 26, 1995, at 104 ("The 8.4 million telecommuters out there today represent the fastest-growing portion of the work-at-home set. It expects the number to exceed 13 million by 1998."); see also Thomas C. Kohler, Individualism and Communitarianism at Work, 1993 BYU L. Rev. 727, 736.
[I]ncreasingly the workplace itself is less one "place." Thus, for example, ten percent of the Chicago area employees of American Telephone and Telegraph now work at locations other than company facilities-many of them at home. Despite concerns about the impact of employee isolation, such "telecommuter" arrangements are on the rise.
Id. at 736.
542. See Nancy E. Dowd, Work and Family: The Gender Paradox and the Limitations of Discrimination Analysis in Restructuring the Workplace, 24 Harv. C.R.-C.L. L. Rev. 79, 101 (1989).
543. See Kugelmass, supra note 540, at 4-6.
544. See Anthony R. Chase, Race, Culture, and Contract Law: From the Cottonfield to the Courtroom, 28 Conn. L. Rev. 35 (1995)
[T]he newly freed slaves who started their lives of freedom with no property, no money, no education, and usually no vocation other than farming were unable to use...market functions to bargain for higher wages and better living and working conditions. As a consequence, the originally freed slaves remained economically deprived and their descendants reaped "a disproportionately small share of society's bounty as each successive generation passe[d] along its inherited economic disadvantage to the next."
Id.
545. Malthusian refers to the works of Thomas Malthus, an eighteenth century economist from England. See 12 Collier's Encyclopedia 287 (1961).
546. See Craig R. Whitney, Europe Isn't Divided in Its Joblessness, N.Y. Times, Mar. 31, 1996, at E4; Craig R. Whitney, Jobless Legions Rattle Europe's Welfare States, N.Y. Times, June 14, 1995, at A3.
547. See Craig R. Whitney, Jobless Legions Rattle Europe's Welfare States, N.Y. Times, June 14, 1995, at A3.
548. See Nathaniel C. Nash, Unemployment in Germany Rose to 9.9% in December, N.Y. Times, Jan. 10, 1996, at D2; Bill Powell, Germany's Disease, Newsweek, Apr. 8, 1996, at 44 ("Unemployment in Germany is 11.2 percent.").
549. See Craig R. Whitney, Chastened by High Jobless Data, Paris and Bonn Seek a Solution, N.Y. Times, Jan. 16, 1996, at D1.
550. See Bloomberg Business News, Jobless Rate in Japan Reached A Record of 3.4% in November, N.Y. Times, Dec. 26, 1995, at D3.
551. See William Bridges, Jobshift: How to Prosper in a Workplace Without Jobs 29 (1994). In the 1980s, many western European nations considered liberalization of constraints on employer abilities to terminate workers. See Karen Paull, Employment Termination Reform: What Should a Statute Require Before Termination?--Lessons from the French, British, and German Experiences, 14 Hastings Int'l & Comp. L. Rev. 619, 643 (1990); Clyde W. Summers, Worker Dislocation: Who Bears the Burden? A Comparative Study of Social Values in Five Countries, 70 Notre Dame L. Rev. 1033 (1995); Gary S. Becker, Why Europe Is Drowning in Joblessness, Bus. Wk., Apr. 8, 1996, at 22; Keith Bradsher, Skilled Workers Watch Their Jobs Migrate Overseas, N.Y. Times, Aug. 28, 1995, at A1; Craig R. Whitney, Jobless Legions Rattle Europe's Welfare States, N.Y. Times, June 14, 1995, at A3 ("With unemployment rates above 12 percent in France and Italy, 23 percent in Spain and about 9 percent in Germany for May [1995], joblessness is at the highest levels since recovery from World War II ...."); see also Richard Lewis Siegel, Employment and Human Rights: The International Dimension 5 (1994); Labor Law in the Post-industrial Era (Lord Wedderburn et al. eds., 1994); Sam Dillon, At U.S. Door, Huddled Masses Yearn for Better Pay, N.Y. Times, Dec. 4, 1995, at A4 (discussing that foreign companies create jobs in poor areas but pay very little in Mexico); Craig R. Whitney, Europe Isn't Divided In Its Joblessness, N.Y. Times, Mar. 31, 1996, at E4 ("[Unemployment] has now reached a European-wide unemployment average of 11 percent, nearly double the rate in the United States.").
Political leaders of the 15 nations in the European Union keep warning their electorates that high unemployment won't go down until rigid high labor costs do-jobs will just flow east to central Europe, where it's cheaper to hire people.....
"[I]t's like a shot of adrenaline to sit in Berlin and realize that one hour away by car, in a country where you no longer need a visa to travel, labor costs are only 5 to 10 percent of what they are in Germany."
Craig R. Whitney, West European Companies Head East for Labor, N.Y. Times, Feb. 9, 1995, at D3.
552. 29 U.S.C. ss 151-169 (1994).
553. See Causes of Loss of Union Membership Debated at New York University Conference On Labor, 110 Daily Lab. Rep. (BNA) A-16 (June 8, 1992).
554. The 1996 annual budget cut the funds allocated to the NLRB from $176 million in 1995 to $170 million. See Janet Hook, Congress Ends Fiscal Seige, Passes Budget, L.A. Times, Apr. 26, 1996, at A1. William B. Gould, IV, the Chairman of the NLRB appointed by President Clinton, was approved by the closest vote given any Clinton nominee. See Daniel V. Yager, Agenda for Reform: The Future of Employment relationships and the Law, Indus. & Lab. Rel. Rev., Apr. 1, 1995, at 586 (book review). The activist tone of the Gould Board has alarmed many employers. The publication of Gould's controversial book, Agenda for Reform (1993), while Mr. Gould was still an active Stanford Law School labor law professor, further exacerbated employer concerns. See Yager, supra, at 586. There is significant bi-partisan, Republican-led support to modify substantially section 8(a)(2) of the NLRA, and to provide for greater work place participatory worker-management teams. This would legislatively overrule the Electromation decision. 35 F.3d 1148 (7th Cir. 1994) (finding that employer's "action committees" constituted labor organizations which are in violation of section 8(a)(2)). Section 8(a)(2) of the NLRA provides that it is an unfair labor practice for an employer to dominate the employees' labor organization. See 29 U.S.C. s 158(a)(2) (1994). For discussion of the merits of the Teamwork for Employers and Managers Act (TEAM) HR 743, #5293, see, William C. Byham, Congress Should Strengthen the Corporate Team, Wall St. J., Feb. 5, 1996, at A14.
555. Everyone agrees that the influences of computer technology will be profound. However, there is considerable disagreement as to whether computer technology will necessarily be a good means to good ends, or the instrument for engineering Orwellian brave new worlds. See, e.g., Nicholas Negroponte, The Architecture Machine (1970); see also, e.g., Bill Gates, The Road Ahead (1995); M. Ethan Katsh, Law in a Digital World (1995); Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) (fictionalizing a popular nightmare of technological dominance as demonstrated by Hal the computer, engineering the death of his human managers); Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (1995); Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (1992); Kirkpatrick Sale, Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution Lessons for the Computer Age (1995); Mark Slouka, War of the Worlds: Cyberspace and the High-Tech Assault on Reality (1995) (arguing that it is increasingly difficult to separate real life from virtual existence, warns of the uglier aspects of seemingly unproblematic progress through computer technology, and urges reaffirmation of human connections to the non-computer-affected world); Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (1995); Sherry Turkle, The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (1984). The popular press is also increasingly examining the issues of computer culture. See, e.g., Michael Krantz, The Great Manhattan Geek Rush of 1995, N.Y. Mag., Nov. 13, 1995, at 34; The New York Cyber Sixty, N.Y. Mag., Nov. 13, 1995, at 44, 52 (quoting Mark Stahlman co-founder of the New York Media Association, stating that some people want to replace the Constitution with a different form of government using this new technology, but warns the technology and the World Wide Web will fail because people are already getting bored with it).
I especially thank my research assistant, Michael D. Jew, for his amazing computer abilities, and his irrepressible and optimistic faith in the tremendous social good he maintains will be realized through computer technologies. He consistently reminds me that, in Chinese, the word for crisis is similar to the word for opportunity; the Chinese word means that it is time to make a change in a different direction, with the difference in meaning depending on intonation and emphasis. It is usually translated as "crisis" in English. Therefore, while technology may threaten to usher in Huxley's Brave New World, it may instead lead to increased freedom and liberation from meaningless toil and drudgery and thus enable better quality of life through creativity, ingenuity, and imagination. Unwarranted fear of technology stifles and retards human potential.
556. See Sale, supra note 555, at 3 (recounting the uprising of English artisans, in the late 18th Century, known as the Luddites, who reacted violently to the introduction of new technologies to their trades, believing these technologies threatened their livelihoods).
557. The norm of the socially necessary structures to enable lives beyond poverty have been developed most recently in the intellectual renaissance of the republican, civic virtues movement. See generally Francis Fukuyama, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (1995) (noting that the liberal political and economic institutions depend on healthy and dynamic civil society for their vitality); Cass R. Sunstein, The Partial Constitution (1993) (arguing that equal citizenship requires freedom from desperate economic misery); Robert Kuttner, Needed: A Two Way Social Contract in the Workplace, Bus. Wk., July 10, 1995, at 22 ("The elements of a decent, two-way social contract in the workplace require floors set by either national policies or strong labor unions."). This has long been a cornerstone of Catholic Social Teaching. Cf. John Langan, The Contract With America And Catholic Social Teaching, America, July 29, 1995, at 10. For related work on the necessity of meaningful employment in the social contract see Richard J. Armeson, Is Work Special? Justice and the Distribution of Employment, 84 Am. Pol. Sci. Rev. 1127 (1990) and Thomas C. Kohler, Civic Virtue At Work: Unions As Seedbeds Of The Civic Virtues, 36 B.C. L. Rev. 279 (1995).