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DICTATORSHIP OVER THE PROLETARIAT:
Deprivations of Work and Labor in the United States
Rick Fantasia
Department of Sociology
Smith College
Northampton, Massachusetts
USA 01063
This paper was published under the title, “Dictature Sur le Proletariat: Strategies de repression et travail aux Etats-Unis” in the June 2001 issue of the French journal, ACTES de la recherché en sciences sociales 138: 3-18. It was awarded the 2004 prize for "best scholarly article" from the Labor and Labor Movements Section of the American Sociological Association (for articles published between 2001 and 2003).
The US economy has been proclaimed as a model for its low levels of unemployment, its high productivity, high living standards, and its remarkable ability to generate jobs. To achieve this success, other countries are informed, they must be prepared to emulate US economic, political, and social arrangements. But just how successful is the US economy, and what exactly would be the costs of replicating it? It might well be argued that what is truly exceptional about the United States is less any of its specific institutional arrangements or even its cultural artifacts, than it is the ease and the extent to which neo-liberal practices and the ideas associated with those practices have been able to circulate without significant opposition. Neo-liberalism has been blessed with a veritable social laboratory in American society, which is why those in Europe seeking to advance market-centered reforms in their own societies have pointed to it as an exemplar, as the model for business de-regulation, for the privatization of public services, for the rapid growth of the service sector and technological innovation within it, as well as for a broad configuration of practices designed to substitute the profit motive for the public interest. What is often unappreciated at an analytical level, however, is the degree to which the entire neo-liberal edifice rests on the situation of labor, including its material conditions, its forms of social organization, and its symbolic life.
Instead, there is a tendency is to focus on selective statistical trends and currents that have been detached from the specifically social context of labor, and this has the effect of lending the American economy a certain charismatic charm as being the great generator of productivity, of employment, and of entrepreneurial freedom. But without wishing to do too much violence to the statistical arts, even a cursory look at cross-national productivity rates indicate that, a) although the U.S. started out well ahead in the postwar productivity contest, by the decade of the 1990’s a number of countries (including France) had actually overtaken the U.S.; and that b) between 1960 and 1997, the average annual productivity growth of the United States was exceeded by at least five other countries (including France).[1] Though notoriously difficult to measure or to standardize, the level of productivity and its rate of growth have traditionally been considered key determinants of current and prospective material standards of living across societies. Whether or not productivity is a reasonable indicator, however, to the extent that it serves as the principal basis for U.S. criticism of Europe for struggling to sustain broad social welfare and collective bargaining systems, the fact that European countries have now surpassed U.S. productivity levels suggests that the condition of “Eurosclerosis” has been misdiagnosed.
Similarly, although the United States has done rather well in terms of job creation over the past several decades, relative to Europe, it is a characterization to which several important qualifications must be added. The first proviso is a simple temporal one, for had we only considered the period from 1975-1985, when most of Western Europe was experiencing slow economic growth, rising levels of unemployment, and falling employment, while at the same time some 20 million jobs were being created in the U.S., we might think that we had indeed discovered a miraculous “jobs machine”.[2] However, if we shift to consider the annual rate of employment growth for the period 1979-1989, we see that while the U.S. rate of employment growth was indeed quite strong (an annual rate of 1.7%) and stronger than most OECD countries, it was not quite as strong as Australia (2.4%), Canada (2.0%), or Switzerland (1.8%); while in a more recent period (1989-1998) as the U.S. rate of growth of employment slowed to 1.3%, Ireland (3.7%), the Netherlands ( 2.0%), New Zealand (2.1%), Norway (1.4%), and Australia (1.4%) all exceeded the U.S. rate.[3]
Furthermore, as many are aware, a high proportion of the jobs that have been created are contingent, or non-standard (part-time, temporary, on-call, sub-contracted, self-employed) jobs, and these tend to be less secure, less well paid, and to provide fewer non-cash “fringe benefits” than do regular full-time jobs. Beginning in the early 1980’s, wage declines drove large numbers of American workers to seek second and third jobs so that by 1999 5.9% of the workforce (8 million workers) held two or more jobs, many of them part-time and concentrated in low-paying industries and occupations. Fueling the expansion of the part-time labor force has been the rapid growth of service sector chain establishments, the most successful of which have been built upon a foundation of high sales volume, high technology, and low labor costs. The managerial imperative to seek increased labor “flexibility” is simply easier to achieve with part-time labor, as one supermarket manager admitted to a researcher: “the pluses of hiring part-time people are the [low] rate of pay that you’re able to pay them, the increased [schedule] flexibility that it will allow you, particularly if you have a varying business, varying volume”.[4] Employers like McDonald’s, the fast food company, maintain a work force of which 80% are part-time (and 100% are non union), while some retail chains mask the size of their part-time labor force by the simple act of redefining the terms. For example, Wal-Mart is able to claim that 70% of its labor force is full-time only by defining full-time as 28 hours per week, and the Starbucks chain of coffee shops claims 57% of its workers are full-time, but defines “full-time” as 20 hours per week.[5] Add to this the fact that the “temporary help” industry in the United States has grown from .4 million workers in 1982 to 3.0 million in 1999, and we reach the situation where approximately one out of four workers in the U.S. is employed in some form of non-standard job arrangement, a circumstance that many may have chosen voluntarily, but that many others have not.[6]
In the same way that claims about job creation in the U.S. must be treated with a measure of skepticism, the same holds for claims about the unemployment level. Although it is true that the overall unemployment rate has tended to be impressively low in the United States for the past two decades, that is not so very exceptional, for it has actually been even lower in a number of other OECD countries. So that while the 1999 U.S. unemployment rate of 4.2% is indeed almost half of the 8.1% average of all OECD countries (and just over a third of the French rate of 11.3%) four European countries had unemployment rates in 1999 that were below the U.S. rate, namely Austria (3.7%), the Netherlands (3.3%), Norway (3.2%), and Switzerland (3.5%), while the same held true in 1989 (in 1979 the U.S. unemployment rate of 5.8%, exceeded the OECD average rate of 4.4%).[7] Furthermore, it is estimated that the millions of poor males, predominantly racial and ethnic minorities caught up in the U.S. penal system, have contributed to a full two percent artificial reduction in the unemployment rate throughout the 1990’s.[8] This would seem to be an especially significant point if we are willing to consider the admittedly counterintuitive idea that youth incarceration in the U.S. essentially represents a perverse, though largely unintended “solution” to the problem of youth unemployment, for when adult unemployment rates are considered apart from those of youth, they appear to have been slightly lower in France than in the U.S. in recent years.[9] Additionally, in its monthly household survey from which the U.S. unemployment rate is actually derived, the U.S. Census Bureau counts anyone over the age of sixteen who has worked just one hour in the previous week as “in the labor force and working”, a standard that would seem to represent a rather uncertain foundation for an edifice as grand as the “Great American Jobs Machine.” Besides, no matter how substantial a job is in the U.S. its occupant can always be discharged by an employer at a moment’s notice, without reason or warning and without severance compensation (with the exception of certain categories of school teachers, university professors, and civil servants with tenure and as well as senior executives in possession of a severance contract). Overall then, it can be said with some confidence that despite several decades of rhetoric and a host of questionable assumptions, when the rates of employment and unemployment are viewed in the social context in which labor is actually performed in the U.S., the situation does not appear nearly as distinctive or as exceptional as it has been made to out to be.
With regard to the wages associated with these jobs, it must be said that if the thesis of working class embourgeoisement had been at all applicable to American society when it was issued in the 1960’s, it was soon reversed, for the average weekly earnings of eighty-percent of working Americans, adjusted for inflation, fell by 18% between the years 1973 and 1995.[10] Thus, the significant wage growth that has occurred in the very recent period (7.3% growth between 1995-1999) must be viewed against the backdrop of a much lengthier, steadier, and more substantial wage decline that transpired for over two decades among male “blue collar”, “service”, and most categories of “white collar” workers in the U.S.[11] This was a period in which the share of workers earning poverty-level wages rose among all groups, and was particularly severe for Hispanic and Black men.[12] Overall, that portion of the American workforce with less than a high school education earned $2.81 per hour less in 1999 than they earned in 1973, and those workers with a high school diploma earned $1.51 less per hour in 1999 than they had in 1973 (together these categories constituted a full 41% of all workers in 1999).[13] This represented a decline in median annual income of approximately $4,500. While the education/wage differential is often portrayed in the media as a higher education “premium” that accrues to those who have successfully attained a university education (often implicitly posed as a shortcoming of those who have not) the data indicate that even those who attended university (but did not complete a degree) also saw their wages drop by a full dollar per hour, between 1973 and 1999.[14]
For workers in the U.S. there has not only been a decline in the monetary wage, but in what Americans call “fringe benefits”, a term that would appear to accurately reflect the institutional status of social provision in American society. In the absence of a universal health insurance system and in the context of a mostly private system of medical care, the employer provision of health insurance is a virtual necessity for most workers in the United States, but between 1979 and 1998 the share of workers covered by employer-provided health insurance in the private sector dropped from 70.2% to 62.9%, a reduction of 7.3%, while employer-provided retirement pensions declined by a rate of 1.9%, leaving in 1998 only 49.2% of the private sector workforce with the ability to depend upon one.[15]
Meanwhile, the United States is the only country (out of twenty OECD countries) where workers actually work more, on average, over the course of a year, than they worked twenty years ago.[16] So while the rest of the industrialized world has seen their annual hours of work reduced by an average of 163 hours over the past two decades, Americans are working 61 hours more now than they did then.[17] An important reason for the difference has to do with the fact that the average annual vacation for a worker in the U.S. (where employers are not legally mandated to provide their employees with any vacation time, paid or unpaid) is only 16 days, a figure that is less than the statutory minimum vacation in every European country, and a full half of the amount of legally mandated vacation time in France, Finland, Austria, Denmark, Spain, and Sweden.[18] Moreover, American workers are not only permitted less daily rest or break time at work than European workers are, but don’t actually have any statutory right to rest time or to bathroom breaks, for any length of time (in fact, managements have the right to require mandatory overtime of workers, without any fixed legal cap on the maximum number of hours).[19] Certainly, French employers are fully capable of fining or disciplining workers for “faire (tros) pipi”, but when they do, if not their co-workers, then the state is likely to intervene in defense of this human imperative, whereas in the U.S. it is not even recognized as such, in statutory terms.[20] In addition to there being no mandated rest time or vacation policy, the U.S. has no sickness leave policy, paid or unpaid, no paid maternity leave policy (although there are 13 weeks of unpaid maternity leave), and there is no child allowance policy to support parenthood.[21]
Of course even though there are so few social benefits mandated by the state, individual employers do provide a range of benefits in the United States. The crucial difference, though, is that whether or not American workers receive social benefits is a function of either the state of the labor market or the state of their collective power. In other words, one chief determinant of whether an employer offers specific benefits has to do with the relative tightness of the labor market at any given time or place, or in any given occupation (with regard to the ability to attract and retain employees with needed skills). The other is the organizational power of workers in relation to employers. The reason, therefore, why so many of the indicators with regard to the social conditions of labor seem so negative is not simply a matter of wishing to place U.S. society in an unflattering light, but it is that in the U.S. there is one problem that serves as a virtual pre-condition for all of the others: a system of labor relations that overwhelmingly favors employers.
For the tens of millions of workers in the U.S. who lack professional or managerial status, a union membership card is the principal passport to social citizenship. Whereas in Europe a more or less full complement of social benefits is granted on the basis of simple citizenship status, in the U.S. most social benefits are granted largely on the basis of union membership status. Thus, through much of the post-war period American workers in the heavily-unionized core sectors of the industrial economy were able to maintain a menu of social benefits that were comparable with (though never fully equal to) those granted to most Europeans as a right of citizenship. The problem is not simply the low percentage of workers who are union members in the U.S. (under 13%), but that it is almost as difficult to attain union membership status in the United States as it is to attain citizenship status in much of Europe, and once union status is attained it must be constantly defended against aggressive employer opposition.
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One important difference that distinguishes the U.S. from France is that the U.S. maintains a highly decentralized system of collective bargaining and labor relations in which union representatives and employers negotiate at many thousands of unionized workplaces across the country in order to produce thousands of separate labor contracts that generally only apply and are only enforceable within each of these specific workplaces or firms alone.[22] Similarly, trade union membership is a status that is attained (and maintained) workplace by workplace and firm by firm, through a process of quasi-self-organization in which groups of rank and file workers, aided by representatives of one of 66 autonomous national union organizations with rough jurisdiction over specific industries and occupations, mobilize an electoral campaign with the goal of convincing a majority of their co-workers to vote for union membership, on a collective basis, and through a government-supervised “union representation election”. If successful, a relatively autonomous local branch of the national union organization will then be chartered as the officially-sanctioned bargaining agent for the workers in that establishment.
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Labor has long been at the heart of the debate over American exceptionalism.[23] To the extent that labor movements are a fulcrum for social transformation, they can be seen as being that social formation whose situation is the condition for the transformation of all social formations. What this means with regard to the United States is that the peculiar situation of its labor movement can be seen as having been both cause and effect of those factors that have been represented as being characteristic of the society, from its putative “classlessness”, to its varied and celebrated “freedoms”, to its relentless ideological individualism. Indeed, when it comes to socio-economic arrangements, the collective actor has largely been replaced by the individual as the most basic unit of social perception in the U.S., a situation that permits a believable-sounding tale of classlessness to be spun in the face of material indicators that show the society to be increasingly “class-ful”.[24]