Re: Re: RE: Suppressed Voices: McReynolds and Nader(fwd)

[Gar Lipow <lipowg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

There are a few people who have come up with answers -- including Robin
Hahnels and Michael Albert's  Parecon scheme. However whenever it is
brought up we get into an endless loop of argument.

Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> Lisa & Ian Murray wrote:
>
> >This seems to be a gaping hole in left prescriptions for organizational
> >change at the micro and macro economic level. What would socializing IBM or
> >UPS, or McDonalds for that matter, look like?
>
> As opposed to small, locally owned enterprises? What would
> socializing them look like, and all the
> communicational/organizational forms? How wretched those can be was
> shown in an article in a recent issue of Dissent by Liza
> Featherstone, an excerpt of which follows...
>
> Doug
>
> ----
>
> More recently, employees at Powell's Books, a six-store chain in
> Portland, Oregon -- who, at $7 an hour, were making no more than
> Portland's average fast-food worker, and had just been denied an
> expected wage increase -- faced a similar, though more restrained,
> counterattack when they wanted to join the International Longshore
> and Warehouse Union's Local 5 (ILWU). Owner Michael Powell is a
> prominent progressive in Portland who is active in the local
> Democratic Party and an outspoken free-speech advocate. His bookstore
> is a favorite meeting-place for the Portland left, and at least
> appears to celebrate diversity of all sorts. This summer's in-store
> readings included lesbian poet Minnie Bruce Pratt and ecofeminist
> Charlene Spretnak, and the store's Web site is run in close
> partnership with the Utne Reader. So last fall, employees and
> customers alike were surprised that Powell fought the union. He sent
> out a letter to all his employees' homes accusing the union of
> corruption (actually confusing it with a different union); later, he
> campaigned against the ILWU's long record as a defendant in
> discrimination suits. "You say the word 'union,' and everyone's
> supposed to feel all squishy. I don't get it," Powell insists. "I
> understand if you're organizing farm workers, or people in
> Bangladesh. But this is not that kind of situation."
>
> The union won in April, 161 to 155 -- a very close margin. Paul
> Couey, who works in the store's corporate accounts department, says
> Michael Powell's bluster hurt the union. "He [Powell] framed it as a
> human rights issue," says Couey. "He said the union would quell free
> speech. He used all this jargon that sounded progressive -- saying
> that we were a small, organic institution, and could respond more
> flexibly [without a union]." (There's a grain of truth to this
> concern about flexibility. If Powell's really were committed to
> workplace democracy, the quirks of U.S. labor law could make it
> difficult for unionized workers to combine "management" and
> "non-management" roles. But there's no evidence that Powell is
> sincerely engaged with such complexities.) Says Couey, "Most of the
> flexibility to which he was referring was managerial. We wanted some
> flexibility in our own finances!" Because Powell was known to be
> progressive, employees were at first confused when he talked about
> unions in what Couey calls "such stereotypical" terms. "In early
> meetings, some of us felt that if we could explain it better maybe he
> would understand. But as it continued it became clear that he wasn't
> misinformed; it was a tactic."
>
> Asked why he didn't simply agree to recognize the union after enough
> employees signed cards, Powell hesitates. "That's a good question. I
> thought about it," he says. "But it just didn't seem like the right
> thing." Powell claims that he didn't voluntarily recognize the union
> in part because some employees opposed it, though of course it was
> also because an organized workforce will make it "harder to compete
> in the industry." When I ask Alice Tepper Marlin, a founder of the
> Council on Economic Priorities, which tracks corporate social
> responsibility (and has showered Ben & Jerry's with adulation in the
> past), if she knows of any company that has voluntarily recognized a
> union "on principle," she laughs. "It would be very unusual," she
> says. Marlin looked through her files, and was unable to locate a
> single example of such an occurrence.
>
> So what's going on here? Like New Age religion, that other cultural
> pathology of the 1980s, the SR business movement reflects that
> period's lack of left political vision and analysis. In its implicit
> notion that consumerism could substitute for politics -- aptly
> reflected in the title of that Bible of corporate social
> responsibility, Shopping for a Better World -- it was, at best, a
> lazy and naïve idealism. At worst, it cynically played on the reality
> that, in the 1980s, as now, many people were unhappy with a world
> centered around corporate profits, yet could imagine no alternative.
> It played on most Americans' desire to believe that capitalism,
> without any major, messy overhaul, could be a force for good, if only
> the people in charge meant well. The movement has spawned many of
> what futurist and SR guru Hazel Henderson calls "cleaner and greener"
> small firms, and increasingly, large corporations are jumping on the
> marketing bandwagon; even Wal-Mart is now a member of Business for
> Social Responsibility. The buzzword itself is revealing.
> "Responsibility" suggests that, like parents or benign dictators,
> people running businesses should make compassionate and sensible use
> of power -- while the fact of that power should go unchallenged.
>
> As prescriptions for social change go, then, SR is uninspiring,
> inadequate, and unambitious. But it's also a ready-made
> rationalization for union-busting; after all, if the people running
> the show are the ones who bear all the responsibility, and are cool
> progressive folks, why would workers need a voice of their own? Local
> 4's Michael Cannarella, who coordinated the Powell's drive, has
> organized many nonprofits "run by fairly liberal people." "The
> reaction is universally the same," he says. "'Hey, we're taking care
> of these people, how dare they?' It's like, 'I'm the dad, you're the
> kids.' Sometimes the more liberal they are, the worse their reaction
> to the union because they're the ones who take it the most
> personally."
>
> Michael Powell, for one, has taken the union victory very personally
> indeed. "I thought I was a compassionate employer," he says. "I
> thought I tried to reward my employees as best I could. That point of
> view was rejected. It shakes your confidence in who you are and what
> your values are."
>
> "Even employers who want to do good end up acting like employers,"
> Paul Mishler observes. "That's why you need unions." As for employers
> who claim that they already treat their employees so well that a
> union isn't necessary, Mishler says, "That's like asking, would you
> need democracy if you always had a nice president? It's a silly
> question. The fact is that dictators always end up doing bad things,
> and employers are the same. Without a union [an SR workplace] is a
> benevolent dictatorship."
>
> Listening to Michael Powell, it's clear that either he's genuinely
> anxious that a pack of sweaty longshoremen are going to invade his
> genteel bookstore or, just as likely, he's playing on his workers'
> status anxieties. "We're not on the docks," he says. "I don't want an
> assembly-line work environment. I want to be able to talk collegially
> to my employees." Says Mishler, "A lot of people who emerged from
> that period of the sixties have this idea that middle-class niceness
> is better than working-class roughness. You know, 'they're not our
> type of person, they listen to the wrong music, they eat meat.'" Not
> only do such attitudes preclude these employers' empathy with
> workers, they inform a cornerstone of SR anti-unionism: the
> assumption that conflict itself is destructive. Borders' management,
> in trying to discourage employees from unionizing, continually
> disparaged unions as "divisive," and disruptive to company "culture."
> Such narratives exploit employees' utopianism; most people would like
> to believe in the possibility of a non-exploitative workplace in
> which workers' and companies' interests are the same. This is
> probably a pipe dream in firms without full worker ownership. But
> rather than inspiring employers at least to try to approximate such a
> vision, the rhetoric and practice of corporate socially
> responsibility actively undermines it.