Serfdom Better than Wage Slavery

My son was not laid off last week, but a lot of people were. They came in to work and were told they no longer had a job: just like that. My son works for a firm that services Wall Street. Instead of growing by 40% in the next year, as its leaders had forecast, its business this year will not grow at all. So, they restructured.

But imagine: working for a firm for years, and then walking in one day and being told, "You don't work here anymore."

The only thing that may drive this small corporation to give at least several months' pay, and decent severances, is to protect its reputation on the Street.

My daughter helped unionize an office of Calpirg's subsidiary, The Fund, only to see this ostensibly progressive non-profit put roadblocks against negotiating a first contract, while management fired the shop members one by one--until finally my daughter lost her job; soon thereafter the division was closed and with it the union shop.

Corporations are people: remember? They can give unlimited amounts of money to political campaigns. They are so humane.

I also helped found a union, back in the days when unions weren't yet targeted for destruction. I played a small part of bringing a union to the University of Central Florida: the faculty voted 80% for. Why? Without a union, department chairs and college deans frequently overrode faculty recommendations, whether it was for hiring, promotion, or tenure. Our chair promoted his favorites.

The union didn't change much, but it was some insurance on job tenure and promotions.

Working in firms like my son's, people have no security. He's paid well, including a nice bonus ("not Wall-Street-size, Dad"), but he could walk in tomorrow, or next Friday, and not have a job!

Does the corporation care for the people who work for it? Even the CEO is expendable, although he's probably careful to have a golden parachute in his contract. But corporations are not people. They use people, and spit them out. If you're lucky, you may have a good job in a corporation for a long time. It used to be that you'd get a pension if you lasted until retirement, but now you and your employer jointly fund a 401K while you work there. If the market goes bust, as it did in 2007-8, then your retirement fund could go bust, too; the switch from pensions to contributory funds is accelerating, expressing employers' lack of concern for employees.

In the hundred years before Rome fell, all but the Senators were reduced to serfs. Employees with no security are more at risk than serfs or slaves, but that's the direction in which we're headed.