Noam Chomsky on class warfare: The rich think worker insecurity is a good thing (via Raw Story )
Noted leftist thinker and pioneering linguist Noam Chomsky recently sat down at the University of California, Santa Barbara, for a wide-ranging discussion titled “Propaganda Vs. Reality.” The host of the event, Professor Jan Nederveen Pieterse,…
5 comments:
Was rereading Victor Quirk's The Job Guarantee of 1848. Quite relevant to Chomsky's points, and well worth reading, especially the conclusion -
"In the absence of the subsequent 150 years of abstract theorising and obfuscation, and the conditional ameliorations of the welfare state, those contesting the ‘right to work’ in 1848 were remarkably clear sighted as to where their interests lay in relation to the question of full employment. ... The need for opponents of full employment to obscure their agenda, to obtain support from those whose interests they intend to harm, continues to muddy debates around full employment to this day.
How can we understand the implacable nature of this opposition?
The social power of employers ultimately derives from being the arbiters of who shall have economic security and social inclusion and who shall not. Their ability to extract a toll (in surplus labour, productivity, profit, servility) from those seeking passage from unemployment to employment, and subsequently to jobs of higher status and remuneration, is compromised by the existence of alternate exits from unemployment, or actions that make it less repulsive. If the state employs those whom private employers choose to reject, the strategic advantage of controlling entry to private employment is lost, diminishing the social power employers derive from that control...
Proponents of full employment require a clear perspective of who their opponents are: not the sincere adherents of Marshallian abstractions of labour supply and demand that spuriously reduce humans to the status of commodities, nor the welfare officials indoctrinated with dependency theory and fallacious notions of saving ‘taxpayers money’. The real debate that must be had is with the hard core of class warriors who construct these smokescreens, whose implacable opposition to full employment would countenance the slaughter of 6000 working people, and who consciously obscure the nature of their game, being the preservation of social domination."
“Worker insecurity” is good or bad depending on what sort of insecurity you’re talking about. Making it relatively easy for employers to hire and fire can benefit workers in that it can result in a more efficient labour market, all else equal, which in turn reduces unemployment.
Ralph, how does making it easy for employers to hire and fire increase the overall demand for goods and services?
"all else equal" means a stylized model. In many cases and certainly in the case of employment, this model abstracts from reality so much as to be useless. It presumes no government, no taxes, no institutional power, a closed economy, and near perfect competition, none of which apply in a modern economy.
I don't know Ralph's reasons, y, but the standard one is that when employers are locked in when they hire, they become reluctant to hire in the same way their reluctance increases when the wage increases or benefits and protections are added to wages. So employers oppose a minimum wage, as well as benefits and protections, one one hand, and increasing labor power on the others. Maximizing their own utility means decreasing the cost of the factors to the degree it is in their power to do so. They don't have much power over the cost of capital or land (energy, materials), but they do over the cost of labor.
The so-called labor market is supposed to pit individual workers against individual employers in a small business world of individual entrepreneurs and small family businesses in more or less equal competition. That has not been the case for a long time if it ever was the case on a large scale. The so-called labor market is dominated by institutional power arrayed against puny individuals with little information and power.
But you already knew that.
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