This is Richard Wolff from Democracy @ Work responding to another Ask Prof Wolff question from
our Patreon community. This one comes from Vivid and while it certainly does touch a raw nerve
that has in fact characterized many of your communications to us here at Democracy @ Work.
Vivid says that the job where that person is working is full of backstabbing employees,
lots of public relations junk about team this and team that, it's a reality light years from
the play acting and pretense of a reasonable workplace with reasonable human relationships
going on there, and Vivid wonders whether this is widespread and what might be going on.
Well, as I've already suggested it’s very widespread,
we're hearing about it all the time. There's even statistical empirical evidence,
for example the record of people quitting their jobs–this is very important because the government
keeps these records–these are people who are not fired, who are not leaving because of some
change in the condition, they just don’t want to work there anymore. And it’s clear from a
number of interviews that something like the following is what happened:
people were away from their jobs for a few weeks, a few months, maybe longer–either because the
businesses where they worked were shut down, the schools where they taught were shut down,
they either weren't teaching or they were teaching at a distance,
covid made their work at the old workplace too dangerous—for all these and related reasons people
spent a good bit of time (here we go) away from their workplaces. Away from the
“toxic” (Vivid’s term) atmosphere and now that they are going back, at least many of them are,
they are forced to confront something they had gotten used to and didn't see clearly
until now: that the workplace is full of fakery, is very toxic, drains your mind, your energy,
your enthusiasm, your personality, and they don't want it. They walk away from it, they resist,
they fight, they quit their job. There's more evidence;
we're seeing more strikes, we're seeing more efforts to form unions, workers are waking up.
The labor movement is moving again. It's interesting because remember, the last time
the American labor movement shifted into high gear was in the depths of the Great Depression
of the 1930s. Working people then were also angry at the toxic conditions of work for so many
and we saw the greatest unionization drive and one of the greatest strikes in human history
and certainly in American history. The greatest unionization drive, we’ve never had anything like
it before we’ve never had anything like it since. Millions of people joined unions because they were
angry at the jobs they were given, the pay they were given, the benefits they were not given,
and so on. You had the great sit-down strikes that taught the working class a fantastic lesson: you
can stay in the workplace. Why are you leaving? You're the majority. Why are the owners staying>
They're the minority. Where's the democracy here? And if you sit down in the workplace as those
famous auto workers in Flint, Michigan did back in the mid 30s, you can get a better deal.
The owners understand that if you’re sitting in you can do a lot more damage
than if you're striking outside can’t you? And they're worried and they always have been.
I want to add another dimension to Vivid’s good question about the toxic
workplace. In my judgment American capitalism is in terrible shape, it is declining,
its hundred year period of dominance in the world is coming to an end. It's being replaced
by China's dominance, which is relentlessly growing, ironically with the help of all those
American, British, French, and German companies that are moved to China over the last 30 years,
and that helped what the Chinese were already doing for themselves,
which is a record of economic development we’ve never seen before in human history.
American companies are in trouble. They also didn't make much money (many of them) during
the pandemic of the last two years so they're eager to catch up. So they're doing all the things
they can to lower their labor costs and take away things they gave their workers to jack up their
prices. That's the inflation we're talking about and yeah, squeezing and making even more toxic the
workplace to get more profits out of them. You're feeling what is very real and it comes right
out of the profit driven logic of this system. The people in charge earn the profits, that’s
what they care about, that's why profit is the bottom line. That your situation is unbearable,
toxic, damaging, stressful, and so on, is of no major interest to them. That's the reality and
it will continue and probably get worse unless and until people understand that this system–the whole
employer/employee relationship–that’s the problem that's what's got to be changed, so the workplace
becomes a joyful learning experience rather than the toxic disaster Vivid’s question points us to.
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