by
Naomi Klein
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Some service-sector companies have made much of the fact that they offer stock options or “profit-sharing” to low-level employees, among them Wal-Mart, which calls its clerks “sales associates” Borders, which refers to them as “co-owners” and Starbucks, which prefers the term “partners.” Many employees do appreciate these gestures, but others claim that while the workplace democracy schemes sparkle on a corporate Web site, they rarely translate into much of substance. Most part-time workers at Starbucks, for instance, can’t afford to buy into the employee stock-option program since their salaries barely cover their expenses. And where profit-sharing schemes are automatic, as at Wal-Mart, workers say their “share” of the $118 billion of annual sales their company hauls in is laughable. Clerks in the Windsor, Ontario, outlet of Wal-Mart, for example, say they only saw an extra $70 during the first three years that their store was open. “Never mind that from the viewpoint of the boardroom, the pension plan’s best feature was that it kept 28 million more shares in firm control of company executives,” writes The Wall Street Journal’s Bob Ortega of the Wal-Mart plan. “Most workers perceived that they could cash in, so the cost of the plan paid off in spades by helping keep the unions out and the wages low” (italics his).26
It was Microsoft, with its famous employee stock-option plan, that developed and fostered the mythology of Silicon Gold, but it is also Microsoft that has done the most to dismantle it. The golden era of the geeks has come and gone, and today’s high-tech jobs are as unstable as any other. Part-timers, temps and contractors are rampant in Silicon Valley—a recent labor study of the region estimates that between 27 and 40 percent of the Valley’s employees are “contingency workers,” and the use of temps there is increasing at twice the rate of the rest of the country. The percentage of Silicon Valley workers employed by temp agencies is nearly three times the national average.43
And Microsoft, the largest of the software firms, didn’t just lead the way to this part-time promised land, it wrote the operating manual. For more than a decade, the company has been busily closing ranks around the programmers who got there first, and banishing as many other employees as it can from that sacred inner circle. Through extensive use of independent contractors, temps and “full-service employment solutions” Microsoft is well on its way to engineering the perfect employee-less corporation, a jigsaw puzzle of outsourced divisions, contract factories and freelance employees. Gates has already converted one-third of his general workforce into temps, and in the Interactive Media Division, where CD-ROMs and Internet products are developed, about half the workers are officially employed by outside “payroll agencies,” who deliver tax-free workers like printer cartridges.44
history repeats itself lol. it's just too tempting
In addition to staffing its campus with permatemps, in 1997 Microsoft initiated a series of moves to disentangle itself from other earthly and cumbersome aspects of running a multibillion-dollar company. “Don’t get caught with useless fixed assets,” Bob Herbold, Microsoft’s chief operating officer, says, explaining his staffing philosophy to a group of shareholders.52 According to Herbold, pretty much everything but the core functions of programming and product development fall into the “useless fixed assets” category—including the company’s sixty-three receptionists, who were laid off, losing benefits and stock options, and told to reapply through the Tascor temp agency. “We were overpaying them,” Herbold said.53
Just as temp workforces mess with the merit principle, so does the growing practice of swapping CEOs like pro ballplayers. Temp CEOs are a major assault on the capitalist folklore of the mail-room boy who works his way up to becoming president of the company. Today’s executives, since they just seem to trade the top spot with one another, appear to be born into their self-enclosed stratospheres like kings. In such a context, there is less room for the dream of making it up from the mail room—especially since the mail room has probably been outsourced to Pitney Bowes and staffed with permatemps.
So although the media often describe campaigns like the one against Nike as “consumer boycotts,” that tells only part of the story. It is more accurate to describe them as political campaigns that use consumer goods as readily accessible targets, as public-relations levers and as popular-education tools. In contrast to the consumer boycotts of the seventies, there is a more diffuse relationship between lifestyle choices (what to eat, what to smoke, what to wear) and the larger questions of how the global corporation—its size, political clout and lack of transparency—is reorganizing the world economy. Behind the protests outside Nike Town, behind the pie in Bill Gates’s face and the bottle shattering the McDonald’s window in Prague, there is something too visceral for most conventional measures to track—a kind of bad mood rising. And the corporate hijacking of political power is as responsible for this mood as the brands’ cultural looting of public and mental space. I also like to think it has to do with the arrogance of branding itself: the seeds of discontent are part of its very DNA.
We have heard the same refrain over and over again from Nike, Reebok, the Body Shop, Starbucks, Levi’s and the Gap: “Why are you picking on us? We’re the good ones!” The answer is simple. They are singled out because the politics they have associated themselves with, which have made them rich—feminism, ecology, inner-city empowerment—were not just random pieces of effective ad copy that their brand managers found lying around. They are complex, essential social ideas, for which many people have spent lifetimes fighting. That’s what lends righteousness to the rage of activists campaigning against what they see as cynical distortions of those ideas. Al Dunlap, the notorious job-slasher-for-hire who built his reputation on ruthless layoffs, may be able to respond to calls for corporate accountability with a rev of his chainsaw, but companies such as Levi’s and the Body Shop can’t shrug them off, because they publicly presented social accountability as the foundation of their corporate philosophy from the first. Over and over again, it is when the advertising teams creatively overreach themselves that—like Icarus—they fall.
By some accident of fate, on February 25, 1997, the multiple layers of anti-corporate rage converged over the Mighty Ducks hockey arena in Anaheim, California. It was Disney’s annual meeting and about 10,000 shareholders crowded into the arena to rake Michael Eisner over the coals. They were upset that he had paid more than $100 million in a severance package to Hollywood superagent Michael Ovitz, who’d lasted only fourteen scandal-racked months at Disney as second in command. Eisner was further attacked for his own $400 million multiyear pay package, as well as for stacking the board with friends and paid Disney consultants. As if shareholders weren’t angry enough, the obscene amounts of money lavished on Ovitz and Eisner were thrown into harsh relief by an unrelated shareholders’ resolution chiding Disney for paying starvation wages to workers in its overseas factories, and calling for independent monitoring of these practices. Outside the arena, dozens of National Labor Committee supporters were shouting and waving placards about the plight of Disney’s Haitian workforce. Of course the monitoring resolution was trounced, but the way the issues of sweatshop labor and executive compensation played off one another must have been music to Charles Kernaghan’s ears.
Eisner, who apparently expected the gathering to be little more than a pep rally, was clearly caught off guard by this confluence of events. Wasn’t he simply playing by the rules—making his shareholders rich and himself richer? Weren’t profits up a healthy 16 percent from the year before? Wasn’t the entertainment industry, as Eisner himself reminded the restless gathering, “extremely competitive”? Ever the expert at speaking to children, Eisner ventured, “I don’t think people understand executive compensation.”21
Or maybe they understood it all too well. [...]
Like Franz, my brother took his life in April of last year. Rodney left no note, just several empty bottles of vodka. Until a few hours before he died, he had been two months sober, trying a keto diet, and going for thirteen-mile runs while working full time. As we later learned, the last thing he googled was: “does vodka have more calories than rum?” He was struggling to better himself until the last moment but came up against more powerful forces. It is not a unique story. These days, it seems as if everything in the world conspires against human flourishing.
Deaths like Rodney’s are now frequently called “deaths of despair,” a category that includes fatalities by overdose and from drug and alcohol abuse, but they don’t have a box for that on death certificates. I remember watching the funeral-home director type “suicide” into the form instead. Above him hung a page of Microsoft Word art, framed and drop-shadowed, informing us that payment is due at time of arrangement. A student-loan company called my mom the next day to ask about payment of another kind. “He’s dead,” she replied. The agent offered her condolences but explained that death did not alter the terms of their contract. Who owns the world, and whose tomorrow is tomorrow? For now, the answer is obvious. It belongs to a bunch of assholes. And I, for one, would really like to kick them all in the teeth.
The United States has seen more and more stories like my own. As inequality rose, so did its victims. Between 1980 and 2014, the income share of the richest 1 percent of American adults doubled, rising from around 10 percent up to 20, while that of the bottom 50 percent was halved, falling from around 20 percent down to 12. Research has shown that societies with high inequality are also societies with high levels of status anxiety — and for good reason: as inequality rises, one’s relative social standing comes to matter much more in determining one’s life chances. Yet as inequality rises, so does the fixity of the status hierarchy. Social mobility declines, so fewer poor parents have rich children, and fewer rich parents have poor children. The wealthy are piling into gated communities and closing the gates behind them.
In this context, people take risks to get ahead against increasingly impossible odds, and mostly they lose. That’s how risk works. And so, here, in the richest country in the world, we have rates of mental illness, drug use, violence, and homicide that are among the highest in the world. We have a massive prison population, facing much harsher sentences than prisoners in other countries. We respond to this drastic situation by giving up our lives. For fuck’s sake, life expectancy is declining in America. On a dying planet we are dying sooner. It’s like being in an otherwise quiet room with the loud ticking of a nearby clock. Can’t you hear it?
A feature of the rise of social inequality in America has been the evaporation of public life, the decline in social experiences not organized around pay or profit. Networks of organizations, from trade unions to church groups to volunteer organizations to parent–teacher associations, have disappeared. Without these places, we all too often retreat into our respective corners, either to make plays at getting ahead, or to nurse our wounds when such risk-taking fails to yield results. People are tired of it all but find that they have no one to turn to: they are too suspicious of each other, too cynical about the motives lurking behind every attempt at fellow feeling and human connection. To get to the future we need, we are going to have to generate new collective lives out of the wreckage of neoliberal atomization. The easy part here is knowing why we need to fight; the hard part will be figuring out a way to come together.