by
Naomi Klein
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His words clearly struck a chord with a homesick Rosalie: “I want to be together with my family in the province,” she said quietly, looking even younger than her nineteen years. “It’s better there because when I get sick, my parents are there, but here there is no one to take care of me.”
Many other rural workers told me that they would have stayed home if they could, but the choice was made for them: most of their families had lost their farms, displaced by golf courses, botched land-reform laws and more export processing zones. Others said that the only reason they came to Cavite was that when the zone recruiters came to their villages, they promised that workers would earn enough in the factories to send money home to their impoverished families. The same inducement had been offered to other girls their age, they told me, to go to Manila to work in the sex trade.
Several more young women wanted to tell me about those promises, too. The problem, they said, is that no matter how long they work in the zone, there is never more than a few pesos left over to send home. “If we had land we would just stay there to cultivate the land for our needs,” Raquel, a teenage girl from one of the garment factories, told me. “But we are landless, so we have no choice but to work in the economic zone even though it is very hard and the situation here is very unfair. The recruiters said we would get a high income, but in my experience, instead of sending my parents money, I cannot maintain even my own expenses.”
In sharp contrast to the days when corporate employees took pride in their company’s growth, seeing it as the result of a successful group effort, many clerks have come to see themselves as being in direct competition with their employers’ expansion dreams. “If Borders opened thirty-eight new stores a year instead of forty,” reasoned Jason Chappell, sitting next to Brenda Hilbrich on the vinyl seats of our deli booth, “they could afford to give us a nice wage increase. On average it costs $7 million to open a superstore. That’s Borders’ own figures….”
“But,” Brenda interrupted, “if you say that directly to them, they say, ‘Well, that’s two markets we don’t get into.’”
“We have to saturate markets,” Chappell said, nodding.
“Yeah,” Brenda added. “We have to compete with Barnes & Noble.”
The retail clerks employed by the superchains are only too familiar with the manic logic of expansion.
always growth!
But while many workers are indeed drawn to flexible work arrangements, their definition of what constitutes “flexibility” is dramatically different from the one favored by service-sector bosses. For instance, while studies have shown that working mothers define flexibility as “having the ability to work less than full-time hours at decent wages and benefits, while still working a regular schedule,”21 the service sector has a different view of part-time work, and a different agenda. A handful of brand-name chains, including Starbucks and Borders, bolster low wages by offering health and dental benefits to their part-timers. For other employers, however, part-time positions are used as a loophole to keep wages down and to avoid benefits and overtime; “flexibility” becomes a code for “no promises,” making the juggling of other commitments—both financial and parental—more challenging, not less. At some retail outlets I’ve researched, the allotment of hours is so random that the ritual of posting next week’s schedule prompts the staff to gather around anxiously, craning their necks and hopping up and down as if they are checking to see who got the lead in the high-school musical.
Starbucks has been the most innovative in the modern art of supple scheduling. The company has created a software program called Star Labor that allows head office maximum control over the schedules of its clerks down to the minute. With Star Labor, gone is anything as blunt and imprecise as a day or evening shift. The software measures exactly when each latte is sold and by whom, then tailor-makes shifts—often only a few hours long—to maximize coffee-selling efficiency. As Laurie Bonang explains, “They give you an arbitrary skill number from one to nine and they plug in when you’re available, how long you’ve been there, when customers come in and when we need more staff, and the computer spits out your schedule based on that.”22 While Starbucks’ breakthrough in “just-in-time” frothing looks great on a spreadsheet, for Steve Emery it meant hauling himself out of bed to start work at 5 a.m., only to leave at 9:30 a.m. after the morning rush had peaked and, according to Star Labor, he was no longer working at maximum efficiency. Wal-Mart has introduced a similar centralized scheduling system, effectively reducing employee hours by pinning them precisely to in-store traffic. “It’s done just like we order merchandise,” says Wal-Mart CEO David Glass.23
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.