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[...] A worker with a punctual record over the course of many months received a T-shirt emblazoned with a slogan (in Spanish) such as "RCA and me," "RCA and I are one team," or "I am part of RCA," and won an opportunity to participate in a raffle that might even lead to a free trip into the interior of the country. As in Bloomington, RCA also tried to construct a family atmosphere (una gran familia) through a variety of extracurricular activities-team sports, birthday parties, production awards, dances, exercise groups, drill teams, the celebration of festival days, and educational courses. Workers could even enter the plant beauty contest for the title of Miss RCA, the winner to compete against Miss Sylvania, Miss GTE, and so on for the coveted title of Miss Maquiladora; or they could enter the Maquilolimpiada, the Maquila Olympics, and compete in athletic events against company teams from all over the country. In later years, with the revival of the company mascot, the line with the highest production numbers won the "privilege" of displaying a giant stuffed Nipper in their work space.
[...] To remind the workers of the new climate of"enforced responsibility," large signs on the wall declared: "Quality is the number one priority in our business, there are no exceptions!" and "Gain confidence through customer satisfaction!" The new system ingeniously encouraged workers to monitor each other's behavior rather than be under the constant supervision of management. An RCA employee explained, "We're trying not to have mistakes and to fulfill the quality [goals], because here we achieve teamwork and respect the others' work." Another echoed, "We're all important, because our job depends on quality."
why do these slogans sound like someone ran Chinese propaganda through google translate
When electrical firms searched for labor across the economic globe, they sought a simple package: low wages, a peaceful industrial relations environment, and an abundance of young, unemployed women. The circumstances that caused a firm to choose a given community, however, were fundamentally transformed by the very presence of the factory. As one of the RCA managers in charge of finding new plant locations explained, these changes become unacceptable to corporate leaders, and once again they search for a new location. Many managers, he said, "say a plant should never be at one location more than twenty years, because of the development of habits, of wage structures, of seniority, and you should move those things every twenty years .... There is some sanity, some credibility to that statement." In contrast, he continued, "There are some older manufacturing sites that are still productive. A lot of it has to do with the mentality that had developed in the workforce." The power to decide whether a community's "mentality" was acceptable or not remained the right of the corporation as workers' local actions could be countered with the simple existence of what to them was a distant and abstract alternative to their own place.
i love the idea of 'mentality' used as a euphemism for discussing workers who demand what they are entitled to
Even though protectionism appeared to be a ready solution to the globalizing labor market, U.S. trade unionists remained hamstrung by their push for higher tariff barriers. Protectionist restrictions tended to offer little to workers on the community level, and tariffs often actually insulated corporations from competitive pressures and still left management free to squeeze its workforce. Most important, protectionism tended to erect "barriers of ill will" between the wage earners of different nations-particularly those of the First and Third Worlds. The lessons that might have been learned from the migration of capital to the U.S. South-that regulatory mechanisms that ensured an upward, rather than downward, harmonization of regional economies may be the only solution-were lost when it came to formulating strategies for the transnational level. Although the flight of jobs to foreign lands indicated that business and the state had abdicated their ends of the postwar bargains, organized labor continued to try to uphold the entire framework through protectionist measures until a Democratic president put his full weight behind the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement, signaling the bitter end. The PATCO strike, when President Reagan permanently replaced striking air-traffic controllers, is frequently cited as the symbolic end of labor's political clout. Labor's power had been dwindling since the 1970s, and the passage of NAFTA by a member of"labor's own" party demonstrated just how marginal organized labor had become to the political process. [...]
This is not, however, a book of prescriptions. No glorious blueprint for the left resides within its pages. Rather it brings together crucial perspectives for understanding capitalism and the world we inhabit. While the assessment of capitalism and its opponents may seem bleak, the conclusion of the book is not. The way forward is to be found by arming ourselves with unsparing analysis of the predicament we find ourselves in, while having the fortitude to once again think ambitiously about broad emancipatory change.
just inspiring
[...] the call remains for a return to the type of regulatory system of the Keynesian postwar welfare state, which ostensibly held the depredations of capital at bay. The rationale runs along these lines: in the 1940s, '50s, and '60s, corporations were kept in their place by a state that imposed checks on banking and manufacturing. Starting in the late 1970s, the state retreated and let the market run wild. If we could only return to the heyday of American capitalism, all would be well.
But is a return feasible, and if it were, would all be well? The present crisis and the limitations of such alternatives may be best grasped by examining the roots of neoliberalism in the crisis of capitalism in the 1970s, afflicting the system's vaunted postwar "Golden Age." The era that many on the left look back to with longing, combined a welfre state (to a greater extent in Europe and Canada and a lesser extent in the U.S.) and a Keynesian commitment to full employment in the Global North and varying degrees of state planning in the Global South. It was shored up by the international financial stability of Bretton Woods, which regulated the international monetary system with the U.S. dollar at its center. During its zenith, it delivered relative economic prosperity in the Global North and moderate development in the Global South.
Yet by the late 1960s the welfare state system was running out of steam. As the 1970s arrived, it sputtered out. The costs of the Vietnam War and domestic spending put significant strain on the U.S. dollar. [...]
not exactly new but it's useful to hammer that story in my head
Neoliberalism also entailed the dispossession and incorporation of massive numbers of new workers into the waged labor force [...] The expansion of the global pool of labor has eroded labor's bargaining power, making it much harder for workers to demand higher wages without capital going elsewhere. [...]
[...] the recognition of capitalism's bankruptcy does not ineluctably translate into anticapitalist politics [...]
The obstacles to conceiving a new emancipatory politics are formidable [...] Neoliberalism has meant a gloves-off form of class war, borne out by the assault on militant unions, relentless restructuring of employment, speed up, wage slashing, and intentional unemployment as a means of disciplining workers and breaking organinzed labor. [...] the increasing precariousness of employment has put a damper on workplace militancy, as workers are hesitant to take actions when they may easily be put out on their ears.
Yet neoliberalism has operated in other ways, which are subtler, but no less destructive. The enormous growth of finance over the past three decades and the integration of the working class into financial circuits, through pensions, mortgage, and credit card debt, have bound people into the system [...] This has been significant for the recent trajectory of capitalism, as more and more people kept the system afloat by borrowing money [...] it has caught workers up in the system, giving them a stake in its survival. The hope of individual advancement within the system, or simply hanging on, has become in many cases a substitute for collective social change. [...]
You simply couldn't have global production with out the role that finance plays just in this respect, and I'm not even getting into the role that finance plays in terms of venture capital, which was very important in terms of the development of information and technology revolution we just lived through; or the role it plays in terms of facilitating investment. You could do the same for the kind of role that finance plays in terms of making indebted consumers into viable consumers. [....] you can go even further to look at the role that finance plays via channeling workers' savings into pension funds and the role those pension funds play in investing in stock markets, investing in derivatives, and so on, which has to be traced through how that links to production.
[...] You're creating a global capitalism within which the American state and American capital have structural power.
The structural power comes from the fact that that the U.S. is still the dominant country in terms of technology. It's increasingly playing a crucial role in terms of what I raised before--business services, accounting, legal, consulting, engineering, and of course finance. There's more concentration of American power in finance than there is in other sectors. So it's very important not to see imperialism as being only about territorial intervention. And it's very important to understand that this kind of empire grows through actually spreading production, in a sense sharing production globally in a particular way.