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The railroads in the United States carry 40 percent of gross national product (GNP), and remain a vital transportation system. [...] railroad labor has been handcuffed by a rigid Railway Labor Act (RLA) passed in 1926 to prevent strikes in the industry. But it is not only the legal handcuffs that shackle rail labor. The fact that there are 13 craft unions for 132,000 rail workers, all bargaining under separate agreements with the railroads, hampers any solidarity. [...]
Here again we have an example of strategic workers at strategic nodes who have vast potential power to impact capitalism, but remain shackled by legal regimes and fractured internal organization. Eric Olin Wright has written a brilliant essay that establishes a framework in which to think about this dynamic. He distinguishes between "structural" power and "associational" power. Structural power is the power of strategic workers in strategic places in the capitalist system. They have power per se, but the question of whether they can successfully leverage and exercise it depends on their associational power: that is, their organization, consciousness, allies, and so on. This interplay is a dynamic way for workers and their allies to think about their work in organizing at strategic choke points.
essay: "Working class power, capitalist class interests, and class compromise" from 2000
[...] breaking out of treating the workers as isolated individuals clinging to elite status on the waterfront, and instead making common cause with workers along the logistics supply chain. Often the workers doing key functions along the supply chain away from the docks are first-generation immigrant workers toiling at minimum wage with no benefits and no job rights. This employment apartheid cannot be allowed to stand, and these workers must become part of the community of the organized. [...]
ah man so relevant to tech!!
on challenges for dockworkers and how to meet them (if ILWU members get great benefits while workers inland are doing similar jobs in marine supply chain with fewer benefits).
he mentions previous efforts to address this through the Chnage to Win Federation, which failed cus they didn't have the "strategic hammer of port workers backing their exciting community and worker outreach". he also later says the future for dockworkers lies in "conceptualizing themselves as logistics workers and not dockworkers" (similar for tech)
Even on dock the possibilities exist to build power if the union can capture the new-technology work that is part of the use of robotics and other automated processes. Union members can be retrained to repair the robots and develop the software that programs and runs the robots. Right now the ILWU is not prepared to capture the new jobs in maintenance, programming, electronics, and data management that have arisen because of the implementation of new technologies on dock and near dock. The union needs to invest in its own massive training program partnering with vocational high schools, two-year junior colleges, and degree-granting universities, to prepare its members to be the workforce of the future. [...]
i concur with the problem but dunno if i agree with the solution. think about this more
Of course, to effectively question technology requires, first, a critical perspective on the development of capitalism, particularly the relation of technological change to profit rates and the social organization of labor, and, second, intimate knowledge of technology’s scientific bases as well as how it works in specific spheres. Such knowledge, along with a thorough acquaintance with the history of the scientifically and technically based professions and the history of labor’s experience with technology, would be absolutely necessary to the emergence of a labor movement rooted in the relations of production and contemporary labor processes. And we still need an informed history of labor’s attempts to organize professionals in the private and public sectors.
Genuine social movements arise when a social formation can no longer realize its aspirations for the good life in the prevailing system and are prepared to travel the arduous path of social transformation.1 Historically, movements that cease to expand and improve and under adverse economic and political conditions are likely to stagnate and decline. Samuel Gompers’s “More” may have served the AFL’s craft union members adequately for the first decades of the twentieth century, but neither he nor his comrades in leadership considered the aspirations of the industrial workers or the possibility that changing economic, technological, and political conditions might affect the crafts. In the 1930s, industrial workers were inspired by the idea that the union was a way to achieve industrial citizenship—that workers could get off their knees and out from under an imperial ownership that watched and controlled them on and off the job and dictated the terms and conditions of their employment and their lives. These workers sought to take their fate into their own hands. Just as workers had at the turn of the twentieth century, they brandished their desire for dignity in every strike, workplace occupation, and march through city streets. Their vision was not typically anticapitalist, but industrial unionism was a movement of a class that aspired to power over their own labor in the factory and other workplaces at least, and in many instances also in their cities and towns. Union members ran for city council, were elected to school boards, and made their voices heard on a wide range of public policies.
Today, U.S. unions have lost any semblance of this radical imagination, and so are generally unable to inspire working-class passion. They have been passive in the face of dramatic changes in the economy, which have visited hardship on a considerable portion of the workers, and accepted the indifference of the political class to their problems. Their explicit commitment to the existing setup, particularly to the capitalist economic system, and to a perverse version of class peace, have put most of them in a dependent and defensive position. Specifically, they have no tools for any analysis that would help workers evaluate the state of their own affairs and those of the country at large. Dimly, unions recognize that we live in an age when national borders no longer define the economy, but they are still tied to conceptions of reform that this new age has outmoded. More egregiously, instead of acting for themselves, they have fixed their hopes on a series of political “saviors” who either ignore the needs of their labor allies or else pay them lip service and then proceed to betray their trust at almost every turn.
Culture has been captured. Three massive conglomerates own the three record labels and three music publishers that control most of the world’s music. They designed the streaming industry, dominated by Spotify, which itself is (or was) partly owned by those same three labels. When Disney swallowed 21st Century Fox, a single company assumed control of 35 percent of the US box office. Google and Facebook have a lock on the digital ads that are wrapped around music, videos, and news online. Google, along with Apple, is the gatekeeper of everything mobile, giving it a massive cut on games, books, music, and movies. Via YouTube, it controls video streaming. Live Nation has sewn up ticketing and concerts. In the US, one company dominates terrestrial radio, and another satellite. Amazon has an iron grip on book, ebook, and audiobook sales, and dominates ebook and audiobook production. The only publisher that might be able to hold its own is Penguin Random House, and then only by gulping down as many other big publishers as it possibly can. The Big Six trade book publishers had become the Big Five by the time we started writing this book, and are making moves to become the Big Four by the time it’s published.
rough. good summary
The reason creative workers are receiving a declining share of the wealth generated by their work is the same reason all workers are receiving a smaller share—we have structured society to make rich people richer at everyone else’s expense. The playing field has been tilted so far that a growing number of people are falling off the edge, beset by precarious employment, stagnating wages, high costs for education, housing and healthcare, and economic policies that prize shareholders over people and communities.
Then the Chicago School pulled off a brilliant coup. They promoted an antitrust theory that dispensed with the idea of citizenship altogether; instead, they insisted anti-monopoly regulators should limit themselves to thinking about “consumer welfare,” forgetting all that high-minded stuff about “democracy” and “citizenship.” Bork’s version of antitrust concerned itself primarily with maximizing short-term consumer welfare—mostly in the form of lower prices—rather than promoting competition as an end in and of itself. (We emphasize “short-term” because it turns out that once fields are cleared of competitors, consumer benefits like lower prices evaporate fast.)
Putting the focus on consumer welfare changed the calculus completely. So long as prices went down (or at least, didn’t go up), companies more or less stopped having to worry about antitrust enforcers showing up with subpoenas. That meant they could use predatory pricing to squeeze smaller rivals out of markets. It also meant they could dangle the promise of new efficiencies and lower prices to persuade regulators to let them buy up competitors that were previously out of bounds.
While competition is supposed to be central to capitalism, the wealthiest people alive today have gotten rich by suppressing it. They’re brazen about it too. Peter Thiel famously announced in 2014 that “competition is for losers” and counseled companies to monopolize their domains. Business schools teach baby MBAs the same lessons: to avoid industries with high competition, to do what it takes to keep potential competitors out, and, if all else fails, to buy them up. Warren Buffett explains that, in business, he looks “for economic castles protected by unbreachable moats,” because “the products or services that have wide, sustainable moats around them are the ones that deliver rewards to investors.”
That language disguises what’s really going on here. When Buffett talks about moats, he means the kind of barriers that lock in customers and suppliers and make markets inhospitable to new entrants. These corporations are not protecting castles from marauders. They are creating chokepoints that separate producers from consumers so they can capture a disproportionate share of the value from other people’s work.
We agree there is an urgent need to reform antitrust law and enforcement and certainly criticize existing approaches in the pages that follow. But antitrust should not be relied upon to do all the heavy lifting. In this book, we explore how the chokepoints enabling corporations to extract more than their fair share of value are formed in the first place. Very often, as we will show, legal structures outside of antitrust contribute substantially to the accumulation of vast corporate power. For example, Amazon chokes publishers by chaining audiobook and ebook titles with digital locks that are illegal to remove. (This might sound like it’s to the benefit of authors and publishers, but as we show in the next chapter, it has been crucial to stripping away their power.) Spotify does it to recording artists and labels through playlistification, which trains us to let it decide what we listen to, and by relying on fiendishly complex music licensing arrangements to keep competitors out of the market. Apple and Google get the power to squeeze game developers from their ability to control where we get our mobile phone software. Facebook and Google captured the market for news advertising by controlling all sides of the market for ads.