w orkers.”
I think that’s not surprising, coming from w hat amounted to a
moderate Republican administration. W hy let w orking people have
w ays to defend themselves against private pow er?
Maybe something else is needed in the high-tech w orkplace
—“flexibility,” w hich is a fancy w ay of saying that w hen you go to
sleep at night, you don’t know if you’ll have a job in the morning (but
y ou do know you w on’t have benefits). “Flexibility” is terrific for
profits, but it destroys human beings.
T here w as a famous quote—at it least it should be famous—by a
Brazilian general (around 1970, I think). Speaking of the Brazilian
“economic miracle,” he said, The economy is doing fine—it’s just
the people that aren’t. T hat pretty much says it all.
Something about this puzzles me. It’s in corporations’ interest to
make sure consumers have enough money to buy their products.
T his w as the logic behind Henry Ford’s raising his w orkers’ pay to
$5 a day, so that they could afford to buy the cars they w ere
building.
It’s in your interest to make profit, but there are other w ays to
do it than by selling a large quantity of goods to a mass market that’s
partially made up of your ow n w orkers. Maybe it’s more in your
interest to use extremely cheap, oppressed labor to produce few er
goods for relatively w ealthy people, w hile at the same time making
money through financial speculation.
W hen the managers of transnational corporations are asked about
the very low w ages they pay their w orkers in the T hird World, they
s ay, These people didn’t have a job before, we’re giving them
work, they’re learning a trade, and so on. How w ould you respond
to that?
If they’re serious about that, they w ould use some of their
profits to support better w orking conditions in Indonesia. How
often do they do that? T hey’re not short of money—just read the
Fortune 500 reports every year.
By the w ay, I’m not criticizing corporate executives individually.
If one of them tried to use corporate funds to improve w orking
conditions in Indonesia, he’d be out on his ear in three seconds. In