The Ungovernable Society. Grégoire Chamayou
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be disturbed by the presence of a union’.40
And, if, despite all these efforts, you still can’t solve the problem, you will always be able to use the services of anti-union consultants who will come, in commando mode, to lend you a helping hand ‘aimed at the areas of greatest worker vulnerability as divined by their psychological spade-work’.41 One of these reformed ‘union busters’ testified in his autobiography to what was more concretely implied by this combined strategy of misinformation and personal attacks: ‘as the consultants go about the business of destroying unions, they invade people’s lives, demolish their friendships, crush their will, and shatter their families’.42 As one unionist said: ‘their weapons are emotional intimidation and the subversion of the law. Whenever and wherever working people seek to organize, this guerrilla army dressed in three-piece suits stands ready to resist’.43
When journalist Beth Nissen got a job incognito with Texas Instruments in 1978 so that she could produce a report on unionism, she felt the fear that was now prevalent among the employees. While discussing the issue of the union with a colleague, the latter replied: ‘Please don’t talk to me on break any more. […] If the company finds out I’m listening, I’ll get fired’.44 For simply mentioning the possibility of joining a trade union, the undercover reporter was dismissed on some spurious context barely three weeks after being hired.
Notes
1 1. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Metalibri Digital Editions, 2007), pp. 105–6 (available at https://www.ibiblio.org/ml/libri/s/SmithA_WealthNations_p.pdf).
2 2. ‘The U.S. Can’t Afford What Labor Wants: New Union Militancy Could Skyrocket Wages and Trigger Runaway Inflation’, Business Week, 11 April 1970, p. 105.
3 3. Ibid., p. 107.
4 4. Gilbert Burck, ‘Union Power and the New Inflation’, Fortune, February 1971, pp. 65–70 (p. 65).
5 5. Richard Armstrong, ‘Labor 1970: Angry, Aggressive, Acquisitive’, Fortune, October 1969, reprinted in Compensation & Benefits Review, vol. 2, no. 1, January 1970, pp. 37–42 (p. 37).
6 6. Ibid., p. 41. And: ‘The blue-collar worker is in the crosscurrent of social change, disgruntled about his bosses and “the system”; and sensitive to the black-power revolution within the ranks of labor’ (p. 37).
7 7. Ibid., p. 41.
8 8. Quoted in ibid., p. 41.
9 9. Murray J. Gart, ‘Labor’s Rebellious Rank and File’, Fortune, November 1966, quoted in Brenner, ‘Rank-and-File Rebellion, 1967–1976’, PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 1996, p. 26.
10 10. Rejecting, too, stark a difference between economics and politics, he sought to theorize a ‘politics of production’. ‘The term “internal state” refers to the set of institutions that organize, transform, or repress struggles over relations in production and relations of production at the level of the enterprise’ (Michael Burawoy, Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process Under Monopoly Capitalism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 110.
11 11. Ibid., p. 109.
12 12. See Michael Burawoy, ‘Manufacturing Consent revisited’, La Nouvelle Revue du travail [online], no. 1, 2012, http://journals.openedition.org/nrt/143.
13 13. See Armstrong, ‘Labor 1970’, p. 38.
14 14. See Thomas Byrne Edsall, The New Politics of Inequality (New York: Norton, 1984), p. 155.
15 15. Douglas Fraser, ‘Letter of resignation from the Labor-Management Advisory Committee’, 19 July 1978, quoted in Samuel Bowles, David M. Gordon and Thomas E. Weisskopf, After the Waste Land: Democratic Economics for the Year 2000 (New York: Routledge, 2015; first published in 1990), p. 30. Almost unconsciously, comments Covey, Fraser produced an interpretation that tells us a great deal about the said compromise which, if we are to believe him, rested less on the power of labour and more on the tactical and temporary tolerance of capital. See Jefferson R. Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: New Press, 2010), p. 297.
16 16. A.H. Raskin, ‘Big Labor Strives to Break Out of Its Rut’, Fortune, 27 August 1979, quoted in Cowie, Stayin’ Alive, p. 298. The contradiction, explains Michele Naples, lies in the fact that the ‘truce’ between capital and labour provided the institutional setting for relative economic prosperity, a prosperity which itself provided the economic context in which workers could struggle for their interests, and thereby undermine the truce (Michele I. Naples, ‘The Unraveling of the Union-Capital Truce and the U.S. Industrial Productivity Crisis’, Review of Radical Political Economics, vol. 18, nos. 1&2, 1986, pp. 110–31, [p. 116]).
17 17. See Fritz Machlup, ‘Monopolistic Wage Determination as a Part of the General Problem of Monopoly’, in Wage Determination and the Economics of Liberalism (Washington, DC: Chamber of Commerce of the United States, 1947).
18 18. Henry C. Simons, ‘Reflections on Syndicalism’, Journal of Political Economy, vol. 52, no. 1, March 1944, pp. 1–25 (p. 5).
19 19. Quoted in Yves Steiner, ‘The Neoliberals Confront the Trade Unions’, in Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 190.
20 20. Burck, ‘Union Power and the New Inflation’, p. 65.
21 21. John Davenport, ‘How to Curb Union Power’, Fortune, vol. 84, no. 1, July 1971, pp. 52–6 (p. 52).
22 22. See John Logan, ‘Employer Opposition in the US: Anti-Union Campaigning from the 1950s’, in Gregor Gall and Tony Dundon (eds.), Global Anti-Unionism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 21–38.
23 23. Quoted in Robert A. Georgine, ‘Statement of Robert A. Georgine. President of the Building and Construction Trades Department, AFL-CIO’, in Pressures in today’s workplace: oversight hearings before the Subcommittee on Labor-Management Relations of the Committee on Education and Labor, House of Representatives, Ninety-sixth Congress, first session, hearings in Washington, D.C. on October 16, 17 and 18, 1979, vol. 1 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1979, pp. 408–35 [pp. 411ff]). I am here putting together a composite narrative that draws on different texts.
24 24. Ibid., p. 412.
25 25. Ibid.
26 26. Ibid.
27 27. Quoted in ibid., p. 419.
28 28. Quoted in ibid., p. 423.
29 29. Quoted in Georgine, ibid., p. 421.
30 30. These words were recorded by journalist Nancy Stiefel, who, armed with a tape recorder, managed to infiltrate a meeting organized by the law firm Jackson Lewis, Schnitzler and Krupman on the art of fighting unionization. Quoted in James Farmer, The hired guns of de-unionisation, Keynote Address by James Farmer Public Sector Labor Law Conference Spokane. Washington March 10 1979, reprinted in Pressures in today’s workplace: oversight hearings before the Subcommittee on Labor-Management Relations of the Committee on Education and Labor, House of Representatives, Ninety-sixth Congress, first session, hearings in Washington, D.C. on October 16, 17 and 18, 1979, vol. 2 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1979, pp. 269–80 [p. 274]).
31 31. Quoted in Georgine, ‘Statement of Robert A. Georgine’, p. 433.
32 32. Ibid., p. 415.
33 33. Alfred T. DeMaria, How Management Wins Union Organizing Campaigns (New York: Executive Enterprises Publications, 1980), p. 15.
34 34. Ibid., p. 209.
35 35. Ibid., p. 95.
36 36. Ibid., p. 96.
37 37. Ibid., p. 153.
38 38. Ibid., p. 126.
39 39.