From: "FRANCO BARCHIESI" <029FRB-AT-cosmos.wits.ac.za>
Date:          Sat, 30 Aug 1997 16:34:06 GMT + 2:00
Subject: AUT: Hard Data (was: networking)


Here is another message I posted to the South African "Debate" 
discussion list for the thread on "networking" as an organizational 
method in the South African case. It is in reply to Tom Bramble, an 
Australian academic now based here at Wits. Something may be of 
interest for current discussions on networking on aut-op-sy. The 
usual caveat applies, ie: this message was originally written for a 
South African public and it has not been changed before forwarding to 
aut-op-sy.
Franco
------- Forwarded Message Follows -------

To:       debate-AT-sunsite.wits.ac.za
Subject:  Hard Data
Date:     Sat, 30 Aug 1997 16:30:23

On 27 August Tom Bramble wrote:

> Is it not the case that the proportion of the world's labouring 
> classes who work for a wage and have no other form of subsistence is 
> now greater than ever before?
> 
> Second, ditto, for the proportion of the world's labouring classes 
> who work in factories?
> 
> Third, even if you don't believe point 2, since when has the working 
> class ever been defined by its place of employment? 
> In 1900 the single biggest occupational category for 
> women in Victorian England was domestic service. And I'm not sure 
> that the factory working class has ever been a majority of the 
> working class in any country at any period.
> 
> And fourth, is it not the case that the working class has *always* suffered 
> divisions (in Australia we could point to sectarian divisions between 
> Protestants and Catholics; between "Anglos" and "Asians"). And that 
> at the same time, these divisions *tend* to be overcome (even if only 
> temporarily) in the course of united struggle. In other words, what 
> is distinctly new about divisions based e.g. on casual work/ "permanent" 
> work (the latter is really only a category that applied in Western working 
> class history between about 1940 and 1975)?
> 
> In other words, what hard concrete evidence is there that the working 
> class has undergone a qualitative change in the course of 
> globlisation, neo liberalism, call it what you will, which leads to 
> its increasing heterogeneity and incapacity to act as a united force?
> And a qualitative change that requires the creation of a fresh way of political 
> organising. In other words, is networking etc. put forward as a 
> political strategy that is *only now* become essential and 
> liberatory, in which case its proponents need to come up with *hard 
> data* to back up their case on the above lines. 

Tom's call for hard data on this issue should be taken into account.
However, I am also quite suspicious about the "objectivity of the
social sciences". I am also afraid that, once we have purely
quantitative data we could well find that they are not conclusive at
all for the issue we want here to discuss, ie. whether we are in the
presence of a trend towards fragmentation of the working class that
questions the viability of its unitary political representation and
of centralized party/union-based organizational strategy.

However, at a purely quantitative level, I think many indicators can
be relevant here. Provided that a comparative research along these
lines is not really available, and it would take years, tens of
researchers and lots of money, I think four relevant indicators (but
many more can be mentioned) concern:

* percentage of workers employed part-time, temporary, casual or 
homeworkers on the totally employed population and 
increasing/decreasing trends in the employment of such workers in 
relation to overall yearly recruitments of wage employees;
* Variations in average firm size per sector and distribution of 
workers per firm size;
* unionization rate;
* coverage by centralized collective bargaining agreements vs. 
individualised company or plant level agreements.

On the first point, a brilliant article on casualization and
flexible exploitation was published by Anne Gray on "Common Sense"
(Journal of the Edinburgh Conference of Socialist Economists), No.
18 (1995). Using data from the OECD and EU's Manpower Surveys she
shows a trend to an increase in the number of workers in a-typical
forms of employment in Western European countries both in relation
to overall employment and newly hired employees. In Britain this is
particularly evident in the fact that 7 out of 10 new employees
every year are hired in a contract/part time/casual position.

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics' most recent estimates place the
percentage of part-time workers at about 19% of the employed
workforce in the US, to which 5% casual and contract are to be
added, leading the total of a-typical employment contract to more
than 25% of the US workforce. The single biggest employer in the US
is today Manpower, a multinational company of subcontracting of
casual labour. These figures represent a slow but steady increase
from the 16.5% part-timers in 1977, a period that witnessed a
relative boom in this form of employment. In the last 20 years,
moreover, the number of people in double employment has increased of
40%, ie. from 4.9% to 6.4% of the total labour force. Inclusing
these workers, then, more than 30% of American workers are not in
single full-time employment. We must also consider that this is in
the States a period of much vaunted high job- creation. This may
indicate that even a phase of economic growth job creation is no
longer able to provide for an increase in full-time jobs relative to
part-time or casual, and that the percentage of atypical contracts
over yearly recruitments can well be more significant than what the
absolute figures indicate. Similar conclusion on the structural
nature of these trends, and on the declining employment security
combined to the fragmentation of employment relations, are in a
forthcoming book by Thomas Palley (AFL chief economist), called
"Plenty of Nothing: The Downsizing of the American Dream" (Princeton
University Press).

Findings in some relevant pieces of research (Juliet Schor's "The
Overworked American", Stanley Aronowitz's "The Jobless Future" and
Jeremy Rifkin's "The End of Work" for example), even if they may be
questionable in some of their conclusion, are nonetheless impressive
in their documentation, and they seem to support precisely the above
trends. No surprise, then that Robert Reich, Clinton's labour
minister at the time, suggested in 1991 ("The Work of Nations") that
American workers must be prepared to change their job 6-7 times on
average during their lifetime. We should also remind that the World
Bank estimated in its 1995 report that today 50% of the world's
labour force is either self-employed (and self-exploited) or
employed in family concerns, and that these figures are likely to
increase under the devastating effects of structural adjustment for
the are of wage employment. Research along similar lines has been
conducted by authors such as Andre' Gorz, Guy Aznar, Sergio Bologna
in Italy, whose notion of the decentralized-self employed worker as
the new forms of "mass proletariat" is very insightful, and the
"Futur Anterieur" group in France.

Here in South Africa, research on atypical employment has been
carried out mainly by people as Rob Rees, Jan Theron and Andries
Bezhuidenhout. It seems they all support the idea that these forms
of employment are of a limited numerical extent but they are
increasing and consolidating not only for conjunctural reasons.
Personally, I found the same dynamics at work in my research on the
auto industry at a leading car manufacturer, considered the most
technologically advanced company in South Africa. That company is
now heavily resorting to outsourcing in the context of a "five
years' plan" that provides for a reduction in headcount from 5,000
to 2,000 from 1995 to 2,000. Even if some authors think that
employers may have a long-ternm interest in a stable labour force
(especially for human resurce investments) these findings support
the impression that this commitment by the bosses can be limited
only to a core minority of the labour market. It is not strange,
then, that when the SA case was discussed on a comparative level at
a Workshop on flexible employment in Pretoria at the Department of
Labour in January, the only case mentioned to testify an increase in
full time permanent employment was New Zealand. In fact in this
country the extent of deregulation of working conditions, the
destruction of collective bargaining and the flexibilization of time
and tasks are much more advanced than in other industrial countries.
It is not unreasonable to suppose then that today it is more likely
to find a trend towards the increase of permanent full-time
emoployment in those countries where workers are already deprived of
union and bargaining rights and where wages and working conditions
are more arbitrarily dependent on company performance or on
authoritarian forms of regulation of the labour market (such as in
South- East Asia). These are also the countries, on the other hand,
where worker movements could make some headways only in so far they
could relate and *net-work* with broader, and not necessarily
working class-based, anti- neoliberal movements for basic needs,
popular empowerment and human rights.

The above trends towards fragmentation of the area of waged
employment can be reinforced by current dynamics of breakdown of
collective bargaining, union decertification, greenfield
industrialization and generalized decline of unionization rates in
all major industrial countries, for which a huge amount of research
exists that would be impossible to summarize here (many of it is
summarized in the bibliography of my thesis, soon to be placed on
the WWW at the aut-op-sy site). It is sufficient to mention a very
good series of article on this issue that the "British Journal of
Industrial Relations" has been publishing in the last two years.

Tom says that the working class has seldom been really united and
homogenous, mentioning the case of domestic workers in Victorian
England. I am not surprised at all that domestic workers were the
single most relevant occupational group in XIX Century England, as
he writes. The crucial role of the care-reproduction work for the
rise and the consolidation of the mass industrial proletariat is
theoretically well supported (see Leopoldina Fortunati's "The Arcane
of the Reproduction", Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1995), and I think it
could act as a factor of unification at least as well as of division
of the factory proletariat. In any case, Peter Waterman's reply to
Tom was quite appropriate, and Tom's reply to Peter wasn't really
convincing, I think.

As Peter stressed, notwithstanding its heterogeneity and
occcupational divisions, the working class could be defined as
*politically* homogeneous and united in the Marxist dicourse of
human emancipation, and this had a decisive impact in defining
massive, united working class movements in the anti-capitalist
struggle. Moreover, regardless for the numerical strength of the
working class, it was the *workplace* and the *labour process* that,
at least until the current crisis of Fordism, could provide the
foundation for such a unity, with the associated forms of coercion,
socialization, discipline and construction of collective identities.

Socialdemocratic welfare states contributed to this trend in the
context of heightened workers' struggles during the century. Full
employment and productivity pacts therefore made in many countries
the prospect of lifelong permanent employment not only the most
likely and desirable life-path for the (especially male) population
at large, but being a waged employee became a decisive component of
citizenship-identification-respectability as such. In an age of
flexibility, deregulation and market competition, this has changed
dramatically -- I would say even at the level of dominant discourse
and values -- to leave space to individual initiative and spirit of
adaptation.

Tom says that the working class has always been divided by race,
gender, etc. But that is not really the point, in my view. What is
relevant for this discussion on unity/frgamentation of the working
class is, I think, that *the production process, which once was one
of the conditions for workers' integration and unity, is now
becoming a condition for workers' fragmentation and dispersion*,
inside the factory and across the territory. This is where my
argument for "networking" started.

It is true that struggle could unify the working class. But this
struggle has often during this century questioned party and union
organizations in so far it was not only a struggle for the
*emancipation of* wage labour, but also a struggle for *liberation
from* wage labour. A strong self-organized tradition of worker
struggles in many countries (see the wonderful Karl-Heinz Roth's
"Die andere Arbeiterbewegung") shows that networking of autonomous
struggles is not something entirely new, as Peter writes. What is
new in the present phase is the way in which networking is today
directly related to the changing strategies of what Peter himself
calls the "informational capital" (a point I touched in a previous
message), with what this implies for working class organization.
Peter is right: Marshall Berman's warning that, in the same way of
the mode of production, also workers' organization is something
"solid" that may well "melt into air", is particularly relevant.

To conclude, I wrote at the beginning of this message that I don't
think that a study of fragmentation of wage labour that is limited
to what Tom calls the "hard data" is satisfactory. To understand to
what extent labour is really fragmented, we must also grasp what are
the dynamics ignited at a collective subjective level. That is to
say, we must understand how macroeconomic trends and changes in
labour markets are represented in workers' minds and how they change
workers' life strategies, expectations, identity and forms of
political engagement. My own research supports the view that worker
subjectivity acts as a kind of "multiplier" of macroeconomic trends.
That is to say: structural economic changes that can be slow,
piecemeal or numerically limited, if they are supported by an
aggressive dominant ideology based on flexibility and competition in
a neoliberal policy environment, they can radically redefine
workers' perceptions of the self as *primarily* defined by being
employed as a waged worker in a life-long factory life. A very
important book on this topic is the one by Ruth Milkman on the
General Motors' workers in a "historical" unionized plant New
Jersey, who chose fat retrenchment packages instead of defending a
waged employment that was becoming in their eyes more and more
uncertain and unable to provide for a sense of pride and identity.

A similar line of argument has been supported from the right wing so
far, (see Streeck or Regini) to say that labour flexibility is in
accordance with workers' deepest concerns for a general life-
flexibility based on individual "entrepreneurial spirits". We should
start using flexibility from the left, to say that the
disarticulation of strong factory-based identities, that flexibility
implies, also creates opportunities for worker to articulate their
demands, needs and desires *outside and against* wage labour, to
combine the reduction of the working time with the universal
provision of social services and guaranteed income. To this end, an
open-minded study of the articulation of worker subjectivity in the
age of flexibility, and how it relates with new networks of
struggles and movements is, in my view, more useful than the
nostalgia for a mass factory proletariat that can reach an idealized
unity *only* under the banners of the workers' party/union.

Franco

Franco Barchiesi
Sociology of Work Unit
Dept of Sociology
University of the Witwatersrand
Private Bag 3
PO Wits 2050
Johannesburg
South Africa
Tel. (++27 11) 716.3290
Fax  (++27 11) 716.3781
E-Mail 029frb-AT-cosmos.wits.ac.za
http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/aut_html
http://pluto.mscc.huji.ac.il/~mshalev/direct.htm

Home:
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Melville 2092
Johannesburg
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Tel. (++27 11) 482.5011


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