Labor Day Postscript

Maybe I'm being grumpy, but this Labor Day blog post by Seth Godin (via Matt) really rubbed me the wrong way.

Your great-grandfather knew what it meant to work hard. He hauled hay all day long, making sure that the cows got fed. In Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser writes about a worker who ruptured his vertebrae, wrecked his hands, burned his lungs, and was eventually hit by a train as part of his 15-year career at a slaughterhouse. Now that's hard work.

The meaning of hard work in a manual economy is clear. Without the leverage of machines and organizations, working hard meant producing more. Producing more, of course, was the best way to feed your family.

Those days are long gone. Most of us don't use our bodies as a replacement for a machine -- unless we're paying for the privilege and getting a workout at the gym. These days, 35% of the American workforce sits at a desk. Yes, we sit there a lot of hours, but the only heavy lifting that we're likely to do is restricted to putting a new water bottle on the cooler.

Godin's post is not really in the spirit of Labor Day: it's an individualistic meditation on the meaning of "hard work" by a wealthy businessman. Godin uses the example of a worker injured on the job as a foil for his musings on how these days "hard work" is no longer risky manual labor but rather readiness of entrepreneurs to take risks that are shrewd and visionary.

Today, working hard is about taking apparent risk. Not a crazy risk like betting the entire company on an untested product. No, an apparent risk: something that the competition (and your coworkers) believe is unsafe but that you realize is far more conservative than sticking with the status quo.

You might be wondering why I am even reading this stuff. Back in 2004, when I was an underemployed PhD program dropout trying to parley my activism and my communication skills (blogging, academic research, poetry writing, English teaching) into some kind of professional life, I asked my friend Adina for some books to read that would help me understand trends in internet communications and online activism. One of the books Adina recommended was Seth Godin's highly influential Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers Into Friends and Friends Into Customers. I learned a lot from the book---and I doubt I'll ever read any other books in the marketing guru genre.

Anyway, there are two things I want to say to Godin's notions of "hard work."

• The fate of the worker in Fast Food Nation is not a freakish anomaly in American worklife.

Godin should spend an hour or two reading the archives of Confined Space, Jordan Barab's excellent, now sadly defunct blog on workplace safety. In his farewell post, Barab wrote:

More than 15 workers are killed every day on the job in this country and a worker becomes injured or ill on the job every 2.5 seconds. The overwhelming majority of deaths, injuries and illnesses could have been easily prevented had the employers simply provided a safe workplace and complied with well-recognized OSHA regulations or other safe practices.

And you'll never learn from the evening news that we have more fish and wildlife inspectors than OSHA inspectors, or that the penalties from a chemical release that kills fish is higher than a chemical release that kills a worker. Not many are aware that workers are often afraid to complain about health and safety hazards or file a complaint with OSHA. Almost no one understands that OSHA inspections are so infrequent and penalties for endangering workers are so insignificant that there is almost no disincentive for employers to break the law. Employers are almost never criminally prosecuted for killing workers even when they knew they were violating OSHA standards.

• The supposed evolution of work conditions from the turn of the century, when my great-grandfather organized his fellow shochetim (ritual slaughterers) on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, is a myth. Over the last few decades, the realms of dangerous, unregulated, "hard" work have been expanding.

Siobhán McGrath and Nina Martin have written an extensive study (PDF) of this trend in American work. They also published a shorter version of their findings (PDF) in Dollars & Sense Magazine.

While many people are familiar with the conditions faced by garment workers and construction day laborers, the tentacles of unregulated work stretch into many other sectors of the economy,
including workplaces as diverse as restaurants, grocery stores, security companies, nail salons, laundries, warehouses, manufacturers, building services firms, and home health care agencies.

We have documented considerable variety in how employers violate laws. They pay their workers less than minimum wage, fail to pay them overtime, refuse to pay them for all hours worked, or
simply don’t pay them at all. They disregard health and safety regulations by imposing unsafe conditions, forcing employees to work without providing necessary safety equipment, and failing to give training and information. The list of ways employers break the law goes on: they refuse to pay Unemployment Insurance or Workers’ Compensation; they discriminate against workers on the basis of race, gender and immigration status; they retaliate against attempts to organize; they refuse medical leaves. Such stories of substandard working conditions may sound familiar—they carry strong echoes of the experiences of workers at the beginning of the last century. At that time, the solution was to pass laws to create wage minimum standards, protect workers who speak up for their rights, and eventually, guarantee workplace safety and outlaw discrimination. That these very laws are now being so widely violated poses new challenges. While efforts to pass new laws
raising workplace standards are still critical, a new battle has emerged to ensure that existing laws are enforced.

What Explains Unregulated Work?
The rise of unregulated work is closely tied to many of the same factors that are thought to be responsible for declining wages and job security in key sectors of the economy. Over the last 30 years, for example, global economic competition has been extinguishing the prospects of workers in manufacturing. Local manufacturers struggle to drive down their costs in order to compete against firms located in Asian or Latin American countries where wages and safety standards are lower.

Yet unregulated work cannot be explained simply as a byproduct of globalization. It’s true that the competitive pressure felt in manufacturing may ripple through other parts of the economy, as wage floors are lowered and the power of labor against capital is diminished. But we found businesses that serve distinctly local markets—such as home cleaning companies, grocery stores, and nail salons—engaging in a range of illegal work practices, even though they are insulated from global competition.

Declining unionization rates since the 1970’s also contribute to the spread of unregulated labor. One effect has been a general rise in inequality accompanied by lower wages and workplace standards: a weaker labor movement has less influence on the labor market as a whole, and offers less protection for both unionized and non-union workers. More directly, union members are more likely to report workplace violations to the relevant government authority than nonunion workers, as a number of studies have shown. So it makes sense that employers are increasingly committing such violations in the wake of a long-term decline in the percentage of workers in unions.

But even the powerful one-two punch of globalization and de-unionization provides only a partial explanation. Government policy is also instrumental in shaping unregulated work—not only employment policies per se, but also immigration, criminal justice, and welfare “reform” policies that create pools of vulnerable workers. In this environment employers can use a variety of illegal and abusive cost-cutting strategies. Perhaps most significantly, they are deciding whether or not to break the law in an era of declining enforcement, when they are likely to face mild penalties or no penalties at all.

For some related reading, I also suggest another article from Dollars & Sense, "The Rise of Migrant Militancy," by Immanuel Ness.