Insecure Workers Are Fodder for Fascists : Change: Turbocharged capitalism has swept away the dull but safe jobs that sustained the middle class, now desperate for sympathetic leadership.
When the sons and daughters of steelworkers or coal miners must become software-writers, teachers, lawyers or, for that matter, retail salespeople, few of them have reason to complain. But when the same mechanisms of change work so fast that steelworkers or coal miners must themselves abandon their lifetime work and habits to learn demanding new skills on penalty of chronic unemployment, then failure and frustration are the likely results.
To be sure, nothing could be more old-fashioned than to worry about the travails of steelworkers and coal miners, supposedly obsolete leftovers of the industrial working class. So the big news is the dislocation of white-collar employment as well. No statistics measure the decline in the security of employment in the United States, where the electronification of office work is most advanced. But hourly pay statistics do show very clearly the impact of a weak demand for white-collar labor.
In the early 1980s, when U.S. trade union officials were bitterly complaining that American workers were being ejected from well-paid industrial employment into minimum-wage jobs, the defenders of free-market economics silenced them in Wall Street Journal editorials that pointed to the rapid increase in “money-sector” jobs in banking, insurance, financial services and real-estate offices. That is where the debate ended--as it turns out, prematurely. By the end of 1992, more than 6.8 million Americans were duly employed in the financial sector (banking, insurance, finance and real estate), but the average wage of the 4.9 million non-supervisory employees among them was $10.14 per hour, as compared with $10.98 for production workers in manufacturing. Moreover, financial-sector jobs have been notoriously volatile and benefit packages can be more stingy than in industrial jobs.
Even bigger news is the dislocation of managerial lives. That is the latest trend in the United States--and it is most definitely structural rather than cyclical. Now that the dull, safe, old-style corporation (moderate dividends, moderate salaries, steady, slow growth) is almost extinct, top managers as a class earn very much more than before, rank-and-file managers who can keep their jobs earn rather less and it is difficult for those managers who are forced out to find any comparable jobs elsewhere. Statistics quantify the downward slide of the entire population from which the class of middle managers is drawn. The median earnings of all males in the 45-54 age bracket with four years of higher education--some 2 million Americans--actually peaked in 1972 at about $55,000 calculated in 1992 dollars. Earnings were stagnant until 1989, then dived to $41,898 by 1982, falling even more dramatically than average earnings of all non-farm workers (see chart). Needless to say, individual working lives cannot be dislocated without damaging families, elective affiliations and communities--the entire moss of human relations that only can grow over the stones of economic stability.
Finally, it is entirely certain that what has already happened in the United States is happening or will happen in every other advanced economy worldwide.
In this situation, what do mainstream U.S. Republicans, British Tories and their counterparts elsewhere have to offer? Only more free trade and globalization, more deregulation and structural change, thus more dislocation of lives and social relations. It is only mildly amusing that nowadays the standard conservative speech is a two-part affair, in which Part I celebrates the virtues of unimpeded competition and dynamic structural change, while Part II mourns the decline of the family “values,” eroded precisely by the forces commended in Part I.
And what does the left have to offer? Only more redistribution, more public assistance and concern for particular groups that can claim victim status, from the sublime peak of elderly, handicapped, lesbians of color down to the merely poor.
Thus neither the moderate right nor the moderate left even recognizes the central problem of our days: the completely unprecedented personal economic insecurity of working people, from industrial workers and white-collar clerks to medium-high managers. None of them are poor and they therefore cannot benefit from the more generous welfare payments that the left is inclined to offer. Few are actually unemployed and they are therefore unmoved by promises of more growth and more jobs through the magic of the unfettered market: What they want is security in the jobs they already have, precisely what unfettered markets most threaten.
And that is the space that remains wide open for a modern fascist party, dedicated to the enhancement of the personal economic security of the masses of (mainly white-collar) working people. Such a party could be as free of anti-Semitism or racism as Mussolini’s original was, until the alliance with Hitler, because its real stock in trade would be to impose restraints on corporate Darwinism, tame trade unions and resist globalization. To many Americans this would not sound bad, but remember that the cost would be the loss of democratic restraints against the things that fascism became under Hitler.
After the appearance of Ross Perot and Vladimir Zhirinovsky on the global scene, it is not necessary to be a prophet to recognize the fascist trends caused by today’s turbocharged capitalism. What is still needed is an undemagogic democratic answer, and not the elite consensus that all is well--as indeed it is, for the elite.
The Decline of Real Wages Average hourly earnings in constant 1982 dollars for private non-farm “non-supervisory” employees: 1994 (January-April average) $7.43 Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics
