I can think of no worse idea for workers than the current arrangement set up by the Obama administration to have the auto worker's union become owners (with the governments of the U.S. and Canada) of GM and Chrysler. The point of the unions is to oppose the demands of management -- but what happens when the unions themselves become the management? The coercive actions of the unions get turned onto the union members -- the workers themselves. The last time we saw the workers owning the means of production -- and that is what this is, a version of that -- it didn't work out all that well. What makes anyone think it will work out this time?
Obama put off bankruptcy for these two companies precisely so he could get all his ducks in a row for the unions to literally take over these companies. Congratulations, unions! You have your reward! Thank goodness Ford was in better shape to avoid this disaster. If you thinking CM and Chrysler were poorly run before, just wait and see what will happen now.
7 comments:
I'm pushing for peasant government and community based steel production.
A funny thing happens when the workers become the owners - they tend to demand the business become more profitable, no matter what. THis is what has happened with greater public investment in the stock market.
But remember--go reread your communist manifesto... Communism was an evolutionary advancement from democracy, according to the text...
My argument has always been that people misread the text. He supposes an evolutionary movement of economics/social governing--not a instution to adopt.
Not that what Obama is doing is that... But...
Of course. But it was also supposed to be revolutionary. The evolutionary theory of punctuated equilibrium, for example, was developed in no small part out of Marx's theories. And both are similar to Kuhnian paradigm shifts. There is thus supposed to be a radical reorganization of the economy, government, and their institutions -- massive, system-wide reorganization into a new kind of system. With problem with Marx of course arises in the fact that one simply cannot predict what a more complex society will actually look like.
There is also the realization that the revolutionary program failed. The goal is now incremental change. The problem is the failure to realize that it wasn't just the way the goals were reached, but the goals themselves which were and are the problem.
And we are a democracy (democratic republic, technically, but still), and Obama and the Democratic Congress were all democratically elected.
In the end, though, Obama is behind the times. The U.S. society is going to shift, but away from the Marx-influenced welfare state into . . . well, some other spontaneous order, whatever it may look like, and not some human-created organization, as Obama clearly desires. I am hoping this is the last hurrah of such thinking, and that we come out on the other side of a major social transformation rather than lingering, stagnant, in one more closely resembling those of the 20th century which all failed.
A rebuttal?
http://www.nceo.org/library/corpperf.html
Good article. Actually, it's not a rebuttal of my point regarding union ownership. The unions are not the workers, notwithstanding popular misconceptions to the contrary. The unions are the union bosses. The people at the top of the union hierarchy will be the ones running these companies. Thus, it won't actually be worker ownership.
What the article is talking about is employee ownership through stock options. When workers at all levels see how company profits directly benefit them, they of course become more concerned with the company's well-being at an individual level.
The difference between ownership through each individual employee and ownership by the unions is that the first is direct, the second indirect. In the first, you have a cycle of employee-owners influencing management influencing employees. In the second, you have what were the worker's advocates against management now becoming the management itself. And the history of unions does not give me a lot of confidence regarding how they will treat the workers once they get power over the companies.
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