Something for the business types who volunteer at Project Homeless Connect: Their mid-level white-collar management jobs are the ones showing greatest increase in outsourcing these days. Consider, when you deign to “look the homeless in the eye,” when for a day you “interact” with the slime of society, across the table, that gentleman may well be yourself down the road.
You could easily be tomorrow's discard, showing up at Homeless Connect for the scraps remaining of the Safety Net and at the end of the day damned grateful for the vague I&R tips you were handed. “Housing” — how to get on a waiting list at TPI men's shelter. “Dental care” — in your dreams and your children’s.
In “The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences,” author Louis Uchitelle gives witness that there is nothing sacred about America's prosperity. The American Century was way yesterday.
After the long struggle to establish “job security” from the end of the first Gilded Age in the 1890s to the beginning of the 1970s, job security had become a central feature of business management. Loyalty to the company was integral to its success. Layoffs were anathema — immoral and destructive of business success, it was assumed.
Then, foreign competition emerged and temporary layoffs were grudgingly implemented. Then, the guilt wore off, and some acquisition types saw it as a real opportunity. Damage to society at large is damned.
When Peter Drucker first came on the scene, shortly after World War II, he dismissed layoffs as immoral. Bad practice. Not sound, what would be called today “evidence-based,” practice. In his final book he embraced layoffs as not only necessary but “good practice.” Would weed out the least productive employees and keep the company fit. A new emergence of Social Darwinism.
Of course, Reagan, back 25 years ago, had embraced layoffs as business management at its best, a practice for the government to encourage. It was emblemized by the dismissal of the striking air traffic controllers at the beginning of his reign. They were denied the prospect of any future federal employment of any kind. They were, you see, the villains in the piece, the ones obstructing progress, according to the Reaganites.
Jobs With Justice (and less so, Industrial Areas Foundation, initiated by Saul Alinsky and his disciples and a model for the local Metro Alliance for Common Ground, once full of promise, now not so much so) now represents what progressives promise the labor movement once represented as a whole. But the point is in our society there is little wholeness. Community is so secondary to financial gain as to barely scan. And with ascendance of private equity firms and the new wave of mergers and corporate acquisitions, white collar workers, like all other workers, are vulnerable. Even doctors, even specialists. Even those middle management types doing intake at Homeless Connect, who in my experience, spend their energy on expediting the process, getting your name, etc., moving you along, to a photo op with a politico, with no more human connection than isn't avoidable. They're so mentally locked into fealty to a “business model,” they can't see themselves in those homeless skegs — can't afford to see these people as workers for real, not some job center fodder. The homeless once were workers working for a sustainable wage. They were the backbone of community. Now, like the suits slumming for a day, they are simply discards of a system which will use them, then slough them like an old pair of socks.
One very important point Uchitelle stresses is the mental health impact of the layoffs themselves, not merely on the individual worker but on the viability of the entire community of which the workers are part. In the receding past, workers were the backbone.
The financial primacy of investor groups serves this country poorly. While a handful of barons make a killing, the safety net is replaced by well-advertised occasional voluntaristic festivals, their rarity spun as how well they're received by “welfare clients,” themselves doled to these events by their herders, the providers.
As to a solution, Uchitelle says we need a return to government intervention, as in regulation of industries such as the airline industry, which was probably the sole beneficiary, after Dubya, of 9/11. He details the lack of coordination in Indianapolis, for example, where a huge center was built for airline repair, complete with lavish tax abatement for the airlines. It stands largely empty today. If the government had interceded to help with the development of a rational regionalized system, this waste — of dollars and people — would have been avoided. Government and organized labor need once again to take an active role instead of labor's acquiescing in its own demise by cooperating with corporations' layoffs.
Government intervention — which reached its heyday under FDR, with the influence of British economist John Keynes, with the arrival of government intrusion to save capitalism's ass from the outrage of the people subject to the predations of the Depression — has been completely marginalized as “voluntarism” has replaced it. The inadequacy of voluntarism was a lesson too thoroughly learned during the 30s Depression, yet Reagan and his progeny successfully imposed it. (As well as Ford. Do you remember WIN buttons? And Nixon would have if he could have, in other words, had a Republican Congress.)
There is also the question of tax cuts. Reagan considered his tax cut of '81 as the single moment of his administration to which he didn't hesitate to point with pride. And his, of course, was only the opening shot.
When reading daily of the manipulations of K Street — the new Kingfishes, the lobbyists, and the new moneyed Barons, the private equity groups such as Texas Pacific Group that tried to swallow PGE — balance it with the good sense of longtime business writer for The New York Times, Louis Uchitelle. When he considers collateral damage, he means what being laid off feels like. To a single person, their family and their community. The human cost. His interviews are of real persons, not corporate headlinks.
