A SWIM IN DENIAL
What we can't think about and how it shapes us.
Let Us Prey
Wage theft, cannibals, and vampires
Recent surveys show that many employers use tricks and coercion to cheat low-wage workers. As it happens, labor's share of profits is the lowest it's been since the 1960s, with most wages stagnant for several decades. Meanwhile Congress has proposed to cut food stamps for poor children while boosting farm subsidies for agri-businessmen such as Rep. Stephen Fincher of Tennessee. A new study shows that the super rich Walmart heirs "pay their workers so little that taxpayers fork over billions to subsidize Walmart's payroll through programs like—food stamps."[1] This brazen injustice doesn't make headlines, and the morally aroused Occupy movement was too busy managing police harassment to storm the Bastille.
It's easier to think of predators in distant China, where obstreperous efforts to collect your wages can send you to a "labor camp," or Brazil, where wealthy landowners murder the upstart poor. Employer theft is hushed up or whitewashed here. Chamber of Commerce ideology, for instance, imagines rich and poor "competing" for wealth and status. Free market doctrine's crudely evolutionary twin Social Darwinism also favors the idea of competition as "survival of the fittest."
It's easier to think of predators in distant China, where obstreperous efforts to collect your wages can send you to a "labor camp," or Brazil, where wealthy landowners murder the upstart poor. Employer theft is hushed up or whitewashed here. Chamber of Commerce ideology, for instance, imagines rich and poor "competing" for wealth and status. Free market doctrine's crudely evolutionary twin Social Darwinism also favors the idea of competition as "survival of the fittest."
But in everyday use, "competition" implies a sports contest that tests fitness—and in work, there is no game. Employment actually involves power and implicit threats, and the "players" are grotesquely mismatched. If you challenge the boss, you lose your job and don't eat. The unspoken command is work or die. In theory law polices the threat, but ithe US has the weakest labor laws of any comparable country, and in action, enforcement is pretty much toothless. Big money captures lawmakers and Supreme Court justices, owns squads of lawyers, and has resources to fall back on. The legal reality is that you hold your job "at will" and can be "terminated" at any time.
Recognizing the odds, the working poor censor themselves. Since complaints about doctored pay stubs are likely to bring retaliation, silence is a survival reflex. Food stamps and unemployment insurance might enable you to risk challenging the boss, but that's why political money votes to kill such programs. Businesses drive toward safe monopoly, rents, and fees, not competition.[2]Media reinforces this unreality. The "gap" between "the top" and "everybody else" is "widening." Most gains "go" to the top 1%. These clichés obscure who's doing what to whom. A "gap" doesn't make decisions; salaries don't set themselves. "The top" is a vacuous abstraction that masks somebody with financial and political muscle the way GM's slippery CEO Roger Smith hid from accountability in Michael Moore's "Roger and Me."
This dead economic language disguises the perverse way we're built. The fact is, we live by consuming other lives which we then excrete as shameful waste that furnishes us with insults we hurl at others such as "asshole." Every day, in death camps across the planet, we kill millions of livestock and live stalks to stay alive. The stomach rules. We're always hungry for more life—for meat and Cheetos, but also for symbolic vitality that makes us feel more alive, from money and sex to "a job well done" and victory parades. Low-status, exhausting drudgery is a reminder that the body is vulnerable and doomed to disappear forever. By contrast, command is expansive and uplifting. In western religions, God doesn't toil; He's an executive, the ultimate CEO.
As you see in obese bodies, cannibalism, and Wall Street bankers,appetite can outrun restraints. This is why both greed and gluttony make the seven deadliest sins, and why slang gives us "fat cats."
Chewing a hamburger, you consume the energy stored in the cow's flesh. From the rancher and butcher, you consume their physical and mental energy. If you pay workers—in effect, exchanging food for food—you turn predation into civilized "employment." If you consume more of their energy than you give back, as in slavery, your new vitality is all profit. In slavery, you feel more alive because potentially you command an infinite number of "hands" and inexhaustible energy. We're only 150 years from slavery in the US, and the fascination with enslavement remains alive and well. In pop culture cannibals ring the doorbell as zombies, while vampires consume others by draining their blood and their will. For both predators, the profit is gaining a shadowy, half-real immortality.
The drawback is that the master commands more life because slaves exist in a state of social death, with no legal identity. In effect, the master thrives as a cannibal, by consuming others. In theory, democracy andreligion ("the last shall be first") banish slavery, but in practice, denial protects many degrees and forms of servitude. If you work hard and still can't feed your kids, you're under stress, on the brink of social death, which is next door to real death. And this is not just a figure of speech, since marginalized folks are in fact less healthy and die younger than those at the top. And their kids suffer too. This is why Marx compared capitalism to vampirism.
This is the tragic reality underlying studies that show the rich hogging more of the nation's wealth and energy than they have since 19thC robber barons mugged the Gilded Age. One perverse paradox is that prosperity for the few spreads poverty. As the rich hoard, everybody else has to cut back spending and work more in order to survive. In turn, the economy stalls or loses altitude, as it's doing now. Tax cheating at the top starves everybody's government services, so "growth" at the top undermines support below. The kids grow up in poverty and can't afford much education, spreading poverty into the future. In the final paradox, greed is self-destructive, because without restraints, the cannibal feast devours all the guests.
So, what about those studies that show employers routinely cheating low-wage workers? Like the predators on Wall Street whose chicanery has kept the global economy on the brink of disaster since 2008, the cheaters steal with impunity. Wage-law violations cost employees an average 15% loss in pay. 12% of employees report that bosses have stolen tips from them. A "common form of theft is the “last paycheck” scam in which a worker is either fired or quits and finds that her final wages are withheld."[3] Many employers contrive to keep workers from claiming workmen's compensation for on the job injuries. They frequently reclassify workers as independent contractors to avoid paying overtime, Social Security contributions, health and unemployment insurance. According to an Anzalone Liszt Grove research survey of 500 of Chicago’s fast food workers, 84% reported that their employer had committed some form of wage theft over the previous year [4]. The victims are most likely to be low-wage women, minorities, and immigrants—the most vulnerable—though a white collar is no defense against predation.
Wait! What about civilization and decency? As government becomes the corporate state, weakened regulators shrug and rationalize attacks on basic labor guarantees, including the right to organize. The US Government spends billions on weapons and high-tech domestic spying, yet like the SEC, the Labor Department is absurdly understaffed and timid. Politicians who attack food stamps actually help the boss force people into subsistence jobs.
Predators claim they steal to survive, and must, because if they perish, so do the employees, right? But if this were true, it would be logical to tell include the employees in the decision-making. Given a share of the varying profits, the workforce could agree to accept cuts in lean times and prosper when conditions improve. (Ugh, socialism!)
The appeal to survival-anxiety usually insinuates that employees are a threat because they're deficient: unskilled, lazy, and redundant. This mentality splits identity into idealized and worthless selves. The executive self is ideal: self-sufficient, responsible, never sick, bravely entrepreneurial, etc. Ah, but those on the bottom can never reach that ideal, and their misery is their own fault. They need self-discipline and sacrifice. More money makes executives bravely entrepreneurial investors; less money makes the bottom feeders shape up. By shrinking employee paychecks, the predators are improving the workforce and a spoiled society.
In this atmosphere employees become less real. While the CEO is larger than life and thus entitled to heroic bonuses, bottom-feeders are interchangeable and expendable. Processing orders in the anonymous fast food window, they could be machines or cyborgs. The gap is not only a disparity in income, but also the dissociation that keeps the working poor personally invisible to those above, and keeps those above personally unaccountable. It's a cliché now: too big to fail—or jail.
Of course criticism always risks inflating criminals. It can be useful to vilify crooks, but in the effort to show how different they are from us, our moralizing impulse may make them a different species, or mythic bigshots like Satan. It's useful to keep in mind that humans are as much scavengers as predators. Snatching money out of an employee's pay can give you the same glow as snagging a fumble and scurrying off with the ball. It's competition as sport, against a team too dumb to know what's hit them. Scavengers are evenly matched or underdogs: predators dominate the game and markets. When the game is rigged, if you play, you prey.
Not that it has to be like this. Any number of economists have proposed measures that could restore mutuality and robustness to the economy and this distressed society. Robert Reich lists some of them.[5] There are better ways to do business, and the reforms are worth a listen.
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