As businesses increasingly embrace a not-for-profit culture, an end to overconsumption on a finite planet could finally be in sight. But given the huge lobbying power of vested interests, it will remain impossible to create a truly sustainable world until the illegitimate power of corporations is held in check.
*****
Back in the mid 1980s, when I was a newly single mother of four, I went back to work with a nearly blank resume. I took one low-paying job, then somehow landed a better one, as assistant to the young president of a wholesale company.
It enabled me to cover the rent and necessary expenses in a time when a decent administrative or secretarial job did. For that I was thankful and proud to survive without assistance. It seemed like a dream job, but it lasted less than a year, from December to December to be precise.
Like many cities in the South, New Orleans has a proud history of civil rights leadership—along with an equally grim history of civil rights violations. That history is repeating itself today. The African American community is again facing economic injustice and abuse from law enforcement. But, this time, the immigrant workers who rebuilt New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina are also the targets of brutal civil rights violations.
When President Obama requested $3.7 billion from Congress in early July he returned the issue of border security to the forefront where it had faded since the days of large scale Mexican migration a few years ago. The exodus from Mexico stemmed from the signing of NAFTA in 1994 which pitted Mexican corn farms, long a staple of the Mexican economy, against an influx of heavily subsidized corn inputs from the U.S. Over two million Mexicans left agriculture and many headed north, drawn by the Sunbelt building boom.
Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), the minority leader of the Democrats in the House of Representatives, just had her political consultants send out a mass mailing to women asking for money and responses to an enclosed survey of their opinions.
What was the much-hyped Computer Revolution but another big step in the history of automation? De-skilling millions of people, and forcing each remaining, computer-“literate” worker to then generate the work output which, say, six employees formerly did. Drastically reducing labor costs, even with stagnant revenues, remains a major source of corporate profit.
Leading management consultants, top government officials and prominent financial journalists are proposing, what they dub, “labor reforms” as the solution for double-digit unemployment and underemployment, economic stagnation and the decline of capital investments.
“Labor Reform” as the Concentration of Power and Profits
First of all, the term “labor reform” is just a euphemism for labor regression, the reversal of laws and practices that workers and employees secured through decades of struggle against employers.
There is no question that over the past decade and a half, Europe, the US, and Israel have engaged in a series of bloody wars, inequalities have increased throughout the globe, economic crisis has become endemic and, more recently, right-wing military and civilian regimes have swept to power throughout Asia, North Africa, Europe and Canada.
People before Profit—the slogan for production cooperatives—is an option even in the United States. Within the past decade, three forms of worker-owned and/or managed types of organizing work places are now functioning. The most democratic structure, one that could potentially transform the economy from profiteering greed to meeting everyone’s needs, is the worker-ownership cooperative.
Modern marketing changes language and machinery but not its material foundation, which existed long before the industrial age. An allegedly “new” economy of information technology (IT) is just an update with different jargon and tools but the profit and loss substance remain exactly what they’ve always been: great for some, nice for many, and terrible for the earth and most of its people.
