Kleenex Workers

From the Progressive via ZNet, Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed and several other left-leaning books, on what young French workers are fighting for:

Was it only three years ago that some of our puffed up patriots were denouncing the French as “cheese-eating surrender monkeys,” too fattened on Camembert to stub out their Gaulois and get down with the war on Iraq? Well, take another look at the folks who invented the word liberté. Throughout the month of March and beyond, they were demonstrating, rioting, and burning up cars to preserve a right Americans can only dream of: the right not to be fired at an employer’s whim.

The French government’s rationale for its new labor law was impeccable from an economist’s standpoint: Make it easier for employers to fire people and they will be more willing to hire people. So why was Paris burning?

What corporations call “flexibility”—the right to dispose of workers at will—is what workers experience as disposability, not to mention insecurity and poverty. The French students who were tossing Molotov cocktails didn’t want to become what they call “a Kleenex generation”—used and tossed away when the employer decides he needs a fresh one.

Click here for the rest.

If French youth fear becoming "a Kleenex generation," then Americans ought to be lamenting the fact that we are now, and have been for quite some time, a Kleenex nation. That is, as workers, we are completely disposable, simply pieces of of the overall capital picture for any employer, no better or worse than machinery, land, natural resources, and funding. Of course, there is a justifying rationale used by pro-capitalists to explain why it's okay to treat Americans as things: the idea is that the ability to discard workers at will allows companies to be more profitable, which expands the economy, which, in turn, creates more jobs and raises wages. The problem is that the conventional wisdom breaks down after the expanding economy part. It is now utterly clear that an expanding economy need not create many new jobs, at least here in the US, now that we are in the era of "outsourcing." And most of the jobs that are created these days are in the shitty service sector, with no hope of advancement, pay raises, or benefits. As for an expanding economy raising wages, well, I think Alan Greenspan put it best in the late 90s when he was talking about how inflation was, amazingly, not a problem with the boom: workers feared losing their jobs and were therefore afraid of asking for raises, and simply accepting the fact that growth was not something from which they would benefit--no rise in wages equaled no rise in inflation. In short, the conventional wisdom that workers have to put up with bullshit from employers so everyone can enjoy greater gains from overall economic growth is a total lie. It just doesn't work that way.

I wish we had big balls like the French.

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