The Uprising of the Second Tier in a Time of Late Capitalism

[marmar]

from Naked Capitalism:



David Dayen: The Uprising of the Second Tier in a Time of Late Capitalism


The past several years have demonstrated the obvious point that inequality and depression will combine to produce flares of mass social unrest. You see this in Europe and the Middle East, where rising food prices had as much to do with the Arab Spring as decades of political repression. Things are no different here in America. Even though elites are fortunate enough to have a militarized local law enforcement apparatus in place to make sure the rabble doesn’t get too out of control, these flares, indications of broader awareness that in an economy rigged against them, the only recourse is to step outside the system and shout to the heavens. We’ve seen this before in US history; it was called the Gilded Age, and it led to the set of progressive reforms as well as a legacy of labor organizing that might, just might, be awakening from what seems like a decades-long slumber.

Over the past year or so, low-wage workers have staged wildcat strikes, walking off the job for a day or two. It started at Walmart, America’s low-wage giant, the largest private employer in the US and the company that the Federal Open Market Committee looks to when making macroeconomic policy decisions. Workers in dozens of stores walked out last October and November, demanding better pay and working conditions, stable hours and above all, respect. This has predictably spread to other parts of the low-wage sector. Fast food and retail workers have been systematically striking, one city at a time, under the banner of a $15 per hour living wage. Workers in New York City, Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis and Milwaukee have walked off the job in the one-day wildcat strikes. SEIU and a variety of community groups have been behind the stoppages. It would be natural to expect chronic one-day strikes like this at the beginnings of union formation. This is exactly how voiceless workers in the 1880s and 1890s began to mass their collective power. That doesn’t mean it will succeed, but it means it’s following a very similar script.

...............(snip)...............

These low-wage worker actions are small in the grand scheme of things, but significant because of what they represent – mass dissatisfaction with the current economic order. The land of the free imposes lots of barriers to this type of assembly, action and speech, many of them psychological. The American “ideal” of individual work ethic places lots of pressure on people not getting by in this economy to blame themselves, to see their lot as part of some personal deficiency. And when that doesn’t work, there’s good old-fashioned police repression.

I highlight this even though I don’t completely support yesterday’s action by homeowners out in front of the Justice Department. I don’t completely support it because one of the main organizations that put the action together, under the umbrella group Campaign for a Fair Settlement, basically sold out these same homeowners when they threw in their lot with Eric Schneiderman and his Potemkin task force, squandering whatever leverage was gained over banks for their abuses of property laws. I don’t trust the instincts of these people, nor do I trust that the protests will amount to anything of value, and I fear that elements of the Occupy Our Homes movement, who stayed overnight in front of DoJ, are being misled by bad leadership. But at some level, this exists on a continuum with the labor strikes; desperate actions by desperate people fighting a rigged economic system and their own government’s implication in the policies that support it. And what happens in the clip below to Carmen Pittman, an Occupy Our Homes fighter in Atlanta who spent a year saving her house from JPMorgan Chase, is indicative of how the state reacts to these flares of unrest:

&feature=player_embedded

...................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/05/david-dayen-the-uprising-of-the-second-tier-in-a-time-of-late-capitalism.html#lkjSYKt5Y4lB3UhT.99

[Laelth]

1. k&r for labor and for concerted action. n/t

-Laelth