The Ethics of Labor Struggle

News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo

[Long, but a very well-thought-out treatment of important issues that

should prove of great interest to anyone interested in libertarianism or

labor activism.--DC]

http://mutualist.blogspot.com/

Thursday, April 19, 2007

The Ethics of Labor Struggle: A Free Market Perspective

by Kevin Carson

The technofascists, with Echelon, RFID chips, public surveillance

cameras, and the like, have us under tighter surveillance at home than

we could have imagined a generation ago; they have the globe under the

closest thing to an unchallenged hegemony that's ever existed in

history. In their wildest dreams for the near future, the PNAC types

probably imagine something like Ken Macleod's US/UN Hegemony in _The

Star Fraction_, enforced by a network of orbital laser battle stations

capable of incinerating ships and armored formations anywhere on the

Earth's surface.(1) But in Macleod's story, that Hegemony was overthrown

in the end by asymmetric warfare, fought by a loose coalition of

insurgencies around the world. Their fluid guerrilla tactics never

presented a target for the orbital lasers; and they kept coming back

with one offensive after another against the New World Order, until the

cost of the constant counter-insurgency wars bled the U.S. economy dry.

I suspect that all these high-tech lines of defense, against would-be

military rivals and against subversion at home, are a modern-day version

of the Maginot Line.

Bin Laden, murderous bastard though he is, has a pretty good sense of

strategy. Expensive, high tech weapons are great for winning battles, he

says, but not for winning wars. The destitute hill people of Afghanistan

already brought one superpower to its knees. Perhaps the remaining

superpower will be similarly humbled by its own people right here at

home. If so, America will be the graveyard of state capitalist Empire.

Perhaps, as in Macleod's vision, the disintegrated remnants of the

post-collapse United States will be referred to as the Second Former

Union (colorfully abbreviated FU2).

In the military realm, the age-old methods of decentralized and

networked resistance have most recently appeared in public discussion

under the buzzword "Fourth Generation Warfare."(2)

But networked resistance against the Empire goes far beyond guerrilla

warfare in the military realm. The same advantages of asymmetric warfare

accrue equally to domestic political opposition. There is a wide range

of ruling elite literature on the dangers of "netwar" to the existing

system of power, along with an equal volume of literature by the

Empire's enemies celebrating such networked resistance. Most notable

among them are probably the Rand studies, from the late 1990s on, by

David Ronfeldt et al. In _The Zapatista "Social Netwar" in Mexico_,(3)

those authors expressed grave concern over the possibilities of

decentralized "netwar" techniques for undermining elite control. They

saw ominous signs of such a movement in the global political support

network for the Zapatistas. Loose, ad hoc coalitions of affinity groups,

organizing through the Internet, could throw together large

demonstrations at short notice, and "swarm" the government and

mainstream media with phone calls, letters, and emails far beyond their

capacity to absorb. Ronfeldt noted a parallel between such techniques

and the "leaderless resistance" advocated by right-wing white

supremacist Louis Beam, circulating in some Constitutionalist/militia

circles. These were, in fact, the very methods later used at Seattle and

afterward. Decentralized "netwar," the stuff of elite nightmares, was

essentially the "crisis of governability" Samuel Huntington had warned

of in the 1970s--but potentially several orders of magnitude greater.

The post-Seattle movement confirmed such elite fears, and resulted in a

full-scale backlash. Paul Rosenberg recounted in horrifying detail the

illegal repression and political dirty tricks used by local police

forces against anti-globalization activists at protests in 1999 and

2000.(4) There have even been some reports that Garden Plot(5) was

activated on a local basis at Seattle, and that Delta Force units

provided intelligence and advice to local police.(6) The U.S. government

also seems to have taken advantage of the upward ratcheting of the

police state after the 9-11 attacks to pursue its preexisting war on the

anti-globalization movement. The intersection of the career of onetime

Philadelphia Police Commissioner John Timoney, a fanatical enemy of the

post-Seattle movement, with the highest levels of Homeland Security (in

the meantime supervising the police riot against the FTAA protesters in

Miami) is especially interesting in this regard.(7)

[i have to point the inaccuracy of the term "anti-globalization". It in

fact refers to opposition only to neoliberal state-corporate

globalization, expanding the rule of corporations and international

financial institutions (IFIs) beyond national boundaries. This sort of

globalization often involves greater government interference in the

marketplace, such as granting corporations patents on traditional

medicines, or banning truthful labeling on products. So-called

"anti-globalization" activists actually generally support a different

sort of globalization, focused on grassroots international organizing

and activism. Better terms include alter-globalization,

globalization-from-below, and the global justice movement.--DC]

The same netwar techniques are discussed in Jeff Vail's A Theory of

Power blog, in a much more sympathetic manner, as "Rhizome."(8)

One question that's been less looked into, though, is the extent to

which the ideas of networked resistance and asymmetric warfare are

applicable to labor relations. It's rather odd labor relations aren't

considered more in this context, since the Wobbly idea of "direct action

on the job" is a classic example of asymmetric warfare. My purpose in

this article is to examine the ethical issues attending the use of such

labor tactics, from a free market libertarian standpoint.

Vulgar libertarian critiques of organized labor commonly assert that

unions depend entirely on force (or the implicit threat of force),

backed by the state, against non-union laborers; they assume, in so

arguing, that the strike as it is known today has always been the

primary method of labor struggle. Any of Thomas DiLorenzo's articles on

the subject at Mises. Org can be taken as a proxy for this ideological

tendency. I quote the following as an example:

"Historically, the main 'weapon' that unions have employed to try to

push wages above the levels that employees could get by bargaining for

themselves on the free market without a union has been the strike. But

in order for the strike to work, and for unions to have any significance

at all, some form of coercion or violence must be used to keep competing

workers out of the labor market."(9)

This betrays a profound ignorance of the history of the labor movement

outside the sterile bubble of the Wagner Act.

First of all, when the strike _was_ chosen as a weapon, it relied more

on the threat of imposing costs on the employer than on the forcible

exclusion of scabs. You wouldn't think it so hard for the Misoids to

understand that the replacement of a major portion of the workforce,

especially when the supply of replacement workers is limited by moral

sympathy with the strike, might entail considerable transaction costs

and disruption of production. The idiosyncratic knowledge of the

existing workforce, the time and cost of bringing replacement workers to

an equivalent level of productivity, and the damage short-term

disruption of production may do to customer relations, together

constitute a rent that invests the threat of walking out with a

considerable deterrent value. And the cost and disruption is greatly

intensified when the strike is backed by sympathy strikes at other

stages of production. Wagner and Taft-Hartley greatly reduced the

effectiveness of strikes at individual plants by transforming them into

declared wars fought by Queensbury rules, and likewise reduced their

effectiveness by prohibiting the coordination of actions across multiple

plants or industries. Taft-Hartley's cooling off periods, in addition,

gave employers time to prepare ahead of time for such disruptions and

greatly reduced the informational rents embodied in the training of the

existing workforce. Were not such restrictions in place, today's

"just-in-time" economy would likely be far more vulnerable to such

disruption than that of the 1930s.

More importantly, though, unionism was historically less about strikes

or excluding non-union workers from the workplace than about what

workers did inside the workplace to strengthen their bargaining power

against the boss.

The Wagner Act, along with the rest of the corporate liberal legal

regime, had as its central goal the redirection of labor resistance away

from the successful asymmetric warfare model, toward a formalized,

bureaucratic system centered on labor contracts enforced by the state

and the union hierarchies. As Karl Hess suggested in a 1976 _Playboy_

interview,

"one crucial similarity between those two fascists [Hitler and FDR] is

that both successfully destroyed the trade unions. Roosevelt did it by

passing exactly the reforms that would ensure the creation of a

trade-union bureaucracy. Since F.D.R., the unions have become the

protectors of contracts rather than the spearhead of worker demands. And

the Roosevelt era brought the 'no strike' clause, the notion that your

rights are limited by the needs of the state."(10)

The federal labor law regime criminalizes many forms of resistance, like

sympathy and boycott strikes up and down the production chain from raw

materials to retail, that made the mass and general strikes of the early

1930s so formidable. The Railway Labor Relations Act, which has since

been applied to airlines, was specifically designed to prevent transport

workers from turning local strikes into general strikes. Taft-Hartley's

cooling off period can be used for similar purposes in other strategic

sectors, as demonstrated by Bush's invocation of it against the

longshoremen's union.

The extent to which state labor policy serves the interests of employers

is suggested by the old (pre-Milsted) Libertarian Party Platform, a

considerable deviation from the stereotypical libertarian position on

organized labor. It expressly called for a repeal, not only of Wagner,

but of Taft-Hartley's prohibitions on sympathy and boycott strikes and

of state right-to-work prohibitions on union shop contracts. It also

condemned any federal right to impose "cooling off" periods or issue

back-to-work orders.(11)

Wagner was originally passed, as Alexis Buss suggests below, because the

_bosses_ were begging for a regime of enforceable contract, with the

unions as enforcers. To quote Adam Smith, when the state regulates

relations between workmen and masters, it usually has the masters for

its counselors.

Far from being a labor charter that empowered unions for the first time,

FDR's labor regime had the same practical effect as telling the

irregulars of Lexington and Concord "Look, you guys come out from behind

those rocks, put on these bright red uniforms, and march in parade

ground formation like the Brits, and in return we'll set up a system of

arbitration to guarantee you don't lose all the time." Unfortunately,

the Wagner regime left organized labor massively vulnerable to

liquidation in the event that ruling elites decided they _wanted_ labor

to lose all the time, after all. Since the late '60s, corporate America

has moved to exploit the full union-busting potential of Taft-Hartley.

And guess what? Labor is prevented by law, for the most part, from

abandoning the limits of Wagner and Taft-Hartley and returning to the

successful unilateral techniques of the early '30s.

Admittedly, Wagner wasn't all bad for workers, so long as big business

saw organized labor as a useful tool for imposing order on the

workplace. If workers lost control of how their job was performed, at

least their pay increased with productivity and they had the security of

a union contract. Life as a wage-slave was certainly better under the

corporate liberal variant of state capitalism than under the kind of

right-to-work banana republic Reagan and Thatcher replaced it with.

Note well: I'm far from defending the statism of the FDR labor regime in

principle. I'd prefer not to have my face stamped by a jackboot in

Oceania, or be smothered with kindness by Huxley's World Controller. I'd

prefer a legal regime where labor is free to obtain its full product by

bargaining in a labor market without the state's thumb on the scale on

behalf of the owning classes. But if I'm forced to choose between forms

of statism, there's no doubt which one I'll pick.

As Larry Gambone says, welfare statism and corporate liberalism are the

price the owning classes pay for state capitalism:

". . . as I repeat ad nauseam, 'social democracy is the price you pay

for corporate capitalism.' There Aint No Sech Thing As A Free Lunch --

if you are going to strip the majority of their property and

independence and turn them into wage slaves -- you have to provide for

them."(12)

Dan Sullivan once suggested, along similar lines, that redistribution

isn't a matter for debate under state capitalism: the owning classes

have no choice in the matter. The distortions, the maldistributions of

purchasing power, are built into the very structure of privilege and

subsidy; if the distortions are not corrected, they result, through a

process of feedback, in wealth growing on itself and further aggravating

the maldistribution of purchasing power. So long as the distorting

privileges are in place, the state capitalist ruling class will simply

have no choice but to intervene to counteract the tendency toward

overproduction and underconsumption. The only alternatives are 1) to

eliminate the original distortion so that purchasing power is tied

directly to effort, and labor is able to purchase its full product; or

2) to add new layers of distortion to counteract the original

distortion.(13)

In any event, the Wagner regime worked for labor only so long as capital

_wanted_ it to work for labor. It was originally intended as one of the

"humane" measures like those the kindly dairy farmer provided for his

cattle in Tolstoy's parable (the better to milk them, of course).(14) If

we're going to be livestock, that sort of thing beats the hell out of

the kind of farmer who decides it's more profitable to work us to death

and then replace us. But that's all moot now; when the corporate elite

decided the "labor accord" had outlived its usefulness, and began

exploiting the available loopholes in Wagner (and the full-blown breach

in Taft-Hartley), labor began its long retreat.

An alternative model of labor struggle, and one much closer to the

overall spirit of organized labor before Wagner, would include the kinds

of activity mentioned in the old Wobbly pamphlet "How to Fire Your

Boss," and discussed by the I.W.W.'s Alexis Buss in her articles on

"minority unionism" for _Industrial Worker_.

If labor is to return to a pre-Wagner way of doing things, what Buss

calls "minority unionism" will be the new organizing principle.

"If unionism is to become a movement again, we need to break out of the

current model, one that has come to rely on a recipe increasingly

difficult to prepare: a majority of workers vote a union in, a contract

is bargained. We need to return to the sort of rank-and-file on-the-job

agitating that won the 8-hour day and built unions as a vital force. . . .

"Minority unionism happens on our own terms, regardless of legal

recognition. . . .

"U.S. & Canadian labor relations regimes are set up on the premise that

you need a majority of workers to have a union, generally

government-certified in a worldwide context[;] this is a relatively rare

set-up. And even in North America, the notion that a union needs

official recognition or majority status to have the right to represent

its members is of relatively recent origin, thanks mostly to the choice

of business unions to trade rank-and-file strength for legal maintenance

of membership guarantees.

"The labor movement was not built through majority unionism -- it

couldn't have been."(15)

"How are we going to get off of this road? We must stop making gaining

legal recognition and a contract the point of our organizing. . . .

"We have to bring about a situation where the bosses, not the union,

want the contract. We need to create situations where bosses will offer

us concessions to get our cooperation. Make them beg for it."(16)

As the Wobbly pamphlet "How to Fire Your Boss" argues, the strike in its

current business union form, according to NLRB rules, is about the least

effective form of action available to organized labor.

"The bosses, with their large financial reserves, are better able to

withstand a long drawn-out strike than the workers. In many cases, court

injunctions will freeze or confiscate the union's strike funds. And

worst of all, a long walk-out only gives the boss a chance to replace

striking workers with a scab (replacement) workforce.

"Workers are far more effective when they take direct action while still

on the job. By deliberately reducing the boss' profits while continuing

to collect wages, you can cripple the boss without giving some scab the

opportunity to take your job. Direct action, by definition, means those

tactics workers can undertake themselves, without the help of government

agencies, union bureaucrats, or high-priced lawyers. Running to the

National Labor Relations Board (N.L.R.B.) for help may be appropriate in

some cases, but it is NOT a form of direct action.(17)

Thomas DiLorenzo, ironically, said almost the same thing in the article

quoted earlier:

"It took decades of dwindling union membership (currently 8.2% of the

private-sector labor force in the U.S. according to the U.S. Dept. of

Labor) to convince union leaders to scale back the strike as their major

'weapon' and resort to other tactics. Despite all the efforts at

violence and intimidation, the fact remains that striking union members

are harmed by lower incomes during strikes, and in many cases have lost

their jobs to replacement workers. To these workers, strikes have

created heavy financial burdens for little or no gain. Consequently,

some unions have now resorted to what they call 'in-plant actions,' a

euphemism for sabotage.

"Damaging the equipment in an oil refinery or slashing the tires of the

trucks belonging to a trucking company, for example, is a way for unions

to 'send a message' to employers that they should give in to union

demands, or else. Meanwhile, no unionized employees, including the ones

engaged in the acts of sabotage, lose a day's work."

DiLorenzo is wrong, of course, in limiting on-the-job action solely to

physical sabotage of the employer's property. As we shall see below, an

on-the-job struggle over the pace and intensity of work is inherent in

the incomplete nature of the employment contract, the impossibility of

defining such particulars ahead of time, and the agency costs involved

in monitoring performance after the fact. But what is truly comical is

DiLorenzo's ignorance of the role employers and the employers' state

played in establishment unions making the strike a "major 'weapon'" _in

the first place_.

Instead of conventional strikes, "How to Fire Your Boss" recommends such

forms of direct action as the slowdown, the "work to rule" strike, the

"good work" strike, selective strikes (brief, unannounced strikes at

random intervals), whisteblowing, and sick-ins. These are all ways of

raising costs on the job, without giving the boss a chance to hire scabs.

The pamphlet also recommends two other tactics which are likely to be

problematic for many free market libertarians: the sitdown and

monkey-wrenching (the idea behind the latter being that there's no point

hiring scabs when the machines are also on strike).

It was probably easier to build unions by means of organizing strikes,

getting workers to "down tools" and strike in hot blood when a flying

squadron entered the shop floor, than it is today to get workers to jump

through the NLRB's hoops (and likely resign themselves to punitive

action) in cold blood. And it certainly was easier to win a strike

before Taft-Hartley outlawed secondary and boycott strikes up and down

the production chain. The classic CIO strikes of the early '30s involved

multiple steps in the chain -- not only production plants, but their

suppliers of raw materials, their retail outlets, and the teamsters who

moved finished and unfinished goods. They were planned strategically, as

a general staff might plan a campaign. Some strikes turned into what

amounted to regional general strikes. Even a minority of workers

striking, at each step in the chain, can be far more effective than a

conventional strike limited to one plant. Even the AFL-CIO's Sweeney, at

one point, half-heartedly suggested that things would be easier if

Congress repealed all the labor legislation after Norris-LaGuardia

(which took the feds out of the business of issuing injunctions and

sending in troops), and let labor and management go at it "mano a mano."(18)

If nothing else, all of this should demonstrate the sheer nonsensicality

of the Misoid idea that strikes are ineffectual unless they involve 100%

of the workforce and are backed up by the threat of violence against

scabs. Even a sizeable minority of workers walking off the job, if

they're backed up by similar minorities at other stages of the

production and distribution process on early CIO lines, could utterly

paralyze a company.

It seems clear, from a common sense standpoint, that the Wobbly approach

to labor struggle is potentially far more effective than the current

business union model of collective bargaining under the Wagner regime.

The question remains, though, what should be the libertarian ethical

stance on such tactics.

As I already mentioned, sitdowns and monkey-wrenching would appear at

first glance to be obvious transgressions of libertarian principle.

Regarding these, I can only say that the morality of trespassing and

vandalism against someone else's property hinges on the just character

of their property rights.

Murray Rothbard raised the question, at the height of his attempted

alliance with the New Left, of what ought to be done with state

property. His answer was quite different from that of today's vulgar

libertarians ("Why, sell it to a giant corporation, of course, on terms

most advantageous to the corporation!"). According to Rothbard, since

state ownership of property is in principle illegitimate, all property

currently "owned" by the government is really unowned. And since the

rightful owner of any piece of unowned property is, in keeping with

radical Lockean principles, the first person to occupy it and mix his or

her labor with it, it follows that government property is rightfully the

property of whoever is currently occupying and using it. That means, for

example, that state universities are the rightful property of either the

students or faculties, and should either be turned into student consumer

co-ops, or placed under the control of scholars' guilds. More

provocative still, Rothbard tentatively applied the same principle to

the (theatrical gasp) private sector! First he raised the question of

nominally "private" universities that got most of their funding from the

state, like Columbia. Surely it was only a "private" college "in the

most ironic sense." And therefore, it deserved "a similar fate of

virtuous homesteading confiscation."

"But if Columbia University, what of General Dynamics? What of the

myriad of corporations which are integral parts of the

military-industrial complex, which not only get over half or sometimes

virtually all their revenue from the government but also participate in

mass murder? What are their credentials to 'private' property? Surely

less than zero. As eager lobbyists for these contracts and subsidies, as

co-founders of the garrison stare, they deserve confiscation and

reversion of their property to the genuine private sector as rapidly as

possible. To say that their 'private' property must be respected is to

say that the property stolen by the horsethief and the murderer must be

'respected.'

"But how then do we go about destatizing the entire mass of government

property, as well as the 'private property' of General Dynamics? All

this needs detailed thought and inquiry on the part of libertarians. One

method would be to turn over ownership to the homesteading workers in

the particular plants; another to turn over pro-rata ownership to the

individual taxpayers. But we must face the fact that it might prove the

most practical route to first nationalize the property as a prelude to

redistribution. Thus, how could the ownership of General Dynamics be

transferred to the deserving taxpayers without first being nationalized

enroute? And, further more, even if the government should decide to

nationalize General Dynamics -- without compensation, of course -- per

se and not as a prelude to redistribution to the taxpayers, this is not

immoral or something to be combatted. For it would only mean that one

gang of thieves -- the government -- would be confiscating property from

another previously cooperating gang, the corporation that has lived off

the government. I do not often agree with John Kenneth Galbraith, but

his recent suggestion to nationalize businesses which get more than 75%

of their revenue from government, or from the military, has considerable

merit. Certainly it does not mean aggression against private property,

and, furthermore, we could expect a considerable diminution of zeal from

the military-industrial complex if much of the profits were taken out of

war and plunder. And besides, it would make the American military

machine less efficient, being governmental, and that is surely all to

the good. But why stop at 75%? Fifty per cent seems to be a reasonable

cutoff point on whether an organization is largely public or largely

private."(19)

If corporations that get the bulk of their profits from state

intervention are essentially parts of the state, rightfully subject to

being treated as the property of the workers actually occupying them,

then sitdowns and sabotage should certainly be legitimate means for

bringing this about.

As for the other, less extreme tactics, those who object morally to such

on-the-job direct action fail to consider the logical implications of a

free contract in labor. As Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis describe it,

"The classical theory of contract implicit in most of neo-classical

economics holds that the enforcement of claims is performed by the

judicial system at negligible cost to the exchanging parties. We refer

to this classical third-party enforcement assumption as _exogenous

enforcement_. Where, by contrast, enforcement of claims arising from an

exchange by third parties is infeasible or excessively costly, the

exchanging agents must themselves seek to enforce their claims.

Endogenous enforcement in labour markets was analysed by Marx -- he

termed it the extraction of labour from labour power -- and has recently

become the more or less standard model among microeconomic theorists.

"Exogenous enforcement is absent under a variety of quite common

conditions: when there is no relevant third party . . ., when the

contested attribute can be measured only imperfectly or at considerable

cost (work effort, for example, or the degre of risk assumed by a firm's

management), when the relevant evidence is not admissible in a court of

law . . .[,] when there is no possible means of redress . . ., or when

the nature of the contingencies concerning future states of the world

relevant to the exchange precludes writing a fully specified contract.

"In such cases the _ex post_ terms of exchange are determined by the

structure of the interaction between A and B, and in particular on the

strategies A is able to adopt to induce B to provide the desired level

of the contested attribute, and the counter strategies available to B. . . .

"Consider agent A who purchases a good or service from agent B. We call

the exchange _contested_ when B's good or service possesses an attribute

which is valuable to A, is costly for B to provide, yet is not fully

secified in an enforceable contract. . . .

"An employment relationship is established when, in return for a wage,

the worker B agrees to submit to the authority of the employer A for a

specified period of time in return for a wage w. While the employer's

promise to pay the wage is legally enforceable, the worker's promise to

bestow an adequate level of effort and care upon the tasks assigned,

even if offered, is not. Work is subjectively costly for the worker to

provide, valuable to the employer, and costly to measure. The

manager-worker relationship is thus a contested exchange."(20)

The very term "adequate effort" is meaningless, aside from whatever way

its definition is worked out in practice based on the comparative

bargaining power of worker and employer. It's virtually impossible to

design a contract that specifies ahead of time the exact levels of

effort and standards of performance for a wage-laborer, and likewise

impossible for employers to reliably monitor performance after the fact.

Therefore, the workplace is contested terrain, and workers are justified

entirely as much as employers in attempting to maximize their own

interests within the leeway left by an incomplete contract. How much

effort is "normal" to expend is determined by the informal outcome of

the social contest within the workplace, given the de facto balance of

power at any given time. And that includes slowdowns, "going canny," and

the like. The "normal" effort that an employer is entitled to, when he

buys labor-power, is entirely a matter of convention. It's directly

analogous the local cultural standards that would determine the nature

of "reasonable expectations," in a libertarian common law of implied

contract. If libertarians like to think of "a fair day's wage" as an

open-ended concept, subject to the employer's discretion and limited by

what he can get away with, they should remember that "a fair day's work"

is equally open-ended.

At the "softest" end of the spectrum, direct action methods fade into

the general category of moral hazard or opportunism. (For that matter,

the whole Austrian concept of "entrepreneurship" arguably presupposes to

a large extent rents from asymmetrical information).

The average worker can probably think of hundreds of ways to raise costs

on the job, with little or no risk of getting caught, if he puts his

mind to it. The giant corporation, arguably, has become so hypertrophied

and centralized under the influence of state subsidies, that it's

vulnerable to the very same kinds of "asymmetrical warfare" from within

that the world's sole remaining superpower is from without.

Now, it's almost impossible to outlaw these things _ex ante_ through a

legally enforceable contract. Every time I go to work it strikes me even

more how much of what the Wobblies considered "direct action" couldn't

possibly be defined by any feasible contractual or legal regime, and are

therefore restrained entirely by the workers' perception of what they

can get away with in the contested social space of the job. What

constitutes a fair level of effort is entirely a subjective cultural

norm, that can only be determined by the real-world bargaining strength

of owners and workers in a particular workplace -- it's a lot like the

local, contextual definitions that the common law of fraud would depend

on in a free marketplace. And I suspect that as downsizing, speedups and

stress continue, workers' definitions of a fair level of effort and of

the legitimate ways to slow down will undergo a drastic shift.

The potential for one form of direct action in particular, referred to

in "How to Fire Your Boss" as "open mouth sabotage," has grown

enormously in the Internet era. As described in the pamphlet:

"Sometimes simply telling people the truth about what goes on at work

can put a lot of pressure on the boss. Consumer industries like

restaurants and packing plants are the most vulnerable. And again, as in

the case of the Good Work Strike, you'll be gaining the support of the

public, whose patronage can make or break a business.

"Whistle Blowing can be as simple as a face-to-face conversation with a

customer, or it can be as dramatic as the P.G.&E. engineer who revealed

that the blueprints to the Diablo Canyon nuclear reactor had been

reversed. Upton Sinclair's novel _The Jungle_ blew the lid off the

scandalous health standards and working conditions of the meatpacking

industry when it was published earlier this century.

"Waiters can tell their restaurant clients about the various shortcuts

and substitutions that go into creating the faux-haute cuisine being

served to them. Just as Work to Rule puts an end to the usual relaxation

of standards, Whistle Blowing reveals it for all to know.

The authors of _The Cluetrain Manifesto_ are quite eloquent on the

potential for frank, unmediated conversations between employees and

customers as a way of building customer relationships and circumventing

the consumer's ingrained habit of blocking out canned corporate

messages.(21)

What they didn't mention is the potential for disaster, from the

company's perspective, if workers are disgruntled and see the customer

as a potential ally against a common enemy. In an age when unions have

virtually disappeared from the private sector workforce, and downsizings

and speedups have become a normal expectation of working life, the

vulnerability of employer's public image may be the one bit of real

leverage the worker has over him -- and it's a doozy. If they go after

that image relentlessly and systematically, they've got the boss by the

short hairs. Given the ease of setting up anonymous blogs and websites

(just think of any company and then look up the URL

employernamesucks.com), the potential for other features of the

writeable web like comment threads and message boards, the possibility

of anonymously saturation emailing of the company's major suppliers and

customers and advocacy groups concerned with that industry. . . . well,

let's just say the potential for "swarming" and "netwar" is limitless.

If the litigation over Diebold's corporate files and emails teaches

anything, it's that court injunctions are absolutely useless against

guerrilla netwar. The era of the SLAPP lawsuit is over, except for those

cases where the offender is considerate enough to volunteer his home

address to the target. Even in the early days of the Internet, the

McLibel case (a McDonald's SLAPP suit against some small-time

pamphleteers) turned into "the most expensive and most disastrous

public-relations exercise ever mounted by a multinational company."(21)

We have probably already passed a "singularity," a point of no return,

in the use of such networked information warfare. It took some time for

employers to reach a consensus that the old corporate liberal welfare

regime no longer served their interests, to take note of the

union-busting potential of Taft-Hartley, and to exploit that potential

whole-heartedly. But once they began to do so, the implosion of

Wagner-style unionism was preordained. Likewise, it will take time for

the realization to dawn on workers that things are only getting worse,

and there's no hope in traditional unionism, and that in a Cluetrain

world they have the power to bring the employer to his knees by their

own direct action. But when they do, the outcome is also probably

preordained.

But even if there were some way of objectively specifying expected

levels of effort by _ex ante_ contract, the costs of monitoring would

likely be very high in practice. I suspect most market anarchists would

reject, in principle, exogenous systems to enforce intra-workplace

contract that are not paid for entirely by those who rely on the

service: in a market anarchy, those contractual arrangements which cost

more to enforce than the benefits would justify would simply "wither

away," regardless of whether the contractual violations incurred the

moral disapproval of some.

Getting back to the issue of moral legitimacy, it's difficult to see how

a wing of libertarianism that agrees with Walter Block on the moral

defensibility of blackmail can consistently get all squeamish when

workers pursue the exact same interest-maximizing behavior. That's no

exaggeration, by the way. Contrast libertarian commentary on the

virtuous function of price gouging after Katrina with this message board

reaction at Libertarian Underground to the idea of workers doing

_exactly the same thing_:

"Fisticuffs: Economically speaking, why should [workers] do more than

the minimum possible for their pay?

"Charles M.: Why not just rob people if you can get away with it?

Economically speaking?

"Fisticuffs: If a person does a certain amount of work and gets paid for

that amount of work, is the person really pricing himself efficiently if

he does more work without getting paid more?"(23)

Here's a little thought experiment: try imagining Charles M.'s reaction

if Fisticuffs had complained that _employers_ are "robbing people" when

they try to get the most work they can for an hour's wages. You can also

do an experiment in real life: go to any mainstream libertarian

discussion forum and complain about the bad behavior of the typical

worker. The responses will range from commiseration over "how hard it is

to get good help nowadays," to visceral outrage at the ingratitude and

perversity of such uppity workers. Then go to a comparable forum and

complain in exactly the same tone about your boss' behavior. The

predictable response will be a terse "if you don't like it, look for

another job." Try it for yourself.

I also recall seeing a lot of tsk-tsking from Paul Birch and others of

like mind in some discussion forum several months back, about what

blackguards union workers were for demanding higher wages when their

labor was most needed. Golly, aren't these the same people who defend

"price gouging" by the oil companies? It's not very consistent to go

from "caveat emptor" and "fooled you twice, shame on you!" in every

realm except labor relations, to spelling "God" E-M-P-L-O-Y-E-R within

the workplace. The hostility is quite odd, assuming the person feeling

it is motivated by free market principle rather than a zeal for the

aggrieved interests of big business. They seem, in fact, to implicitly

assume a model of employer-employee relations based on a cultural

holdover from the old master-servant relationship.

Before we put the sainted "employer" on too high a pedestal, let's

consider this quote from a vice president of PR at General Motors (in

David M. Gordon's _Fat and Mean_):

". . . . We are not yet a classless society. . . . [F]undamentally the

mission of [workers'] elected representatives is to get the most

compensation for the least amount of labor. Our responsibility to our

shareholders is to get the most production for the least amount of

compensation."

And here, from the same source, is an advertising blurb from a

union-busting consulting firm:

"We will show you how to screw your employees (before they screw you) --

how to keep them smiling on low pay -- how to maneuver them into low-pay

jobs they are afraid to walk away from -- how to hire and fire so you

always make money."

That kind of honesty is quite refreshing, after all the smarmy Fish!

Philosophy shit I've been wading through lately.

Before I move on, there's one possibility for labor organizing that's

pretty much new. As described in Yochai Benkler in _The Wealth of

Networks_, the networked digital world has created an unprecedented

state of affairs. In many industries, in which the initial outlay for

entering the market was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars or more,

the desktop revolution and the Internet mean that the minimum capital

outlay has fallen to a few thousand dollars, and the marginal cost of

reproduction is zero. That is true of the software industry, the music

industry (thanks to cheap equipment for high quality recording and sound

editing), desktop publishing, and to a certain extent even to film (as

witnessed by affordable editing technology and the success of _Sky

Captain_). In this environment, the only thing standing between the old

information and media dinosaurs and their total collapse is their

so-called "intellectual property" rights -- at least to the extent

they're still enforceable. In any such industry, where the basic

production equipment is affordable to all, and bottom-up networking

renders management obsolete, it is likely that self-managed, cooperative

production will replace the old managerial hierarchies. The potential

for such "worker control of the means of production," in the digital

world, has been celebrated by no less of an anarcho-capitalist than Eric

Raymond.

And the same model of organization can be extended, by way of analogy,

to fields of employment outside the information and entertainment

industries. The basic model is applicable in any industry with low

requirements for initial capitalization and low or non-existent

overhead. Perhaps the most revolutionary possibilities are in the temp

industry. In my own work experience, I've seen that hospitals using

agency nursing staff typically pay the staffing agency about three times

what the agency nurse receives in pay. Cutting out the middleman,

perhaps with some sort of cross between a workers' co-op and a

longshoremen's union hiring hall, seems like a no-brainer. An AFL-CIO

organizer in the San Francisco Bay area has attempted just such a

project, as recounted by Daniel Levine.(24)

Finally, I want to address the common contention of right-wing

libertarians that unions are useless. I've read _Economics in One

Lesson_. I'm familiar with the argument that "in a free market" wages

are determined by productivity. I'm familiar with Rothbard's argument

that unions can't do anything for workers, in a free market, that isn't

already accomplished by the market itself.

I've also seen, in the real world, real wages that have remained

stagnant or even fallen slightly since the 1970s, as labor productivity

soared and the real GDP nearly doubled. Labor is far more productive

than it was thirty years ago; yet virtually the entire increase in GDP

in that time has gone to corporate profits, CEO salaries, and exploding

land rents. The entire growth of economic output over the past thirty

years has gone into mushrooming incomes for the rentier classes, while

the majority have kept up their purchasing power by cashing out home

equity at Ditech. These facts, seemingly so at odds with Hazlitt's

dictum, bring to mind a quote from Mises:

"If a contradiction appears between a theory and experience, we must

always assume that a condition pre-supposed by the theory was not

present, or else there is some error in our observation. The

disagreement between the theory and the facts of experience frequently

forces us to think through the problems of the theory again. But so long

as a rethinking of the theory uncovers no errors in our thinking, we are

not entitled to doubt its truth."(25)

When the theory predicts that in a free market wages will be determined

by the productivity of labor, and we see that they aren't, what's the

obvious conclusion? That this isn't a free market. That we're dealing

with power relations, not market relations.

In a state capitalist market, where some component of employer profits

are rents extracted from the employee because of state-enforced unequal

exchange, organized labor action may provide the bargaining leverage to

reduce those ill-gotten gains.

It's also odd that the Rothbardians see so little advantage in

contracts, from a worker's perspective. Thomas L. Knapp, a

left-Rothbardian who joined the Wobblies, remarked on the contrast

between mainstream libertarians' attitudes toward labor contracts and

their attitudes toward contracts in all other economic realms:

"Contract is the basis of the free market; yet the non-union laborer's

'contract' is an unenforceable, malleable verbal agreement which can be

rescinded or modified at any time, called 'at will employment.' There's

nothing philosophically repugnant about 'at will employment,' but I find

it odd that Pacificus does not likewise decry written, enforceable,

binding contracts between other entities -- suppliers and purchasers,

for example.

"Far from putting employers and employees at odds with each other,

dealing on the basis of explicit contract minimizes misunderstandings.

Each party knows what he or she is required to do to execute the

contract, and each party knows what he or she can expect as a benefit

under it."(26)

Contracts introduce long-term stability and predictability for everyone:

something free-market libertarians consider to be a fairly

non-controversial benefit, when anything but labor supply is involved.

Had Rothbard held down a blue collar job, he might have understood the

incredible feeling of relief in knowing you're protected by a union

contract against arbitrary dismissal and all the associated uncertainty

and insecurity, that comes with being an "at-will" employee.

Another point, on the same subject: Rothbard expressed considerable

hostility toward the "economic illiteracy" of workers who voluntarily

refrained from crossing picket lines, and consumers who boycott scab

goods, is quite uncharacteristic for a subjectivist. It's certainly odd

for adherents of an ideology that normally accepts no second-guessing of

"revealed preference," to get their noses so out of joint when that

preference is for respecting a picket line or buying "fair trade" coffee.

More importantly, in acknowledging that enough potential "replacement

workers" so honored picket lines as to constitute a "problem," from his

perspective, he also gave the lie to arguments by DiLorenzo and his ilk

that the success of strikes depends on forcible exclusion of scabs. To

see just how ridiculous that assertion is, imagine someone making the

analogous claim that "the success of the boycott as a weapon depends

entirely on the use of force to exclude customers from the market." A

strike does not have to achieve 100% participation of the workforce, or

exclude 100% of potential replacements. It only has to _persuade_ enough

of both groups to inconvenience the employer beyond his threshold of

tolerance. And that a general moral culture which encourages labor

solidarity and respect for picket lines, alone, may be enough to achieve

this, is suggested by the very fact that Rothbard and his right-wing

followers regard that kind of moral culture as such a threat.

Conclusion. Whatever value the Wagner regime had for us in the past, it

has outlived. We are getting kicked in the teeth under the old rules. If

labor is to fight a successful counteroffensive, it has to stop playing

by the bosses' rules. We need to fight completely outside the structure

of Wagner and the NLRB's system of certification and contracts, or at

least treat them as a secondary tactic in a strategy based on direct action.

In the neoliberal age, they've apparently decided that we need the

contracts more than they do, and that "at-will" is the best thing for

them. But I think if we took off the gloves, they might be the ones

begging for a new Wagner act and contracts, all over again.

It's time to take up Sweeney's half-hearted suggestion, not just as a

throwaway line, but as a challenge to the bosses. We'll gladly forego

legal protections against punitive firing of union organizers, and

federal certification of unions, if you'll forego the court injunctions

and cooling-off periods and arbitration. We'll leave you free to fire

organizers at will, to bring back the yellow dog contract, if you leave

us free to engage in sympathy and boycott strikes all the way up and

down the production chain, boycott retailers, and strike against the

hauling of scab cargo, etc., effectively turning every strike into a

general strike. We give up Wagner (such as it is), and you give up

Taft-Hartley and the Railway Labor Relations Act. And then we'll mop the

floor with your ass.

According to Thomas M. Gordon, the percentage of "discouraged union

workers" (workers who say they would join a union in their workplace if

one were available) is over 30% -- that's the same percentage who

actually belong to unions in Canada, where union membership is based on

a simple card-check system.(27) So the number of people looking for a

way to fight back is about the same as it always was. The avenues of

fighting back just seem to have been closed off, from their perspective.

We need to show them they're wrong.

If we're considering ways the labor movement might regain some of its

strength, how's this for one small step in the right direction: start

sending a big box of "How to Fire Your Boss" pamphlets to the

headquarters of every union local that's just lost a conventional

strike. The pamphlet describes a Wobbly cell in one restaurant that had

lost a strike. Once back on the job, the workers agreed on a strategy of

"piling the customer's plates high, and figuring the bill on the low

side." Within a short time, the boss was asking for terms. Unions that

have just got their teeth kicked in playing by the bosses' rules might

be open to unconventional warfare, making the bosses fight by their

rules for a change.

Notes

1. Tor Books, 2001.

2. William S. Lind's archives on the subject at Lew Rockwell.Com

[http://www.lewrockwell.com/lind/lind-arch.html ] are a good starting

place for study, along with John Robb's Global Guerrillas blog

[http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/] .

3. David Ronfeldt, John Arquilla, Graham Fuller, Melissa Fuller. The

Zapatista "Social Netwar" in Mexico MR-994-A (Santa Monica: Rand, 1998)

[ http://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR994/index.html ].

4. "The Empire Strikes Back: Police Repression of Protest from Seattle

to L.A." (L.A. Independent Media Center, August 13, 2000). The original

online file is now defunct, unfortunately, but is preserved for the time

being at

http://web.archive.org/web/20030803220613/http://www.r2kphilly.org/pdf/empire-strikes.pdf

5. Frank Morales, "U.S. Military Civil Disturbance Planning: The War at

Home" Covert Action Quarterly, Spring-Summer 2000; this article,

likewise, is no longer available on the Web, but is preserved at

http://web.archive.org/web/20000818175231/http://infowar.net/warathome/warathome.html

6. Alexander Cockburn, "The Jackboot State: The War Came Home and We're

Losing It" Counterpunch May 10, 2000

[http://www.counterpunch.org/jackboot.html ]; "US Army Intel Units

Spying on Activists" Intelligence Newsletter #381 April 5, 2000

[http://web.archive.org/web/20000816182951/http://www.infoshop.org/news5/army_intel.html

]

7. I put together much of the relevant information in these blog posts:

"Fighting the Domestic Enemy: You," Mutualist Blog, August 11, 2005

[http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/08/fighting-domestic-enemy-you.html

]; and "Filthy Pig Timoney in the News," Mutualist Blog, December 2,

2005

[http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/filthy-pig-timoney-in-news.html ].

8. http://www.jeffvail.net/ The book A Theory of Power is available as a

free pdf file at http://www.jeffvail.net/atheoryofpower.pdf

9. Thomas DiLorenzo, "The Myth of Voluntary Unions," Mises.Org,

September 14, 2004[.http://www.mises.org/story/1604 ].

10. I'm indebted to the blogger freeman, libertarian critter for

scanning it in online: "More From Hess," freeman, libertarian critter,

June 9, 2005 [http://freemanlc.blogspot.com/2005/06/more-from-hess.html ].

11. The original plank, "Unions and Collective Bargaining," is preserved

by the Web Archive at

http://web.archive.org/web/20050305053450/http://www.lp.org/issues/platform/uniocoll.html

.. Regrettably, it has otherwise vanished down the memory hole. Nothing

resembling it is included in the new LP platform (which can be found at

http://www.lp.org/issues/platform_all.shtml , in the unlikely event

anyone wants to bother reading it).

12. From a post to the Salon Liberty yahoogroup, Nov. 26, 2006

[http://groups.yahoo com/group/ Salon_Liberty/ message/2954 ].

13. This is a paraphrase from memory of his argument. Unfortunately, I

can't track down the original. I'm pretty sure it was on one of the

Georgist yahoogroups in mid-2006.

14. Leo Tolstoy, "Parable," reproduced at

http://www.geocities.com/glasgowbranch/parable.html

15. "Minority Report," Industrial Worker, October 2002

[http://www.iww.org/organize/strategy/AlexisBuss102002.shtml ].

16. "Minority Report," Industrial Worker, December 2002

[http://www.iww.org/organize/strategy/AlexisBuss122002.shtml ].

17. "How to Fire Your Boss: A Worker's Guide to Direct Action."

http://home.interlog.com/~gilgames/boss.htm . It should be noted that

the I.W.W. no longer endorses this pamphlet in its original form, and

reproduces only a heavily toned down version at its website.

18. Tom Geoghegan, Which Side Are You On?

19. "Confiscation and the Homestead Principle," The Libertarian Forum,

June 15, 1969 [http://www.mises.org/ journals/lf/1969/1969_06_15.pdf ].

20. "Is the Demand for Workplace Democracy Redundant in a Liberal

Economy?" in Ugo Pagano and Robert Rowthorn, eds., Democracy and

Effciency in the Economic Enterprise. A study prepared for the World

Institute for Development Economics Research (WIDER) of the United

Nations University (London and New York: Routledge, 1994, 1996), pp. 69-70.

21. "Markets are Conversations," in Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc

Searls and David Weinberger, The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of

Business as Usual (Perseus Books Group, 2001)

[http://www.cluetrain.com/book/index.html ].

22. "270-day libel case goes on and on...," 28th June 1996, Daily

Telegraph (UK) [http://www.mcspotlight.org/media/thisweek/jul3.html ]

23. "Proud to be a Replacement Worker," Libertarian Underground, March

2, 2004.

http://www.libertarianunderground.com/Forum/index.php/topic,865.0.html

24. Disgruntled.

25. Epistemological Problems of Economics

26. The original exchange between Knapp and Pacificus has disappeared,

unfortunately. The quote above is taken from a post of mine, "Thomas L.

Knapp Joins the One Big Union," Mutualist Blog, April 6, 2005

[http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/04/thomas-l-knapp-joins-one-big-union.html

].

27. Thomas M. Gordon, Fat and Mean

--

Dan Clore

My collected fiction, _The Unspeakable and Others_:

http://amazon.com/o/ASIN/1587154838/ref=nosim/thedanclorenecro

Lord We