What happened to work in America between GR and VL

[ish mailian]

GE figures in GR.

And in GR, GE, to take but one example, is, in WWII time and in 1974,
a top 5 Fortune 100 company. And it still is.  But what about its
workers?



Democrats as well as Republicans responded to the inflation of the
late 1970s with policies that significantly reduced workers’ incomes.
The Democrats’ solution of choice, promoted by both President Jimmy
Carter and his liberal rival Senator Edward Kennedy, was deregulation.
At their initiative, both trucking and airlines were deregulated,
lowering prices and wages in both industries. In the quarter--century
following 1975, drivers’ pay fell by 30 percent. Wage declines
followed in other deregulated industries, such as telecommunications.

If Volcker’s and Carter’s attacks on unions were indirect, Reagan’s
was altogether frontal. In the 1980 election, the union of air-traffic
controllers was one of a handful of labor organizations that endorsed
Reagan’s candidacy. Nevertheless, they could not reach an accord with
the government, and when they opted to strike in violation of federal
law, Reagan fired them all. (His actions contrasted sharply with those
of President Nixon, who responded to an illegal wildcat strike of
postal workers in 1970 by negotiating a settlement and letting them
return to their jobs.)

Reagan’s union busting was quickly emulated by many private-sector
employers. In 1983, the nation’s second-largest copper-mining company,
Phelps Dodge, ended its cost-of-living adjustment, provoking a walkout
of its workers, whom it replaced with new hires who then decertified
the union. The same year, Greyhound Bus cut wages, pushing its workers
out on strike, then hired replacements at lower wages. Also in 1983,
Louisiana Pacific, the second-largest timber company, reduced its
starting hourly wage, forcing a strike that culminated in the same
kind of worker defeats seen at Phelps Dodge and Greyhound. Eastern
Airlines, Boise Cascade, International Paper, Hormel meatpacking—all
went down the path of forcing strikes to weaken or destroy their
unions.

In the topsy-turvy world of the 1980s, the strike had become a tool
for management to break unions. Save in the most exceptional
circumstances, unions abandoned the strike. The number of major
strikes plummeted from 286 a year in the 1960s and 1970s, to 83 a year
in the 1980s, to 34 a year in the 1990s, to 20 a year in the 2000s.
The end of the strike transformed the American economy. From the 1820s
through the 1970s, workers had two ways to bid up their wages:
threatening to take their services elsewhere in a full-employment
economy and walking off the job with their fellow workers until
managers met their demands. Since the early 1980s, only the
full-employment-economy option has been available—and just barely.
Save for the late 1990s, the economy has been nowhere near full
employment.

The loss of workers’ leverage was compounded by a radical shift in
corporations’ view of their mission. In August 1981, at New York’s
Pierre Hotel, Jack Welch, General Electric’s new CEO, delivered a kind
of inaugural address, which he titled “Growing Fast in a Slow-Growth
Economy.” GE, Welch proclaimed, would henceforth shed all its
divisions that weren’t No. 1 or No. 2 in their markets. If that meant
shedding workers, so be it. All that mattered was pushing the company
to pre-eminence, and the measure of a company’s pre-eminence was its
stock price.

Between late 1980 and 1985, Welch reduced the number of GE employees
from 411,000 to 299,000. He cut basic research. The company’s stock
price soared. So much for balancing the interests of employees,
stockholders, consumers, and the public. The new model company was
answerable solely to its stockholders.

In the decade preceding Welch’s speech, a number of conservative
economists, chiefly from the University of Chicago, had argued that
the midcentury U.S. corporation had to contend with a mishmash of
competing demands. Boosting the company’s share price, they contended,
gave corporate executives a clear purpose—even clearer if those
executives were incentivized by receiving their payments in stock.
After Welch’s speech, the goal of America’s corporate executives
became the elevation of the company’s—and their own—stock. If revenues
weren’t rising, and even if they were, that goal could be accomplished
by reducing wages, curtailing pensions, making employees pay more for
their health coverage, cutting research, eliminating worker training,
and offshoring production.
(After CEO Louis Gerstner announced in 1999 that IBM, long considered
a model employer, would no longer pay its workers defined benefits and
would switch to 401(k)s, corporate America largely abandoned paying
for its employees’ secure retirements.)

By the end of the century, corporations acknowledged that they had
downgraded workers in their calculus of concerns. In the 1980s, a
Conference Board survey of corporate executives found that 56 percent
agreed that “employees who are loyal to the company and further its
business goals deserve an assurance of continued employment.” When the
Conference Board asked the same question in the 1990s, 6 percent of
executives agreed. “Loyalty to a company,” Welch once said, “it’s
nonsense.”



http://prospect.org/article/40-year-slump
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l