The Ethics of Labor Struggle

international | workplace struggles | other libertarian press Sunday April 29, 2007 05:47 by Kevin Carson

A Free Market Perspective

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

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.
Thursday, April 19, 2007

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
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
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo