At 5:51 PM -0400 10/15/98, Ed Weick wrote:
>By the way, what has happened to that movement? At one time, it was a
>strong force for social change. Now it seems to do little more than
>represent a particular group interest, and that interest appears to be
>concerned with little more than ensuring that it gets its "slice of the pie"
>even if no one else gets any pie.
I think what happened was first corruptionof some unions and
complacency of many workers during the fat 60's, and thenReagan and
subsequent anti-labour politicians who have been steadily eroding the
rights of unions, and the "inevitable" 'globalization' which have
slashed membership and made workers so concerned with the vain struggle
to keep their jobs that they have little energy left for broader causes.
Real production has become so slight (most economic activiuty for the
last 15 years having been concerned with amalgamation, asset stripping,
and labour chopping) and the slices taken by "investors" and management
have gotten so huge that there is little left for the workers, who have
to knuckle under or see their jobs go to ungegulated sweatshops in the
pollution-wracked maquilladora wasteland, to sweat shop contractors in
other impoverishe countries, or to prison labor in the (formerly) "land
of the free."
But I think there's something to what Tom Walker says, too.
Caspar Davis
