>From: "vivian Hutchinson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>To: "The Jobs Letter" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
> "The Jobs Letter" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Date: Mon, 6 Dec 1999 10:32:07 +1300
>X-Distribution: Moderate
>MIME-Version: 1.0
>Subject: Viviane Forrester -- L'horreur Economique
>Reply-to: "The Jobs Letter" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Priority: normal
>
>
>F E A T U R E
>------------------
>from
>T H E J O B S L E T T E R 1 1 3
>a subscriber-based letter
>published in New Zealand 6 December 1999
> -------------------------------------
>
>THE ECONOMIC HORROR
>
>French author VIVIANE FORRESTER's book L'horreur
>Economique (The Economic Horror) has just been published in an
>English edition. The 1996 book is already a huge bestseller in
>France, Germany, Italy, Japan and South America, and reviewers
>predict that it set to become the biggest economics bestseller since
>Das Kapital.
>
>The 72-year old author has become a heroine in France where
>unemployment now stands at more than 12%. Young jobless have
>taken to photocopying pages from L'horreur - notably those
>passages decrying the culture of shame attached to unemployment
>- and sticking them up on job centre walls. The author's effigy can
>also be found at the front of workers' marches, with banners quoting
>>from her book.
>
>International financier George Soros was so impressed with
>L'horreur that he arranged to meet with the author in Paris. The book
>has also been discussed by the Mexican parliament, and politicians
>in Peru have invited the author to lecture in Latin America.
>
>This official interest has come despite the author's argument that
>there is a conspiracy by "those who control economic power" to
>"hide from the workers the truth that they are no longer needed by
>the capitalist system" and that we are witnessing "the end of
>employment as we have known it."
>
>In this special feature, The Jobs Letter profiles Viviane Forrester
>and gives an essential summary of her views on the future of work.
>
>* Viviane Forrester's economics is largely self-taught, and until the
>publication of L'horreur, she was better known as a novelist and
>literary critic. Yet, according to Ian Cotton of The Guardian Weekly,
>Forrester has emerged as "... a fine example of the outsider who
>sees things insiders cannot."
>
>Forrester's thesis is that employment as we have known it for three
>centuries throughout the West, has had its day and is becoming
>less plausible by the year as a way of distributing wealth.
>
>L'horreur also attacks the present policies of Western governments
>as it makes ever more desperate attempts to keep the jobs-and-
>wages system alive. Forrester cites the constant downsizing of ever
>larger numbers of the working and, now, middle classes; the steady
>attrition, internationally, of welfare and union rights; and the growing
>destabilisation of those in work, let alone of the unemployed.
>
>All this has created an employment and unemployment (and
>underemployment) culture that is not merely stressful, regrettable
>and unpleasant but has also, according to Forrester, "spawned an
>economic world that is an obscenity, an affront to human nature"
>and, in the words of the book's title, a "horror".
>
>* Ian Cotton remarks: "This is not a thesis likely to appeal to
>Messrs Clinton and Blair. After all, it doesn't square with the fact that
>the United States economy is enjoying the longest, strongest
>economic boom in post-war history. Or that unemployment in Britain
>is at its lowest for 19 years. Yet there is a curious thing about
>Forrester's reading of the situation: a vast number of ordinary
>people believe it..."
>
>* Forrester finds that the book has certainly struck a nerve: "When I
>was promoting the book in South America I'd go to these town
>meetings of factory workers, clerks, ordinary people. The cheering
>would start before I entered the hall..."
>
>"My book has brought me in touch with the powerful as well as the
>poor, and there is this strong feeling among political elites that you
>must not tell the people the truth about today's economic realities;
>that they just can't take it.
>
>"In fact, I found the opposite: people aren't, in fact, afraid ... but they
>are indignant. They're not stupid, they can see what's going on, and
>the thing that really angers them is denial. Indeed, it's surprising how
>many people have told me that reading my book has actually
>reduced their anxieties ...
>
>"Waiters, bankers, housewives, taxi drivers, students, young
>unemployed ... they say to me: ''I've had exactly the same thoughts
>you wrote in your book myself, for years. But it wasn't until I read
>L'horreur that I even realised I'd been thinking them - let alone
>started taking such ideas seriously' ... "
>
>* Forrester argues that economic neo-liberalism has introduced a
>new economic paradigm: "Increasingly it offers the most vulnerable
>in our society a quite new choice - poverty at work or poverty on the
>dole..."
>
>For examples, she points to the desperate rush of French
>unemployed applying for the Contrat Emploi Solidarite jobs which
>pay half the guaranteed minimum wage, and are only part-time. Or
>those on workfare programmes in the US who are paid a third of
>union rates and have benefits docked if they are late for "work". Or
>those in Britain whose special economic horror is to have achieved
>invisibility - the "economically inactive" who don't even count as
>unemployed for statistical purposes.
>
>Forrester: "The feeling that we must prove ourselves useful to
>society, or at least to the market economy, is rooted in the value
>system of a world which no longer exists. As we are unlikely ever to
>have a culture of full employment again, we need to stop basing our
>identities, individually and communally, around the idea of
>employment. First and foremost, the new millennium calls out for a
>new culture, with a new social structure which is not centred on paid
>employment ..."
>
>* Meanwhile, in France, Forrester's book title has become the
>catch-phrase of all kinds of protest movements. But French
>economists have generally been reluctant to discuss the book, with
>some describing its arguments as "irrational" and "irrelevant to a
>serious discussion of the subject".
>
>The liberal French economist Alain Minc, who is also chairman of Le
>Monde, has described the book a "rubbish". He recently told
>Forrester: "Your book is a talented opinion poll. It is a publishing
>success because it plays on people's fears. But it would have sold
>far fewer copies if it had been signed by [Communist party leader]
>Robert Hue..."
>
>Minc argues that the prosperous French workers and their unions
>have refused to trade some of their benefits for wider employment.
>Minc: "Since 1973, average purchasing power has risen by 40 per
>cent in real terms in France. If we had accepted a rise of only 35
>per cent, there would be a million more jobs..."
>
>Minc nevertheless concedes that Forrester has articulated a popular
>feeling which, for him, demonstrates "the confusion in society at
>large about current economic developments..."
>
>The Economic Horror
>by Viviane Forrester
>(pub 1999 by Blackwell )
>ISBN 0-745-61994-0
>available on www.amazon.com
>
>http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0745619940/thejobsres
>earctr
>
>
>VIVIANE FORRESTER
>ON A PROFOUND CHANGE
>- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
>
>* I think that each of us, whatever our walk of life, should feel
>concerned about the present state of the world, which is entirely
>governed by economics. If Shakespeare were to come back to life
>today, I think he would be fascinated by the tragic interplay of
>powerful economic forces which are stealthily transforming the lives
>and destinies of the citizens - or rather the populations - of all
>countries.
>
>* To my mind we are witnessing a profound change, a
>transformation of society and civilization, and we are finding it very
>hard to accept. How can we say good-bye to a society that was
>based on stable jobs that provided a safety net and the basics of a
>decent existence? Job security is on the way out.
>
>For the first time in history, the vast majority of human beings are no
>longer indispensable to the small number of those who run the
>world economy. The economy is increasingly wrapped up in pure
>speculation. The working masses and their cost are becoming
>superfluous. In other words, there is something worse than actually
>being exploited - and that is no longer to be even worth exploiting!
>
>* It is true that this state of affairs is not being concealed, but there
>is a tendency to avoid talking about it clearly. In democratic
>societies, at any rate, you don't tell people that they are regarded as
>superfluous. Under totalitarianism there might be an even worse
>danger than joblessness and poverty. Once salaried work has
>disappeared, why should a totalitarian regime not simply eliminate
>those forces that have become useless?
>
>In democratic countries there is an urgent need for vigilance. It is
>often claimed that the industrial age, when a regular wage provided
>the means of subsistence, can somehow be patched up. But those
>days are over. Wage-earning is disappearing and the panoply of
>temporary doles and allowances designed to replace it is shrinking,
>something that is nothing less than criminal.
>
>* The managers of the economic machine exploit this situation. Full
>employment is a thing of the past, but we still use criteria that were
>current in the nineteenth century, or twenty or thirty years ago, when
>it still existed. Among other things, this encourages many
>unemployed people to feel ashamed of themselves. This shame
>has always been absurd but it is even more so today.
>
>It goes hand in hand with the fear felt by the privileged who still have
>a paid job and are afraid of losing it. I maintain that this shame and
>this fear ought to be quoted on the stock exchange, because they
>are major inputs in profit. Once upon a time people pilloried the
>alienation caused by work. Today falling labour costs contribute to
>the profits of big companies, whose favourite management tool is
>sacking workers; when they do this, their stock market value soars.
>
>* Today we hear a lot about "wealth creation". In the past it was
>simply known as profit. Today people talk about this wealth as if it
>will automatically go straight to the community and create jobs, yet at
>the same time we see highly profitable businesses cutting down
>heavily on their workforce.
>
>When people talk about society's "movers and shakers", they aren't
>talking about the bulk of their country's population but about
>business leaders who relocate at the drop of a hat. Politicians make
>jobs their priority, but the Stock Exchange is delighted whenever a
>big industrial complex fires workers and gets worried whenever
>there's the slightest improvement in the unemployment figures. I
>wanted to draw people's attention to this paradox. A company's
>stock market quotation depends largely on labour costs, and profit
>is generated in the last analysis by reducing the numbers of those
>who have a job.
>
>* The present situation raises a vital question for the future of the
>people of our planet, above all for young people and their future.
>Today the great thing is to be "profitable", not "useful". This raises a
>very serious question: Should people be profitable in order to
>"deserve" the right to live? The commonsense answer is that it is a
>good thing to be useful to society. But we are preventing people
>>from being useful, we are squandering the energies of young
>people by regarding profitability as the be-all and end-all.
>
>* Most countries have lost their sense of priorities. There is a
>greater and greater need for teachers and medical staff, but
>governments are increasingly aggressive towards them. These are
>the professions where posts are abolished and funding is cut. Yet
>they are indispensable to the welfare and future of humanity. This
>confusion between "usefulness" and "profitability" is disastrous for
>the future of the planet.
>
>Young people live in a society which still regards salaried
>employment as the only acceptable, honest and lawful way of life,
>but most of them are deprived of the opportunity to achieve this. In
>deprived inner city areas this is a major problem.
>
>At the same time I often meet young people with armfuls of
>degrees who are out of work. What inexcusable waste! For
>generations study was young people's initiation into social life. I
>admire young people today because they go on with their studies
>fully aware that they are running the risk of rejection by society.
>
>* Only twenty or thirty years ago, there was still reason to hope that
>the relative prosperity of the North would spread all over the world.
>Today we are seeing the globalization of poverty. Businesses
>based in the North that set up in the so-called "developing"
>countries, do not create jobs for the people of those countries but
>generally make them work without any kind of social security
>protection, in medieval conditions. The reason is that the workforce -
> underpaid women and children, as well as prisoners - costs less
>than automation would cost in the country of origin. This is
>colonization in another, equally heinous, form.
>
>* I am not pessimistic, far from it. The pessimists are those who
>say there is no alternative to the present situation, that we have no
>choice. My book is an attempt to describe what is going on. It's true
>that the situation is dramatic. All the same I am, like many other
>people, the citizen of a country whose democratic regime makes it
>possible to reflect and freely resist the growing pressure that the
>economic factor is exerting on our lives.
>
>* I would like there to be checks and balances, alternative thinking,
>conflicts of ideas and interests. Not violent conflict, of course, but
>we should wake up and stop being petrified, prisoners of
>hackneyed thinking. Already in countries where my book is being
>translated-especially in the United States, Brazil, Mexico, Lithuania,
>Poland and in others such as the Republic of Korea - it is causing
>something of a stir even before publication.
>
>I am neither against the globalization of exchanges, nor the
>emergence of new technologies. Such an attitude would be absurd.
>But I am against their being taken over by a tiny minority of
>economic power centres, often in private hands, whereas entire
>populations are excluded from social progress. I am against the
>globalization of rejection and poverty and for the globalization of
>well-being.
>
>
>C R E D I T S
>-------------------
>edited by Vivian Hutchinson for the Jobs Research Trust
>P.O.Box 428, New Plymouth, New Zealand
>phone 06-753-4434 fax 06-759-4648
>Internet address -- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
>The Jobs Letter -- an essential information and media watch
>on jobs, employment, unemployment, the future of work,
>and related economic and education issues.
>
>The Jobs Research Trust -- a not-for-profit Charitable Trust
>constituted in 1994 to develop and distribute information that
>will help our communities create more jobs and reduce
>unemployment and poverty in New Zealand.
>
>Our internet website at
>
> http://www.jobsletter.org.nz/
>
>contains our back issues and key papers,
>and hotlinks to other internet resources.
>
>ends
>------
>The Jobs Letter
>essential information on an essential issue
>[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>phone 06-753-4434 fax 06-759-4648
>P.O.Box 428
>New Plymouth, Taranaki, New Zealand
>
>visit The Jobs Research Website at
>http://www.jobsletter.org.nz/
>
