2416. Interview With Kim Moody: Busting the Myths of a Workerless Future (Part 1)

By Chris Brooks and Kim Moody, Labor Notes, July 26, 2016

Despite all the "gig economy" hype, Kim Moody argues, most workers are experiencing the rise of the crappy-job economy. But just-in-time production has created huge concentrations of workers—and vast potential for organizing. Photo: Nick Saltmarsh (CC BY 2.0)

Labor Notes: We read a lot about the “gig economy,” where workers cycle through multiple jobs using app-based companies like Uber, TaskRabbit [for everyday tasks such as cleaning or moving], and Mechanical Turk [for online tasks such as labeling images]. Is this really the future of work?

Kim Moody: One thing to notice is that, aside from outfits like Uber, most of these are not employers. They're digital platforms where you can find a job.

The apps are not determining the hours and pay, or even the technology used on the jobs. It’s still employers that are calling the shots. So if jobs are getting worse, it’s not because people can find them digitally as opposed to reading them in the newspaper.

Also, discussions of the gig economy often assume that suddenly there are all these people who are multiple job-holders. But the fact is that the proportion of the workforce who have more than one job hasn’t changed much in 40 years.

The vast majority of them are people with regular full-time jobs who are also moonlighting, which is a very old thing. There are a lot of multiple job-holders, but there have always been a lot of them.

There’s also been talk of the “1099 economy.” Are we really moving towards a future where 40 percent of workers will be freelancing?

The idea that freelancers can become 40 percent of the workforce is science fiction.

There are two kinds of self-employed. The greatest number are the “unincorporated self-employed,” or independent contractors. Their numbers have been dropping for years.

The other group, the incorporated ones, are people who run a small business. They have grown somewhat, but they are still just 4 percent of the workforce.

You argue that the “gig economy” and “precarious work” concepts miss the mark because they don’t get at the most concerning change: the rise of the crappy-job economy. Can you talk about what’s changed for workers and why?

The first change is work intensification. Work has gotten dramatically harder in the last 30 years or so, and continues to.

That’s happened through lean production, which reduces the amount of labor to produce the same or greater amount of product or service and is tied to just-in-time production. Lean production began in the automobile industry in the 1980s, but now it is everywhere. It’s in hospitals, it’s in schools.

Another aspect is electronic and biometric monitoring, measuring, and surveillance, which allow employers to see how to get more work literally out of each minute. Another aspect is that the amount of break time has fallen dramatically since the ’80s.

Whether you are working full-time or part-time, in a precarious job or not, chances are you are going to experience some of this.

The other side is income. Wages have been falling since the early 1970s. More and more people are actually working for less, in real terms, than they used to. This also impacts everybody, although part-time and precarious workers are likely to get paid even less than full-time people.

And if you look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics projections for the fastest-growing jobs, millions of new jobs over the next decade or so, 70 percent are projected to be low-skill, low-pay jobs.

In other words, we are not heading for some big high-tech economy. Instead we are heading for a low-paid workforce with crappy jobs. The end of good jobs is nigh.

While app-based “just-in-time” gigs have gotten lots of media attention, far less attention has been paid to “just-in-time” production. Can you talk about why massive logistics hubs have emerged, and what they mean for union organizing?

In order for globalization to be efficient, low pay isn’t necessarily enough, because you have to move products from one location to another. That required a change in the way products are moved—the “logistics revolution.”

The time it takes to deliver a product to the point of sale is an important factor in competition. Like production, transportation now operates on a just-in-time basis. Products move faster.

The speed of trucks, planes, and trains did not change. What did was the way things are processed. Goods don’t stay in warehouses very long. Products arrive on rail and are cross-docked and moved out by truck in a matter of hours. This process has really only taken shape in the 21st century.

In order to make it work, the industry has created logistics clusters. These are huge concentrations of warehouses where rail, truck, air, and water transportation meet and can be coordinated, usually electronically.

You might think, “Well, this is all very high-tech.” But it turns out that it still requires thousands and thousands of workers. In the U.S. there are 60 of these clusters, but three stand out: the Port of New York and New Jersey, the Los Angeles and Long Beach port area, and Chicago. Each of these employs, in a small geographic area, at least 100,000 people.

Now, the whole idea of outsourcing back in the 1980s was to break up the concentrations of workers in places like Detroit, Pittsburgh, or Gary. But what these companies have done now, inadvertently, is to recruit incredibly massive concentrations of manual laborers.

It has evolved in a way that might shoot these companies in the foot—because here you have the potential to organize vast numbers of poorly paid workers into unions. And there are attempts to do just that.

The other thing is that these clusters are tied together by just-in-time systems—which means you have hundreds, maybe thousands, of points in the transportation system that are highly vulnerable. If you stop work in one place, you are going to close down huge areas.

The vulnerability of “just-in-time” production was on display recently at General Motors.

Clark-Cutler-McDermott Co., which provides parts for almost every GM vehicle produced in North America, filed for bankruptcy in June.

But with no inventory on hand and no alternative source of supply, GM warned that a shutdown at this supplier would halt its vehicle production across the continent within a day—and every day the shutdown lasted, the company would lose millions of dollars.

GM scored a temporary restraining order, forcing Clark-Cutler-McDermott to continue production while the automaker sought out other suppliers.

Ford faced a similar issue in May when the all-temp workforce at its Detroit Chassis parts plant in Ohio threatened to strike, which could have halted production at a nearby Ford factory within a day. The employer quickly agreed to recognize their union.

—Chris Brooks

Media commentators and even presidential candidates blame the loss of millions of U.S. manufacturing jobs on trade and outsourcing. You’re skeptical. How do you explain it?

Outsourcing, if it is in the U.S.—which most of it has been—can break up the union, it can be very inconvenient to the people who lose their jobs, but it doesn’t necessarily eliminate jobs in the U.S. The jobs are just moved to a different, lower-paid group of workers.

Offshoring is another thing, but it’s not as widespread as people think. While moving production abroad has definitely impacted certain industries like steel, textile, and clothing, it cannot account for the loss of jobs we have seen. I estimate that between a million and 2 million jobs have been lost since the mid-’80s to imports and offshoring.

Manufacturing output, from the 1960s to just before the Great Recession in 2007, actually grew by 131 percent; the manufacturing sector more than doubled its output. If everything was going abroad, you couldn’t possibly have that kind of growth.

How can this be? I believe the answer lies in lean production and new technology, as we talked about earlier. Productivity literally doubled, and manufacturing jobs dropped by 50 percent or more. It’s the productivity increase that explains the loss of jobs.

It is very difficult for politicians to deal with this question, because it means attacking employers. It means saying, “You are taking too much out of your workforce.” And of course since most economists, politicians, and experts think that productivity growth is a wonderful thing, it’s beyond criticism.

There’s a lot of hand-wringing about the future of automation. Former Service Employees President Andy Stern has been making the media rounds claiming that driverless trucks are going to replace millions of drivers.

You can sell a lot of books with this pop futurology. It reminds me of the great automation scare of the 1950s. It was popular then to make predictions that there wouldn’t be any factory workers left.

And automation has reduced the number of factory workers, but there are still 8 or 9 million of them lingering around—despite all this technology, which is much greater than anything they predicted in the ’50s.

I have a shelf of books predicting “the end of work.” And yet we have millions more workers than we used to—the problem being that they are worse off than they used to be, not that they don’t exist.

2349. Union Members Are More Likely Than the General Population to Support Environmental Measures

By Jeremy Brecher and Todd Vachon, In These Times, May 23, 2016

Thousands of unionists took part in the Sept. 21, 2014 march to sound the alarm on climate change. Photo courtesy of AFSCME District Council 37

Union workers attacking environmentalists—it has become a trope of our time. But what do union members actually think about the environment?

In a study soon to be published in Labor Studies Journal, we report our findings on workers attitudes and behaviors regarding a variety of environmental issues. In particular, we examine the attitudes and behaviors of unionized workers to see how they may differ from the non-union respondents. The results might surprise those whose images of worker attitudes come only from the mainstream media.

Looking at data from national surveys, we find that union members are on average more likely than the general population to display pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors.

For example, in the General Social Survey (GSS), people were asked to agree or disagree with the statement “We worry too much about the future of the environment and not enough about prices and jobs today.” Forty-three percent of nonunion respondents disagreed—but 48 percent of the unionized respondents disagreed.

People were asked if they had signed a petition about an environmental issue in the past five years. Twenty-five percent of the general population said yes—but 32 percent of union members said yes.

Eight percent of the population belonged to a group whose main aim is “to preserve or protect the environment.” But 12 percent of union members belonged to an environmental organization.

Overall, we analyzed 19 survey items pertaining to the environment. On 13 of them, union members expressed more pro-environment sentiments than non-union members at a statistically significant level. On the remaining six items, there were no statistically significant differences between union members and the rest of the population.

This finding runs against the mainstream media mantra of “jobs versus the environment,” a frame which portrays unionized workers as self-interested and materialistic, putting their own personal gains above all else, including the environment. A more informed historical analysis would reveal a long record of environmental concern among unionized workers and their organizations that overlaps and intermingles with the sporadic “news event” conflicts that occasionally flare up between workers and environmentalists.

The United Steelworkers, for example, supported the very first Federal Clean Air Act; unions and environmentalists joined together in many states to win the right to know about toxic substances used in industry; the AFL-CIO helped establish the National Wilderness Preservation System; the United Auto Workers was the leading funder of the first Earth Day and more recently supported raising emissions standards for autos. Such pro-environmental policies reflect a little-recognized desire and even activism for environmental protection among union members.  

That isn’t to deny that unions face an inescapable tension. On the one hand, they are principally organized to protect the work-related interests of their members. On the other hand, they have a responsibility to represent the broad class and social interests their members share with other workers, citizens, and human beings and to protect the future of the labor movement. From time to time, these interests come into conflict—particularly within unions whose members work in extractive industries like oil drilling or fracking. When a particular group of workers find their very livelihoods threatened by environmental protection or other socially necessary policies, their unions have a responsibility to ensure that the burden of change is not unjustly put on them.

Faced with such a situation, unions can simply fight against socially desirable policies that may harm some of their members. But unions have the opportunity to pursue another course: not trying to preserve environmentally destructive jobs, but fighting for economic security and/or new jobs with equal or better wages and benefits. This has come to be known as providing a “just transition.” Fighting for such a transition can be a crucial point of convergence between environmental and labor advocates.

What is actually more remarkable than the fact that some unions sometimes oppose specific environmental policies that may harm their members is the fact that particular unions and organized labor as a whole have so often served as advocates for environmental protection. Far from pursuing interests of members that contradict broader social interests, unions in such cases advocate for the interests their members share with others. As Olga Madar, the first head of the UAW Conservation and Resource Development Department put it around the time the UAW was helping initiate the first Earth Day, union members were “first and foremost American citizens and consumers” who “breathe the same air and drink and bathe in the same water” as their neighbors in other occupations.

Our study shows that the remarkable tendency of unions to support environmental policies and even to take the lead in environmental efforts is not an aberration, but rather is often a reflection of the concerns and convictions of their rank-and-file members. Union members, far from being only concerned with their immediate self-interest at the expense of a broader common interest in environmental protection, are often more concerned about the environment and more willing to act on that concern than either the public at large or non-union workers.

That fact should encourage environmental advocates to strengthen their outreach to workers and their unions. And it should encourage union activists and leaders who are themselves concerned about protecting the environment to go forth boldly, knowing that there are deep reserves of support for environmental protection among trade union members.  

Jeremy Brecher is the author of more than a dozen books on labor and social movements, including Strike! and Global Village or Global Pillage and the winner of five regional Emmy awards for his documentary movie work. He currently works with the Labor Network for Sustainability. Todd Vachon is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Connecticut and the president of UAW Local 6950, UConn's graduate employee union.