Following on teacherken's diary this morning, I'd like to mention two other NYTimes articles that are relevant to this discussion about workers being screwed out of their share in the productivity gains over the last few decades.
One has to do with "quants" who developed ever more sophisticated ways to tickle out pennies for the money classes. This gets at precisely how workers were separated from the benefits of greater productivity.
Quants can't figure it out.
The other is an article by a Fordham professor Jennifer Gordon calling for worker freedom to cross borders anytime anywhere in order to work--as long as they join some kind of labor union
and promise to report any exploitive anti-labor practices they may encounter. I think this idea needs to be fleshed out more, but it is a very interesting and creative idea which should be given some attention. I tend to basically agree that our borders should be open to workers and tourists alike, which is probably a radical position. But I think our economy is based on the tremendous productivity of immigrants and "temporary" laborers, and by tightening up immigration rules to keep people out, we are shooting ourselves in the foot.
It's a complicated issue and I don't think it is being talked about enough. It will take imagination and creativity, and this particular article might spark an interesting conversation.
Free the migrant workers.
The most important point in the first article is that the physicists who came up with the mathematical scalpels that were used to separate the workers from the fruits of their labors are no more to blame for the current financial meltdown than Einstein was responsible for the development of nuclear weapons and any future nuclear meltdown. How much blame should these Wall Street brains get? Who was it who decided that finance was a math problem and not a social problem?
The second article gets at another anti-worker policy: immigration restrictions. I think Prof. Gordon has a lot of good ideas here that are worth talking about. The whole immigration debate has stagnated at this point. There are two extremes: pro-business models that bring in highly exploitable workers under conditions that are financially advantageous to companies, and do nothing wholistically for the workers, their families, their neighbors, etc. And on the other extreme is this system of crackdown, with immoral raids and detention centers which satisfies the authoritarian scaredy-cats, but--in my view--has so crippled our economy, which like it or not is based on "slave" (call it "highly exploited," if you prefer) labor. We need a new way of thinking and an better way of treating workers--that is all of us.