Liberté, Flexibilité, Précarité

On July 22, 1997 Alan Greenspan testified before Congress to give his views on the so-called new economy. Growth was high, unemployment was low, and yet inflation remained perfectly under control. Greenspan had a simple explanation for that. Worker insecurity:

But even if the perceived quicker pace of application of our newer technologies turns out to be mere wheel-spinning rather than true productivity advance, it has brought with it a heightened sense of job insecurity and, as a consequence, subdued wage gains. As I pointed out here last February, polls indicated that despite the significant fall in the unemployment rate, the proportion of workers in larger establishments fearful of being laid off rose from 25 percent in 1991 to 46 percent by 1996. It should not have been surprising then that strike activity in the 1990s has been lower than it has been in decades and that new labor union contracts have been longer and have given greater emphasis to job security. Nor should it have been unexpected that the number of workers voluntarily leaving their jobs to seek other employment has not risen in this period of tight labor markets. To be sure, since last year, surveys have indicated that the proportion of workers fearful of layoff has stabilized and the number of voluntary job leavers has edged up. And, indeed, perhaps as a consequence, wage gains have accelerated some.

As long as people are scared to lose their jobs they don't ask for more money. And that is of course the reason to bring this up today. The CPE. The conventional wisdom is that the mob just doesn't understand that if it's easy to fire people, employers will sooner hire them. Maybe so, though it should perhaps also be pointed out that if it's easy to fire people, it's easy to fire people, and that too has an effect on unemployment figures. But ultimately unemployment is not what laws like the CPE are about. The worker insecurity they create is not some accidental side-effect; it has a very clear function.

Comments

[David]

I need a third ...ité-noun for the title, but I couldn't think of a good one.

[Charles]

...assuming insecurité would be too obvious.

[Charles]

and solidarité somehow overrated?

[David]

Yes, both crossed my mind and I even thought of Flexibilité, Précarité, Fraternité, but that seemed still a bit too optimistic.

[Tic]

Didn't those spoiled French kids get Baudrillard's memo? (They do still read Baudrillard in France, don't they?) You know, the one that said we're all truly fucked anyway, so why not embrace the apocalypse with open arms, and speed up the merely inevitable? Why not glory in the groovy nomadism and have some very authentic hyper-virtual-simulacral communist fun! (If nothing else, it will have been a party when the lights go out.)

[Amie]

the young'uns i have spoken to understand quite well that the CPE law is about installing a society governed by insecurity and fear, that is to say, ever further submitted and subservient to the law. the CPE will provide for 'mobility' and further employment 'opportunities' for the youth!? it sure as hell renders les patrons less insecure, solidifies their hold. what does it do to criticizing les patrons, resisting their abuses, etc., - so the boss wants to put his hands down my pants, better not say anything, hey if i look at him the wrong way i'm a goner. ok so there are laws against abuses by bosses, sexual harrasment in the workplace, etc., - right, try bringing them up, or wanting to bring them up, when you can be fired without any cause having to be reasoned, or even presented.
and what would the CPE law do to the relations between the young, the 'working' young or those looking or in need of it? is it hard to imagine that it would destroy these relations to the profit of those who are beyond it?
isn't this law about destroying the sense of relation, and at a young age, destroying a sense of relation other than that of a fearful relation to the powers that be?

[Matt]

Some negative utopians might suggest that a good and productive thing, suppose. I certainly wouldn't.

[s0metim3s]

Surely it's possible to desist from taking the side of either the speed-elite or social democracy. A lament about the one without the other just falls into a rather longstanding socialist tango about 'capital versus the state', as if a) there are no other forms of agency or action, let alone a politics that might exceed or oppose them, and b) as if this recourse to (what in the last decade or so has been called) flexibilisation has not been preceded by a decades-long attempt by workers to acheive flexibility (though in another sense, and whose trajectory is worth talking about more closely).

But, surely, minimally, the issue here is employer prerogative, and not necessarily its particular form (ie., greater 'flexibility' versus, say, measures against absenteeism. And it's the state which weighs in to ensure this prerogative holds sway.

Though, I think discussion has moved on somewhat, or could.

[abelard]

Isn't liberté just a racist Eurocentric Enlightenment universal, testament to the assimilationist xenophobic Republican French model of citizenship? ;-)

[tco]

Angela, how would you tell the story of this decades long attempt to win flexibility?

I wonder about this, because in one way of looking at things, the 'flexibility' workers demand is actually what gets called 'security' sometimes.

Sort of in advance, my view of this is that the question is confusingly posed in terms of security and flexibility. The real question is one of power and freedom. Do people have the power and freedom to decide when and how they wish to work? I think we can all agree that workers have wanted and demanded that pretty much forever. Does 'security' mean that they get it? Not necessarily, but I feel that if the balance of power is on the side of the workers, if they can quit but not be fired, then security is on their side. Under other conditions, 'security' can become a trap, it plays into fears and the reduction of expectations to mere survivals - we all know the story. Does flexibility mean they do not get it? Not necessarily: under certain conditions, flexibility can be terrible for capital. Above all, the power to make these things terrible for capital is ours, or can be ours.. si nous saurons prendre.

[Matt]

some interesting video and commentary etc. here, and here, for those who may've missed it. And a nice post linking refusal with Thoreau here.

[s0metim3s]

how would you tell the story of this decades long attempt to win flexibility? I wonder about this, because in one way of looking at things, the 'flexibility' workers demand is actually what gets called 'security' sometimes.

I'd tell it by looking at the post-WWII history of absenteeism, turnover, demands for parental leave, shorter hours, migration, welfare bludgers and, not least, in the flight of a generation from the mind-body divide of the factories into the assumed flexibility of the universities. And more besides. Problem is, this particular route kind of failed. But that for another time.

Anway, that's why I think a better way to talk about it is as a question of employer prerogative.

'Security v flexibility' is a distraction, as you imply. They both have a tendency to fold into some really dodgy politics. Though, here, because I think the reach for security has some particularly nasty consequences, and because it implicitly delegates the exercise of power to capital/state, methinks the emphasis has to be on refusing to concede the sense of what freedom and power to capital, on a whole lot of levels. So, I strongly agree - si nous saurons prendre, indeed.

another one

[s0metim3s]

And another, "Proud to be precarious!? - Our precariousness against theirs", from the Mayday Paris network of the Coordination des Intermittents et Précaires.

[David]

Of particular interest is this 2004 paper put out by researchers at the Center on Economic Policy Research which looks at evidence from the OECD countries and finds no evidence that, in general, "employment protection" laws have much impact on unemployment rates.

[Charles]

You wouldn't know it from the way US media (and blogs) are wall-to-wall saturated with coverage of Delay getting himself ready for elite prison...or meathead Scott's latest press conference...but student and worker protests are continuing, and on a global solidarity scale.

We'd like to see a post linking these issues on Daily Kos, please. Don't they have any writers over there?

It would sure be a welcome break from boring-ass DNC polling and fundraisers, to take a step back and paint a larger picture for the neoliberal masses.

oh give the Kosers a break, why doncha.

go buy yourself some Fukuyama, with their sleek, hip link already...

his sidekick Tom Friedman may not have paid for the rights to the painting, but it's a flat flat world (though remember, the protestors are "flat earth" people only in a different sense, you see...)

men of (ocktail) nuance, both!