Chrysler Black Mail

Chrysler is blackmailing Canada.

In its submission to the federal government, Chrysler compared plants in Windsor and Brampton, Ont., with American facilities that could assemble the same models, and noted it had spare capacity in the United States - a comment that some in government saw as a veiled threat to shift production if Canada does not provide emergency assistance.

Meanwhile the Harpocrites offer no new solutions to the auto crisis instead they offer workers the same old same old;

Mr. Clement met with senior officials from the Canadian Auto Workers union, including its president, Ken Lewenza. Mr. Clement has urged the union to be "part of the solution" and has suggested they may need to take a cut in wages and benefits to keep jobs in Canada.


The solution to the auto crisis is not more concessions from workers nor bailing out the Big 3. It is to socialize them under workers control.


SEE
There Is An Alternative To Capitalism
Auto Solution II
We Own GM
Auto Solution

tags
MGuinty, GM, concesssion bargaining, unions, trade union, Marx, Ontario, Corporate Welfare, Canada, cars, automobilie, production, taxes, tax credit, investment, environment, hybrid, self-valorization,, self-management,, workers control,, autoworkers,, KEN LEWENZA,,CAW, Big Three Auto,, libertarian socialism, automobile, Chrysler, Tony Clement, business unions, auto parts, workers, layoffs, plant-closings, workers-control, unions, labour, Canada

Whiners and Losers

This is the same line used by the provincial tories in Alberta since the days of King Klein; the government should not pick winners and lossers iin the capitalist marketplace. But of course it does, as we have seen with Alberta's support of privatiziation initiatives like K-Bro contracting outhospital laundry services, not to mention of course oil and gas development royalty and tax holidays, and dare I say investment in the mythical CO2 coal extraction process that will supposedly reduce methane gas.

Now the Feds are denying the obvious as Jim Flaherty explains about a pending bail out for the auto industry in Canada, with nary a recongition that yes he indeed just did pick winners and losers in Canada's auto industry. Canada: Government is open to selective industry support

Mr. Flaherty said most economists would consider a bailout unwise, since such a
package puts government in the dicey business of choosing winners and losers.
Rather, he said, he would be guided by which plants have the best chance of
remaining viable over the long term.
"So if General Motors is going to build a hybrid car in Oshawa, people can understand that that is a good investment for the longer term. Operating a large truck plant, pickup trucks - probably not a good investment of taxpayers' money," Mr. Flaherty said.
His top priority, however, is to ensure that banks are lending to each other, and that credit is
available to corporate and household borrowers at a decent price. A
well-functioning credit market, he said, will help the manufacturing sector as
much as any kind of direct aid.
David Paterson, vice-president of corporate and environmental affairs for
General Motors of Canada Ltd., said the largest auto maker in Canada has not
outlined specific proposals to Ottawa, but supports calls for both immediate
assistance and a longer-term Canadian program similar to an existing $25-billion
fund Washington created this year. That fund is supposed to help the industry
develop more environmentally friendly technologies.
Mr. Paterson said GM is in the midst of transforming its business in Canada
to meet the sustainability objective Mr. Flaherty has outlined.

There ya go Jim ya picked a winner. But of course this is not a real industrial policy, nor what is needed to create a Made In Canada Auto Industry. Which of course is workers control of production through 'workers cooperatives owning the factories. Now that would be worth taxpayers dollars. Anything is else is the same old same old neo-con crap; public funding of private capitalism.

SEE:

Concessions Don't Work

And Then There Was One

October Surprise Was The Market Crash

No Austrians In Foxholes

Pension Rip Off

Deja Vu

The Failure of Privatization



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Auto Solution

In the U.S. the debate over the failure of the big three automakers has devolved into an argument over bail-out or bankruptcy. As usual the Republicans arguing in favour of bankruptcy and opposing a bail out claim that part of the Big Three's failure is the high cost of production. They attack the UAW for being part of the problem with their retiree pension plans, healthcare costs and wage demands.

Make union pay cuts mandatory for auto aid

They claim that that Toyota and other import car manufactureres in the U.S. can produce cars cheaper then America's own. Well that is true. However the elephant in the room in this debate is the fact where Toyota and other import auto manufacturers set up shop is in Right To Work States, states which use right to work laws to ban unions.

As for Health Care costs this is the other elephant, in Canada and around the world the government provides health care except in two countries America and China. In the US the healthcare cost is a burden born by business and labour.

So what would a solution be do ya think? Hmm how about passing the the proposed first union contract law that was pending in the Senate; Employee Free Choice Act. You know the one that in the last days of the Presidential campaign became an issue for McCain.
And instead of either Clinton's of Obama's weak tea HealthCare reform, a universal healthcare program was adopted in the U.S. like it is in Canada.

Unionization of Toyota and other import car companies American workers would level the playing field as would creating a universal healthcare program.

While these would go a long way to really changing the auto industry in North America the only real solution is nationalization the auto industry under workers control. Something no one is talking about, including the UAW and CAW.

CAW President Ken Lewenza said the failure of even one of those companies would be a "devastating blow to the economy, a devastating blow to consumers out there and quite frankly devastating to our members."
Ontario, especially, would suffer, he told CTV Newsnet.
"It's not even imaginable what would happen in communities like Oshawa, Windsor, St. Catharines, Oakville. These communities are dominated by the auto industry."
Lewenza said the union has done its part to respond to the Detroit Three's shrinking market share, giving up hundreds of millions of dollars in concessions in collective bargaining.
However, Lewenza didn't blame management either, saying "nobody anticipated at the beginning of this business year we would be selling 12 to 13 million vehicles in the United States, when most people were anticipating 16 or 17."

Oh come on now quit apologizing for your bosses incompetence. What part of Climate Crisis did you miss? I mean for christ sakes the NDP proposes a Green Vehicle plan three years ago and what does CAW get fromall its politcal pull and lobbying? An investment in GM by the Ontario Government for a Camaro plant. Is that counter intuitive or what.

If we are going to produce green vehicles then it will take a complete restructuring of the industry based not on concession bargaining but on workers control and workers ownership.



SEE:
Whiners and Losers
Business Unionism Offers No Solution To Capitalist Crisis
Concessions Don't Work
And Then There Was One
October Surprise Was The Market Crash
No Austrians In Foxholes
Pension Rip Off


tags
MGuinty, GM, concesssion bargaining, unions, trade union, Marx, Ontario, Corporate Welfare, Canada, cars, automobilie, production, taxes, taxcredit, investment, environment, hybrid, self-valorization,, self-management,, workers control,, autoworkers,, Buzz Hargrove,,CAW, Big Three Auto,, libertarian socialism, automobile, Frank Stronach, Magna, business unions, auto parts, workers, layoffs, plant-closings, workers-control, unions, labour, Canada

Labour, Opera and Anarchy

This is the labour day long weekend in North America and for that reason the August Carnival of Anarchy will begin and carry on through the week. The theme is:

Anarchism and Work, Anarchism and Life

Why Opera you ask. Because it originates from the Latin word for work; Opus. As in creative, fulfilling, self directed activity. Liberated labour if you like. Self-Valorization.

Whereas the common modern word for labour, work and worker in the Latin based languages like French, Spanish, Italian, etc. is trabajo and travail (from the Latin tripalium, or “instrument of torture”)

Hence modern work for most of us is not an opera nor our opus but wage slavery.

Towards a History of Workers' Resistance to Work - Michael Seidman

And besides it gives me another chance to make a reference to that great cultural anarchist Bugs Bunny.

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Big Auto Crisis is the Crisis of Capitalism

The time has come to quit pussy footing around the issue at hand. Capitalism is in collapse. But the truth is that factories still are capable of production, raw resources are still available, technology has increased worker productivity, and workers are still able to work. So why are GM and Chrysler incapable of being productive. Because they rely not on creating products but creating profit. And the bottom line is that while their Canadian factories are some of the most productive they now face closure. No bail out by taxpayers, no bail out by bond holders (that's you folks who own mutual funds and bonds, including your pension funds which are institutional bond holders) nor concessions by workers will end the bleeding at GM or Chrysler. Indeed you can include Ford in that as well.
Instead of bailing out the Big Three it is time to fire the executive class, stop the bleeding of white collar and blue collar jobs and socialize big auto under workers control. In fact that should be the agenda of the left from the NDP and CLC through to the more radical of the left.
And yet nowhere do I hear the call to socialize capital under workers control. Despite statist attempts to nationalize banks and financial institutions by various governments of diverse ideologies, this is simply a public bail out of private capital.
Capitalism is the problem contrary to Gordon Brown, George Bush and Stephen Harper, it is not the solution. The solution is not taxpayer stimulus of existing infrastructure of capitalism and its state. Rather it is the complete and total overhaul of capitalism by socializing it, recognizing that capitalism is currently publicly funded by workers wages, pensions and taxes. It is time to restructure all production under workers control, to reconstitute government as the administration of things rather than people.
Just as big auto cannot restructure itself neither can capitalism. Ownership at GM and Chrysler has not changed, the executives have not changed, the command structure of the organisation has not changed. Nor has concessions, nor bail outs changed the fact that big auto like capitalism in general is simply about the creative destruction of workers and factories, in order to get slim enough to increase the bottom line; profit. And what is profit? It is the surplus value accumulated for further investment to make, more profit. It is this simple equation which exposes the capitalist system as being incapable of solving its own crisis. Which is not a crisis of production but of profit making.
This is the solution that needs to be shouted from the roof tops. And yet I find no cheerleaders for socialism, rather the left seems as despondent as the apologists for capitalism. It is time to challenge the established propaganda of the day that capitalism is a horrible system but it is better than the alternative. The alternative is socialism which contrary to popular mythology is not the same as state owned public works. Socialism is socialized capital, and production under the democratic control of those who own and use it that is us the vast majority of people.
Socialism as a democratic restructuring of capitalism and its statist forms is the unknown country, still to be explored. In this crisis it is time to begin the broad discussion that was so vibrant forty years ago, after the failures of Stalinism and Labourism, about new forms of community and worker control, extending democracy to the work place and into our public institutions, etc.
Unless we have a vibrant vision of a new world, being built in the shell of the old, we will not be grave diggers of capitalism, but rather labour and its political parties will simply dig themselfves into a grave created for them by the current capitalist crisis. Their lack of imigination is their failure to see beyond things as they are, because inevitably for the past fifty years they have abandoned the belief in the revolutionary potential of the working class they claim to represent.


SEE

There Is An Alternative To Capitalism

Auto Solution II

tags
MGuinty, GM, concesssion bargaining, unions, trade union, Marx, Ontario, Corporate Welfare, Canada, cars, automobilie, production, taxes, tax credit, investment, environment, hybrid, self-valorization,, self-management,, workers control,, autoworkers,, KEN LEWENZA,,CAW, Big Three Auto,, libertarian socialism, automobile, Frank Stronach, Magna, business unions, auto parts, workers, layoffs, plant-closings, workers-control, unions, labour, Canada

 

Engineer Menni and the Prose of Project Management

The recent efforts of Mckenzie Wark to rehabilitate Bogdanov have brought back more than just the lovable vampiric theorist from his bloody grave. With him emerge the concurrent spectres of utopia, state socialism and grandiose public works. Bogdanov, the activist revolutionary of 1905, had by 1917 become a theorist of the abstract, a scientific socialist, and a constructor of tangible Martian utopias. It is on Mars that Bogdanov pursues the doppelganger of Earthly socialism, and so, it is to Mars we go, by means of the collected translation Red Star: The First Bolshevik Utopia.

What is Mars for Bogdanov? If he defines Nature as “that which labor encounters,” Mars becomes something like “that which theory encounters”.

Mckenzie Wark makes use of the Deleuzian notion of molar and molecular in order to reach Bogdanov. If the molar is the realm of abstract grand thinking, high level concepts, and authoritarian pronouncements, then the molecular is the unseen, the below the below, the minute and particular, carbon liberation, and the world of “actually existing theoritism”. We must contrast the molar concepts of history, philosophy, love, art, with the molecular concepts of metabolic rift, development, attraction, and labor.

What does Bogdanov’s Mars represent? It is a world that is much older than ours, and yet has only progressed a few hundred years ahead of humanity (at least by 1905 – who knows what they’re up to now). They are a communist utopia of course, but have graduated to that position in much more molar way than the Earthlings were trending; because Mars is a harsher, larger, and sadder world, the populace, constrained to smaller plots of inhabitable land; Martians are much more tolerant of social development, much less cruel, much more abstract themselves as historical characters. Leonid (or affectionately, “Lenni”), the main character of Red Star, notices in Martian culture, art, politics, a certain abstract remove which contrasts with the brashness and threatening asymmetry of the development of the proletarian movement on Earth. As comes out in discussion:

“I don’t know,” he said thoughtfully, “but I think that you are wrong. True, the conflicts on Earth have been more acute than ours, and the natural environment has always shown a greater tendency to retaliate with death and destruction. But perhaps this is due to the fact that Earth is so much more richly endowed with natural resources and the life-giving energy of the sun. Look how much older our planet is, yet our humanity arose only a few tens of thousands of years before yours and is at present a mere two or three hundred years ahead of you in development. I tend to think of our two humanities as brothers. The elder one has a calm and balanced temperament, while the younger one is stormy and impetuous. The younger one is more wasteful with his resources, and prone to serious errors. His childhood was sickly and turbulent, and as he now approaches adolescence he often suffers from convulsive growing pains. But might he not become a greater and more powerful artist and creator than his elder brother? And in that case, will he not eventuaily be able to adorn our great Universe even better and more richly? I cannot be certain, but its seems to me that this is what may happen.”

Which is the molecular and which is the molar? In some sense, Mars is the same sort of abstraction as that used by Marx in Das Kapital, the abstractions that David Harvey’s brilliant youtube course makes commodity-clear; in Marx, certain real variables must be factored out of the equation because they over-complicate the development of a solution or tendency. In this sense, Martian society has progressed along molar lines. Big ideas have always managed to triumph with relative ease; the great public works of the canals have succeeded. Earth, on the other hand, is out-of-whack; it is full of metabolic rift, molecular instability, ideas emerge too soon or too late, and coalitions are much more radioactive. They even have a chiller, more widely read Martian doppelganger of Karl Marx, the “renowned Xarma”.

In this we see, not a rejection of the molar as such as Wark sometimes seems to suggest, but a comparison of the abstract with the concrete – by means of hypothetical abstraction (science fiction). The model of Mars, the cool temperaments of its inhabitants, serve as a template that the Earth is already corrupting beyond repair. In this sense, the Martian sequence can never be a program for the Earth, only ever a vague, super-egoic tease, an unreachable success-factor. Or in a more optimistic vein, Martian technical socialism is the idea that must be pursued by the various romantic truth procedures of love, science, art and politics on Earth, pursued but never fully actualized. Only on Mars is a cohesive “poetics of labor” capable of emerging as a whole. Maybe all that Earth can hope to do in the stead of a fully realized poetics of labor, is capture that movement into a banal realism, a “prose of project management”?

It is funny that Red Star, the more traditional utopia of travel, was a huge best-seller during the Russian Revolution, while its much superior prequel Engineer Menni went pretty much unnoticed. Yet the latter is perhaps the heart of Bogdanov’s project; to turn vulgar Marxism into a technical ideal of socialism, and this technical development, through the figure of the Engineer – the Martian Engineers Menni and Netti, who pre-figure the stupid figures of socialist realism and far surpass them.

Engineer Menni gives humanity hope that it can reach the molar one day too. It is the great manifesto of molar projection. The book is presented as a novel from Mars, translated into English by Leonid. As Leonid mentions in Red Star, there is a certain coolness to Martian literature that seems to find more aesthetic joy in the technical – a kind of latent suprematism or Neue Sachlichkeit. Bogdanov is true to his word when, in Engineer Menni, he really does compose such a novel. The device of writing, not about aliens, but an alien novel as such, is really quite brilliant. The gesture practiced in Menni is very compelling, nigh Lovecraftian in its staging of uncanny familiarity:

Translation from the single Martian language into those of Earth is much more difficult than translation from one Earthly language to another, and it is often even impossible to give a full and exact rendering of the content of the original. Imagine trying to translate a modern scientific work, a psychological novel, or a political article into the language of Homer or into Old Church Slavonic. I am aware that such a comparison does not Batter us Earthlings, but it is unfortunately no exaggeration-the difference between our respective civilizations is just about that great.

But who is Menni? The molar hero. The great architect, engineer, project manager, and a Lycurgus or pre-foundational figure of vulgar, technical, molar Marxism. The novel is about his great project and his interpersonal relationships, but moreso the former. Menni has an idea that will greatly expand the territory of Martian life and progress, exploit the untapped resources of the planet, and progress the species of Martian humanity, which feels cramped and narrow in its tiny pockets of inhabitable land, much like the characters in more recent fictions like Attack on Titan.

This is a socialist realist technique, to write about public works, and the great (projected) unity of state, technology, and labor against the elements. The whole trend of Bogdanov’s science fiction is the unity of labor against natural ferocity. He refutes a future left of localism not yet developed in his era; as Žižek proclaims, the Negri style pockets of progress and local contributions do not suffice to deal with the problems of a socialist race, even once the proletariat has conquered. The real enemy is not a rival class, but nature herself.

Thus in Red Star, the great debate of the Martians is whether to colonize Earth or Venus. Placid and artistic, hedonistic even on the surface, the Martians are all bitterly melancholic because the natural world is trying to kill them and their socialist paradise; a dilemma emerges – colonize and kill the humans in the name of a greater more developed humanity (the view of the Martian Sterni) or go to the inhospitable Venus to mine its resources? They have only enough fuel for one project, and they choose the more comradely, leaving Earth its chance.

Menni shows more the pure poetry of labor and project management, a struggle against organizational inertia and natural obstacles, and how class development and ideational progress attach themselves to technical developments in the concrete world. It is a strange novel. The strangest part is the long hallucinatory sequence of the vampire, the representative of old ideas and once-useful historical processes, like democracy or parliamentarism, that have become dead letters but continue to live on and pester the progressive forces.

Technicality triumphs, and history goes with her, but only, it seems, on Mars.

So far.

We have signs. Everybody on Earth now speaks English. The Martians too had a coming together of language. Beercroft’s “universal language” is now a reality.

But the idea lives on after the man disappears, and you have come to understand the main thing: the creativity that found one of its incarnations in you has no end.

The possibility of the Project Management Novel

So that’s why I came up with the phrase “prose of project management”, as a kind of realist response to the Bogdanovite “poetry of labor”. We need to recognize that tektological and organizational thinking brings about a weird counter-swing from the molar to the molecular and back to the molar again. Like Bogdanov’s notion of “crisis” as either a conjunction or a destruction (crisises C and D respectively). His point is that no crisis is just a pure crisis-D or crisis-C, but that the interesting features of either can appear to be dominantly one or the other, depending on your point of observation. Likewise, the “poetry of labor” needs its “managemental prose”. This is the molar prose of the technical abstraction, the Brechtian “crude thinking”, the concept-as-blunt-object used by committees to bludgeon reactionaries.

This is clearly a different spin on the idea of the “project” from the (quite molecular) “project-as-self” or any other individualistic narcissism; it is almost classically soviet in comparison to what is prevalent today. It should not be taken in the same vein as the Invisible Committee describes the “I AM WHAT I AM”, the petty atomistic personal project of the self:

The maintenance of the self in a permanent state of deterioration, in a chronic state of near-collapse, is the best-kept secret of the present order of things. The weak, depressed, self-critical, virtual self is essentially that endlessly adaptable subject required by the ceaseless innovation of production…It is at the same time the most voracious consumer and, paradoxically, the most productive self, the one that will most eagerly and energetically throw itself into the slightest project, only to return later to its original larval state. 

The PM methodology to be derived from Bogdanov emphatically rejects this. No slight projects, no larval pupas, and certainly no return. In this sense, molar.

Like the dreams of Benjamin, Platonov, Ehrenberg, Lunacharsky, and Piscator, among many others, the hope of functionalizing or socializing the novel form is so old to criticism that it’s surprising that it hasn’t actually manifested itself more frequently. The valorization of the report, the blueprint, the newspaper as aesthetic endstates was a constant refrain in the 1920s. Eventually this led to a re-capture within literature itself – Brecht and Alfred Döblin, for example, made heavy use of reportage and workerist flavoured functionality for artistic ends.

If rhyme really is of feudal provenance, then the same may be said of many other good and beautiful things.

If the Soviet Union’s contribution to the great unreadable genres of mankind was the production novel, Engineer Menni stands as an elegant and surprisingly readable precursor. Yet although production is certainly an element, it is far more high level. We see in Menni the possibility for something like a management or project novel. A novel or literary form that takes as its architecture not story arcs, but phases; not character development, but resource management; not plot resolutions, but outcomes; and finally, not moral platitudes or zen like moments of observation, but strictly documented lessons learned.

All of a suddenly he understood that one didn’t have to invent it all from scratch, that it was a matter of making something new by synthesis of all that was good in what came before.

Kim Stanley Robinson.

This functional trend seemed to have gone away for awhile. But the rehabilitation of Red Star/Engineer Menni opens up the possibility for a severe détournement; the language of management, organization, abstract project coordination can be stolen for aesthetic development. And once the literary captures this thinking, it can return it back with a vengeance. No longer will the notions of finance or human resources be linked to solely spreadsheets; a utilitarian flavor will remain, but legends and heroes, or perhaps even new methodologies embodied as heroes. Engineer Menni stands for both a political finality or class division, and a new methodology for the commune as a whole. A vindication of the major or state project, and as such, an aesthetic as much as political vindication.

Our Cause | Two Grenadiers (wordpress.com)

SELF VALORIZATION

Only Early Birds Will See Acropolis as Workers Strike Over Heat

Security guards and others say the extreme temperatures in Athens and at other historical sites are dangerous for them and for tourists. The employees are stopping work at noon at least for now.

Tourists at the Acropolis in Athens on Thursday.Credit...Milos Bicanski/Getty Images

By Niki Kitsantonis
Reporting from Athens.
July 21, 2023, 

The suffocating heat in Athens has forced its top attraction, the Acropolis, to close to tourists in the afternoons for the second time this month, with plans to open up in the cooler hours of the evening. But a strike by workers at that site and others, over dangerous working conditions, will likely also keep it closed after 12 p.m. while the extreme temperatures endure.

Greece is suffering through its second heat wave in as many weeks, and temperatures are expected to reach 111 degrees Fahrenheit, or 44 Celsius, in Athens on Sunday. Workers say the heat poses a potential risk to them and to visitors, and they stopped working at noon on Thursday and Friday and plan to continue doing so until at least Sunday. Their union says they will reassess the situation on Monday.

Speaking to Greek radio on Friday morning, the head of the union, Ioannis Mavrikopoulos, said the temperature on the site of the Acropolis, home to the gleaming white marble Parthenon monument and few shade trees, had reached some 118 degrees Fahrenheit, or 48 Celsius. The Acropolis is perched on a rocky outcrop high above Athens.

Mr. Mavrikopoulos claimed that between 20 and 25 visitors fainted at the site daily, adding that similar problems had been reported at two other popular sites: the ancient palace of Knossos on Crete and Ancient Olympia in northern Greece.

A tourist was taken to an ambulance after fainting near the Acropolis on Thursday.

Credit...Louisa Gouliamaki/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The walkout means that the Acropolis will be accessible to tourists for only four hours a day, from its opening at 8 a.m. until 12 p.m. The site has had about 21,000 visitors a day this summer, up by more than a third from last year.

Despite the sweltering temperatures, tourists continued to try to visit the Acropolis, Greece’s ancient citadel, known as a model of classical architecture but also for the sculptures that were hacked off the Parthenon in the early 19th century and have since sat in the British Museum.

The site draws millions of people ever year, and this summer they have been waiting under canopies set up on the paths up to the Acropolis as Red Cross volunteers hand out bottles of water to keep them hydrated. The turnout seems to have ebbed slightly compared with early last week when televised footage showed huge crowds shuffling through the site.

Visitors who booked in advance but were unable to gain access to the Acropolis will be able to use their tickets any time over the next year, a Culture Ministry official said.

Forecasts suggest that Greece will see a small dip in temperatures on Monday but that is expected to be followed by a third heat wave two days later. With sweltering temperatures enduring well after sunset, it is likely that the country’s archaeological sites will continue to restrict afternoon visits.


Niki Kitsantonis is a freelance correspondent for The Times based in Athens. She has been writing about Greece for 20 years, including more than a decade of coverage for The Times. More about Niki Kitsantonis

Time For The Four Hour Day

And the Four Day Week.


While surfing I came across this interesting site on an alternative to downsizing workers, downsizing the work day. See links below.

Not a new idea but one that resurfaces when whenever capitalism adopts new technology to reduce labour costs. As Dr. Marx pointed out the class struggle is all about reducing the work day.

This began with the 10 hour movement during the late 19th Century, and quickly grew into the 8 hour movement. You know the saying, "The Weekend,brought to you by the Labour Movement".

The Syndicalist movement in North America called for a 4 hour work day. This was advanced by the IWW in the 1920's!!!. In the 1920's folks. 75 years ago. And today folks are working two jobs and most are working 44-50 hours a week to make ends meet.

Work time has increased, while wages have decreased in real money, and work has become contracted out and precarious.

In the 1930's the Progressive Labour Party and others in the labour movement called for a 32 hour work week, in otherwords a four day week. Even this revisionist demand was met with capitalist distain. Today France has a 35 hour work week which was not without controversy.

Today as more workers are laid off, the Canadian Autoworkers Union has fought and bargianed against forced overtime in favour of increased jobs.

We still hear from folks who offer the 32 hour week as their minimum demand, and thats the problem, its a minimum, and even then capitalism has not embraced it with anymore enthusiaism than the 4 hour day and the 4 day week.

Reducing Working Time

The European Union (EU) Directive on working time (Directive 93/104/EC) required member states to introduce national legislation that would reduce working time to a weekly average of forty eight (48) hours in a year. The 'Organisation of Working Time Act, 1997' has transposed the EU Directive into law in Ireland. This new law has impacted on the dependence that enterprises can have on excessive overtime working. It also reduces the maximum number of hours that employees are allowed to work. In this context both employers and unions are exploring the possible potential of combining changes in work organisation with changes in the pattern of working hours. While employers and unions can have different aims for any reorganisation of work and working time, a recognition of the interdependence of these aims should provide a basis for joint examination of what can be done. In short, the chances for employees to improve guaranteed earnings while working fewer hours are likely to be better if working time can be more effectively matched with the actual needs of the enterprise.

Another group influenced by the IWW and North American Syndicalism was Technocracy Inc. which also adopted the idea that the MAXIMUM labour required to maintain an advanced industrial society is wait for it, yep, a 4 hour day, 4 days a week.

The Price System be abolished, and be replaced with an Energy Credit”-system. The Energy Credit is an electronic distribution unit of which the value is determined by the resources which the system could distribute to it’s clients, and the costs is equivalent with the production costs – because profit is eliminated. The investments could instead be developed through the total independence and autarchy of the system, and in time, the system will be impossible to destroy. The Energy Credit could never be bartered, loaned, speculated, inflated, stolen or be misused for corrupt purposes, because it’s value and areas of legitimacy is fixated. All inhabitants within the borders of the Technate are given a standard income of energy credits, free residence of living, free means of communication, free clothes, free food, free healthcare, free education, and free recreation. The work time is 4 hours a day, 4 days a week, but it will in each case be a hard task to give everyone a job, but that is not a problem, because everyone will prosper and survive, work or no work. “Machines work, humans play”, as one of the mottos sound.

For a larger picture of this chart click here.

The Passing Of The Wage Slave

The Mystery of Money G. D. KOE, CHQ • 1938

The machine is here to stay. It is emancipating the wage slaves who in ever increasing numbers are becoming like the lilies of the field: they toil not, neither do they spin. The machine does not strike nor talk back and it requires no relief when unemployed. If you wish to continue your Price System you will have to breed a new race of men, men that can lie fallow for a season, or can be stored away in warehouses till they are required.

Human labor means wages. Wages means purchasing power. Purchasing power means profits and profits means savings. Savings mean more and more means of production. And so round and round the endless chain of the Price System. Men work so that they may consume, and consume so that they may have strength to work some more so that they may continue to consume, while close behind comes the grim spectre of scarcity. To protect themselves they saved themselves into the jaws of unemployment. Savings built machines.

When electric power came, human labor lost. Electric power works twenty-four hours and it draws no wages, but the owners pile up savings. More savings, more machines, more production, more machines, less wages, less purchasing power, less employment, larger relief rolls, over production. Still more dividends are being paid and still more savings are being added to the debt structure. A considerable part of the population have become paupers but they have to be clothed and fed that the Price System might still be operated and savings steadily increased. Production slowed down. Fewer new machines for a time and a steadily increasing liquidity in the banks and financial institutions.

Today, liquidity is approaching its maximum and soon the banks, insurance companies, and financial houses will fade quietly away, except as governmental institutions. They cannot earn enough to pay their overhead and must go into voluntary liquidation or they will fail. Any industrialist that does not modernize his equipment (and that means mechanize) must shut up shop. With an ever increasing velocity the Price System approaches its inevitable end. The Price System is a gigantic debt system and the cancellation of debt is but the foundations of that System crumbling into dust. It is wisdom to make your choice now, before you come to the parting of the ways. Then it may-be too late. Which will you have? Chaos or Science? Scarcity or abundance? Disorder or order? Death or life? The choice is yours; but the necessity for the choice cannot long be delayed. Technocracy alone, offers life.

Note this was written in 1938 when automobile production, called Fordism, was rapidly industrializing America as it is now doing in China and has done in the newly developing industrial economies of Korea and the post war development of Japan.

And speaking of Ford he already introduced the idea of increased wages for less work with his new mode of production, of course to encourage increased consumption of his product, and to control his workers by keeping the unions out.

From World's Work, October 1926 pp. 613-616.

HENRY FORD: Why I Favor Five Days' Work With Six Days' Pay

The automobile manufacturer in this authorized interview tells Mr. Crowther why he reduced the working week in Ford plants all over the world to forty hours with no cut in pay*

We now face a political economy of outsourcing and contracting out work, flexible working conditions where you are expected to 'multi-task', which is deskilling of the workforce yet making us pliable for being multi use cogs in the machine of capital production. And yet we still have unemployment, and we are working more for less, and for longer hours.

Yet the society in which we live could provide abundance for all. Strange that.

As Dr. Marx points out in his work the Grundrisse, as automation increases, and allows for greater freedom of the worker, the capitalist system cannot adapt fast enough forcing the workers to give up their lesisure time, in favour of either wage slavery or unemployment.

Surplus value in general is value in excess of the equivalent. The equivalent, by definition, is only the identity of value with itself. Hence surplus value can never sprout out of the equivalent; nor can it do so originally out of circulation; it has to arise from the production process of capital itself. The matter can also be expressed in this way: if the worker needs only half a working day in order to live a whole day, then, in order to keep alive as a worker, he needs to work only half a day. The second half of the labour day is forced labour; surplus-labour. What appears as surplus value on capital's side appears identically on the worker's side as surplus labour in excess of his requirements as worker, hence in excess of his immediate requirements for keeping himself alive. The great historic quality of capital is to create this surplus labour, superfluous labour from the standpoint of mere use value, mere subsistence; and its historic destiny [Bestimmung] is fulfilled as soon as, on one side, there has been such a development of needs that surplus labour above and beyond necessity has itself become a general need arising out of individual needs themselves—and, on the other side, when the severe discipline of capital, acting on succeeding generations [Geschlechter], has developed general industriousness as the general property of the new species [Geschlecht]—and, finally, when the development of the productive powers of labour, which capital incessantly whips onward with its unlimited mania for wealth, and of the sole conditions in which this mania can be realized, have flourished to the stage where the possession and preservation of general wealth require a lesser labour time of society as a whole, and where the labouring society relates scientifically to the process of its progressive reproduction, its reproduction in a constantly greater abundance; hence where labour in which a human being does what a thing could do has ceased. Accordingly, capital and labour relate to each other here like money and commodity; the former is the general form of wealth, the other only the substance destined for immediate consumption. Capital's ceaseless striving towards the general form of wealth drives labour beyond the limits of its natural paltriness [Naturbedürftigkeit], and thus creates the material elements for the development of the rich individuality which is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption, and whose labour also therefore appears no longer as labour, but as the full development of activity itself, in which natural necessity in its direct form has disappeared; because a historically created need has taken the place of the natural one. This is why capital is productive; i.e. an essential relation for the development of the social productive forces. It ceases to exist as such only where the development of these productive forces themselves encounters its barrier in capital itself.

The Times of November 1857 contains an utterly delightful cry of outrage on the part of a West-Indian plantation owner. This advocate analyses with great moral indignation—as a plea for the re-introduction of Negro slavery—how the Quashees (the free blacks of Jamaica) content themselves with producing only what is strictly necessary for their own consumption, and, alongside this 'use value', regard loafing (indulgence and idleness) as the real luxury good; how they do not care a damn for the sugar and the fixed capital invested in the plantations, but rather observe the planters' impending bankruptcy with an ironic grin of malicious pleasure, and even exploit their acquired Christianity as an embellishment for this mood of malicious glee and indolence. They have ceased to be slaves, but not in order to become wage labourers, but, instead, self-sustaining peasants working for their own consumption. As far as they are concerned, capital does not exist as capital, because autonomous wealth as such can exist only either on the basis of direct forced labour, slavery, or indirect forced labour, wage labour. Wealth confronts direct forced labour not as capital, but rather as relation of domination [Herrschaftsverhältnis]; thus, the relation of domination is the only thing which is reproduced on this basis, for which wealth itself has value only as gratification, not as wealth itself, and which can therefore never create general industriousness. (We shall return to this relation of slavery and wage labour.)

It is time to take back our time from the machine, not through reforms like increased paternity leaves paid for out of EI, but in actual time to be with our families and friends by reducing our work time. Not adapting to flexible organisation of the workplace, where we 'job shre', that is share our poverty, our waged work. But rather the fight for the 4 hour day in the 4 hour week for 40 hours pay, is not a utopian ideal but a radical demand upon the system of capitalism.

Capital adapts such demands with its illusionary flexible working conditions for the professional classes. These are based on salaried wages, and give the illusion of a beneficient and paternalistic management in the workplace. In reality it is NOT the reduction of work time, nor its radical transformation into playtime. It is simply the sharing of surplus value time, at our own expense.

Or in the case of working from home, here the benefits of daycare, etc. are absorbed by the worker, costs that would normally acrue to the capitalist and his state.

Just as in self employment, the very basis of the wage slavery of the mercantile classes, which includes trades men, white collar managers, owners of fast food franchises, etc. the classic petit-bourgoise, here we now have the contracting out and privatization of public sector jobs to a sector that now must pay the burden of benefits and insurance, and pensions, out of their own pocket with not employer contribution. Hence most don't and end up destitute later on due to accidents, health problems, or catastrophic personal financial burderns. Thus the self employed are the self deluded, thinking they are no longer wage slaves.

This is one of the consequences of downsizing. The other is the quick capitalization and valorization of the business as the workers are disposed of but their surplus value is kept. Wages, benefits, pension funds, all are disposed of as liquid capital, which is why after downsizing corporations see their share price rise on Wall Street. Regardless of the socio economic grouping that gets laid off, waged employees, salaried employees, white collar, blue collar, support staff, production staff, distribution staff, or management.

All are one class; the wage slaves to the machine of capital.

New Study Reveals One in Three Americans Are Chronically Overworked
Triggers for Overwork and Solutions for Workplace Stress are Explored

Key Study Data

• One in three American employees are chronically overworked.
• 54 percent of American employees have felt overwhelmed at some time in the past month by how much work they had to complete.
• 29 percent of employees spend a lot of time doing work that they consider a waste of time. These employees are more likely to be overworked.
• 79 percent of employees had access to paid vacations in 2004.
• More than one-third of employees (36 percent) had not and were not planning to take their full vacation.
• On average, American workers take 14.6 vacation days annually.
• Most employees take short vacations, with 37 percent taking fewer than seven days.
• Only 14 percent of employees take vacations of two weeks or more.
• Among employees who take one to three days off (including weekends), 68 percent return feeling relaxed compared with 85 percent who take seven or more days (including weekends).
• Only 8 percent of employees who are not overworked experience symptoms of clinical depression compared with 21 percent of those who are highly overworked.

Study: Reducing hours isn’t always a career killer

By Kathy Gurchiek

Choosing to cut your workload to three or four days a week is not a career killer for top-level employees, according to Crafting Lives that Work: A Six-Year Retrospective on Reduced-Load Work in the Careers and Lives of Professionals and Managers, a study that was released Feb. 16. 2005

“Many leading employers have been formally and informally offering alternative work arrangements such as reduced-load work for many years,” according to the executive summary of the report by McGill State University, Canada’s leading research-intensive university, and Michigan State University (MSU).

“However, little research has been conducted on how choosing to use these new ways of working affects individuals, their careers, and their families over time.”

The study followed up with 81 of the original 87 salaried, nonunionized participants interviewed in 1996 to 1998 who voluntarily cut back from full-time to part-time status at 43 companies in the United States and Canada. Ages ranged from 33 to 58. Men were included, but most participants were women, and the typical one was 45, married, a manager, and had reduced her workload to 66 percent of full time.

Nearly half of those working part time were still doing so six years later, and most of those no longer working a reduced schedule wanted to return to it, according to the study, funded by the nonprofit philanthropic Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

In addition, it found that a significantly higher percentage of those working reduced work schedules had elder care responsibilities, family health problems or major personal health problems compared to those working full time. A high commitment to family and the need or desire to spend time with their children were the reasons why more than half of the participants continued working a reduced schedule.

Timesizing versus Downsizing
we address the two biggest questions of our times:
(1) When introducing technology, how, without makework, can CEOs avoid downsizing employees & the consumer markets they represent? (2) Then how do we shift from maximizing consumption to save the economy, to minimizing consumption to save the planet?
Two answers, two 'gears'. (1) Timesizing = trim workweeks, not workforce & consumer base; make not taxpayer-support but self-support easier; re-employ & re-activate all marginalized consumers. (2) Once everyone is included in the worksharing system, economic growth becomes optional instead of desperately needed, because for the first time growth can be limited without starving the now well-employed 'poor'. So we then cut the workweek further to downshift production & consumption and "save the planet," that is, ecosystems and the whole biosphere.

The big picture & the-time-trilogy

We had a lot of help, but not from standard economists. They hate people like us. We're mavericks. Most of us are indeed dreaded "autodidacts" - self-taught people with no particular stake in any particular economic conclusion - except that maybe our whole economic juggernaut could be a lot more "win-win" than it is. Charlie Kindleberger, despite being personally a nice Ray Bolger-type of guy and a bit of an outsider himself (an American historical economist is a rare bird), said, with reference to Jane Jacobs, "All of us hate these autodidacts." (Warsh, Economic Principles, 396.) One of us autodidacts didn't get translated into English for 162 years (Sismondi).

OK, part of our problem is that we're not win-win with standard economists. We badmouth them. Jane Jacobs says economics is a "fool's paradise" and what's needed now is a wholesale rethinking of the field, a "trip back to reality." (Warsh, 396.) Joan Robinson called economics a branch of theology! And Sismondi opposed economic systems and all forms of dogmatism. But let's face it, standard economists deserve it.

We discovered that over the years, indeed the centuries, there were other autodidacts and mavericks who went over much of the same ground as us ("us" is maverick-correct here, an English disjunctive attested in Chaucer) and they laid down a pretty good foundation. In the last 20 years, Ben Hunnicutt. In the 1950s, Nobel-reject John Kenneth Galbraith. Art Dahlberg and Ed Filene in the 1930s. Lord Leverhulme (a "Lever Brother") and Stephen Leacock (a Canadian Mark Twain) in the nineteen-teens. Thorstein Veblen in the 1890s. Jean-Charles Sismondi in the early 1800s and Sir William Petty in the 1600s - see our bibliography. There are probably a lot more but they're tough to find because the mainstream does little or nothing to publicize them. None of these people get Nobels. Guess they make in-the-box thinkers uneasy. Kindleberger went on to say, "We are in the business of teaching people, and we want them to learn our stuff, not make it up." Sounds like primitive territoriality.

Another Canadian Site is:

Welcome to the TimeWork Web: the limitation of the working day is a preliminary condition without which all further attempts at improvement and emancipation must prove abortive.

And of course they have created a Workless Party, Parteee..the site is located in BC which is a wonderful land to want to work less in and play more.

I could party for that.

"Workers of the world - RELAX !!!!"

Work Less Party

Work Less, Consume Less, Live More!!!

240-Minute Man

Gabe Sinclair Has Seen the Future, and It Includes a Four-Hour Workday

By Michael Anft

Baltimore City Paper: 240-Minute Man (March 21 - March 27, 2001)

THE IDEA

At the beginning of the last century, the tractor and the assembly line revolutionized the American economy. The eight-hour workday and the forty-hour week soon prevailed as a natural consequence of these innovations.

The computer and other minor miracles have since opened glorious opportunities for a further reduction of our drudgery, yet nothing of the kind has happened. Modern life remains a headlong rush into long commutes, two-income families, late nights at work, and exhausting recreation. How could this be? What is it about our collective personality that drives us over this cliff of endless rat race?

The Four-hour Day Foundation exists to assemble a particular coalition of people prepared to question the fundamental assumptions of how we labor and how we distribute our immense wealth. Two percent of Americans now grow all of our food and then some. Another thirty million or so do all the mining, manufacturing, and construction. If this minority can produce our modern cornucopia, then the four-hour day is within easy reach. If we can rearrange world politics so as to honestly collaborate with other nations, anything is possib