The media that reminds us most often about all the holidays we have is television of course. Christmas reminders begin pretty much around the end of October, right after Halloween. Yep, we have a lot of holidays here in the US. There's Christmas, the January sales after Christmas celebrating the new year, Valentines day, Mother's Day, Fathers Day, the Fourth of July day sales, we actually get a day off there, Labor Day, and back to Halloween.
You'd think that we were the luckiest workers on the planet here in the US having so many holidays and they use the media to remind us too. Well, they use the media to remind us of some of them and to remind us to go shopping on that day. If you don't by mum or dad a present you don't respect and love that holy institution, the American family.
The truth is of course that in the US we have fewer holidays than workers in just about every other industrialized country. The Financial Times in a piece, in 2007 titled, In Humungous Praise of Holidays, points out:
"The average American takes just 14 days holiday a year. By contrast, the average Italian takes 42 days off every year and the average Frenchman takes 37 days (and only works 35 hours a week, when he deigns to turn up at the office.) When they are actually at their desks or lathes, the average European produces more per hour than the average American. But because they spend relatively little time working, European productivity per person is well behind that of the Americans." *
You can see by the derisory tone that the author uses, the boss doesn't like it when you're not "at work", in other words, when they don't own and control your Labor activity, an opportunity to extract surplus value. The myth of US productivity is based on longer work hours, we have less free time. In the past 60 years or so, the heads of organized Labor in the US have traditionally gone for more money as opposed to social gains and benefits that improve life, like more time off. A day off is a day off but a dollar can be worth half its value from one day to the next. In the PATCO strike that was crushed by Reagan in 1980 one of the major issues was a reduced workweek, I think they were demanding 30 or a 32 hour week.
Reagan fired them all and banned them from working in that industry for life. At the same time he was praising the Polish Solidarity Union for fighting for their rights. The heads of organized Labor did nothing to stop this assault which gave the employers the green light and confidence to go on an all out assault on Unions throughout the eighties and nineties up to the present day.
I recall talking to an air traffic controller who was on strike and he asked me:
"Do you play Pacman"
"I do" I replied.
"Well I watch a screen all day long and when two blips hit I lose 600 people." he said soberly.
As recently as 1984, the AFL-CIO was talking about reduced hours at least. They weren't prepared to do anything about it, nothing terrifies them more than activating their membership, who knows what they'll be demanding, instead, they relied on the goodwill of their friends in the Democratic Party; we can see where that got us.
What the boss means by holidays are sales days, an opportunity to sell the commodities we produce and reap the profit within them, the profit that has as its source the unpaid Labor of the working class.
" It is time to reduce the standard workweek, both to provide more job opportunities for an expanding workforce and to resume the historic downward trend in working hours."
(From the AFL-CIO platform proposals presented to the Democratic and Republican conventions in 1984)
* In Humunguous Praise of Holidays, Financial Times, Dec 23, 2007
No comments:
Post a Comment