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Ten years ago, the financial markets suffered another collapse. Distinguished U.S. economists from the White House, the Congress, and the New York and Chicago stock exchanges tried to explain what had happened. The word “speculation” was not uttered in any of their analyses. After all, popular sports deserve respect: five out of every ten North Americans play the stock market in one way or another. Just as “smart bombs” killed Iraqis in the Gulf war without anyone except the dead finding out, “smart money” earns 40 percent profits without anyone finding out how. Wall Street, which some say was named for a wall built to keep black slaves from escaping, is today the center of the great global electronic gambling den, and all of humanity is enslaved by the decisions made there. The virtual economy moves capital, trashes prices, plucks fools, ruins countries, and churns out millionaires and mendicants in the time it takes to say, “Amen.”
The world may be obsessed with personal insecurity, but reality teaches us that the crimes of finance capital are far more fearsome than those we read about in the papers. Mark Mobius, who speculates on behalf of thousands of investors, told the German magazine Der Spiegel at the beginning of 1998, “My clients laugh at ethical criteria. They only want us to increase their profits.” During the crisis of 1987, another phrase made him famous: “You’ve got to buy when blood runs in the streets, even if the blood is mine.” George Soros, the most successful speculator in the world, who made a fortune successively bidding down the pound, the lira, and the ruble, knows what he’s talking about when he says, “The main enemy of the open society, I believe, is no longer the Communist but the capitalist threat.”
Capitalism’s Dr. Frankenstein has created a monster that walks on its own, and nobody can stop it. It is a superstate over and above all others, an invisible power that governs us all even though it was elected by no one. In this world there is too much misery but there is also too much money, and wealth doesn’t know what to do with itself. In other times, finance capital broadened the consumer market by extending credit. It served the real economy, which to exist needed to grow. Today, utterly bloated, finance capital has put the productive system to work for it, while it plays with the real economy like a cat with a mouse.
Every crash on the stock exchange is a catastrophe for small investors who swallowed the line and bet their savings on the financial lottery. And it’s a catastrophe for the poorest barrios of the global village, whose residents suffer the consequences without ever knowing what caused them: in a single blow each “market correction” empties their plates and wipes out their jobs. But rarely do crises on the stock exchange fatally wound the suffering millionaires who, day after day, backs bent over their computers, fingertips calloused from the keyboards, redistribute the world’s wealth by moving money, setting interest rates, and deciding the value of labor, commodities, and currencies. They are the only workers who could refute the anonymous scribe who wrote on a wall in Montevideo: “He who works has no time to make money.”
LESSONS FOR RESISTING USELESS VICES
Unemployment sends the crime rate soaring and humiliating wages spike it higher still. Never has the old Spanish proverb been so apt: “The hustler lives from the fool, and the fool from his work.” In contrast, no one says, “Work hard and you shall prosper,” because no one believes it anymore.
Labor rights have come down to the right to work for whatever you can get under whatever conditions you can stand. Work is the most useless of vices. There is no commodity in the world cheaper than labor. While wages fall and hours rise, the labor market vomits up people. Take it or leave it—there’s a long line behind you.
EMPLOYMENT AND UNEMPLOYMENT IN THE TIME OF FEAR
The shadow of fear is nipping at your heels no matter how fast you go. Fear of losing your job, your money, your food, your home. No talisman can protect you from the curse of sudden bad luck. From one moment to the next, even the greatest winner can turn into a loser unworthy of forgiveness or compassion.
Who is safe from the terror of unemployment? Who doesn’t fear being shipwrecked by new technologies or by globalization or any other of the many storms whipping today’s world? The waves pound furiously: the ruin or flight of local industries, competition with cheap labor from other latitudes, the implacable advance of machines that need no salary or vacation or bonus or pension or severance pay or anything but the electricity that feeds them.
The development of technology leads not to more free time or freedom, only to more unemployment and fear. Panic at the specter of the pink slip is universal: We’re sorry to inform you that due to the new budget policy we must make do without your services. Or simply that’s the way it is, without any euphemism to ease the blow. Anyone can get shot down anytime, anywhere. At forty, anyone can become old from one day to the next.
In a report on conditions in 1996 and 1997, the International Labor Organization says, “The evolution of employment in the world continues to be discouraging.” In industrialized countries, unemployment remains high and contributes to increasing social inequality, and in so-called developing countries, both unemployment and poverty have risen spectacularly. “That’s what spreads fear,” the report concludes. And fear does spread: you have a job or you have nothing. At the entrance to Auschwitz the sign said: “Work Shall Make You Free.” A little more than half a century later, any worker with a job should thank the company for its kindness in allowing him or her to carry on day after backbreaking day, fodder for the tedium of office or factory life. To find a job, or hang on to one, even if it comes without vacation or pension or any benefits at all and even if the pay stinks, is celebrated as if it were a miracle.
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Famous Words
On November 28, 1990, the Argentine papers published a pearl of wisdom from a union leader now in political office. This is how Luis Barrionuevo explained his sudden fortune: “You don’t make money by working.”
When charges of fraud rained down on him, his friends offered him a testimonial dinner. Later on, he was elected president of a first-division soccer club, and throughout it all he remained at the helm of the food service workers’ union.
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Saint Cajetan, patron saint of the unemployed, is the most popular saint in Argentina. Crowds come to him begging for work. No other saint, male or female, has such a large clientele. Between May and October 1997, when new jobs suddenly appeared paying two hundred dollars a month, many wondered who was responsible, Saint Cajetan or democracy. With legislative elections on the horizon, the Argentine government astonished the saint by handing out half a million jobs right and left. But they didn’t last much beyond the campaign. Some time later, President Menem suggested that Argentines take up golf, because it’s relaxing and keeps your mind off your troubles.
The number of unemployed keeps on growing. The world has more and more surplus people. What will the owners of the planet do with so much useless humanity? Send them to the moon? At the beginning of 1998, huge demonstrations in France, Germany, Italy, and other European countries made headlines around the globe. Some of the marchers acted out the drama of labor in today’s world and wore black plastic garbage bags. In Europe there may still be insurance to ease the fate of the unemployed, but the fact remains that even there one young person in every four cannot find a steady job. Work under the table and outside the law has tripled in Europe over the past quarter century. In Great Britain there are more and more stay-at-home workers, always available, who don’t earn a thing until that telephone rings. Then they work for a while for an employment agency and go back home to wait for the phone to ring again.
Globalization is a magic galleon that spirits factories away to poor countries. Technology, so dizzying in its ability to reduce the labor time needed to produce anything, impoverishes and oppresses workers instead of liberating them from need and servitude. And labor is no longer necessary for making money. No need to transform raw materials, no need to lay a finger on them, since money is more
fertile when it makes love to itself. Siemens, one of the largest industrial companies in the world, earns more from its financial investments than from its productive activities.
In the United States, there is a lot less unemployment than in Europe, but new jobs are temporary, poorly paid, and without benefits. “I see it in my students,” says Noam Chomsky. “They’re afraid that if they don’t behave themselves they’ll never get a job, and that has a disciplinary effect on them.” At the five hundred largest U.S. companies, only one worker in ten has the privilege of a permanent, full-time job. In Great Britain, nine of every ten new jobs are temporary; in France, eight of every ten. History is leaping two centuries, but backwards: most workers in today’s world have neither job stability nor the right to severance, and job insecurity drives wages down. Six out of every ten North Americans are earning less than they did a quarter century ago, even though the U.S. economy has grown 40 percent over the past twenty-five years.
Despite this, thousands and thousands of Mexican braceros, the “wetbacks,” continue crossing the river that marks the border, risking their hides in search of a better life. In a couple of decades the ratio of U.S. to Mexican wages has doubled. The U.S. average used to be four times the Mexican; now it’s eight. As is well known by those whose investments migrate south in search of cheap labor, and the cheap labor that tries to migrate north, in Mexico work is the only commodity whose price goes down every month. Over the past twenty years, a good part of the middle class has fallen into poverty, the poor have fallen into misery, and the miserable have fallen off the charts. The law guarantees job stability for those who have jobs, but in reality it depends on the Virgin of Guadalupe.
Along with unemployment, job insecurity is the principal factor underlying the decline in pay, and it’s as common as the flu. No one is safe. Not even skilled workers in the most sophisticated and dynamic sectors of the world economy can breathe easy. There, too, contracting and piecework are rapidly replacing steady jobs. In telecommunications and electronics, “virtual companies” already operate with only a handful of employees. Tasks are carried out from computer to computer. Workers never meet one another or their employers, those fugitive ghosts who owe obedience to the laws of no nation. Highly skilled professionals—the poster children you see in magazines that praise the miracles of technology in an era of universal happiness—are condemned to uncertainty and job instability just like any poor kid, even though they earn much more.
Fear of losing your job and terror at the prospect of never finding one can’t be separated from a ridiculous statistic that could only seem normal in a world gone mad: over the past thirty years, formal working hours, which tend to be less than real hours worked, have gone up significantly in the United States, Canada, and Japan and diminished only slightly in a few European countries. This trend constitutes a treacherous attack on common sense by the upside-down world: the astonishing increase in productivity wrought by the technological revolution not only fails to raise wages but doesn’t even diminish working hours in countries with state-of-the-art machines. In the United States, frequent polls indicate that work, far more than divorce or the fear of death, is the principal source of stress, and in Japan karoshi, overwork, kills ten thousand people a year.
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Capitalist Realism
Lee Iacocca, once a star executive at Chrysler Corporation, visited Buenos Aires at the end of 1993. At a press conference he spoke with admirable sincerity about unemployment and education: “The problem of unemployment is a tough one. Today we can make twice as many cars with the same number of people. When they talk about improving people’s educational levels as a solution to the problem of unemployment, I’m always bothered by the memory of what happened in Germany. Education was put forward as the solution to unemployment, and the result was hundreds of thousands of frustrated professionals who then turned to socialism and rebellion. It’s not easy for me to admit, but I wonder if it wouldn’t be better for the unemployed to smarten up and go straight to McDonald’s to find a job.”
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When the French government decided in May 1998 to reduce the workweek from thirty-nine to thirty-five hours, offering a basic lesson in common sense, the measure set off cries of protest from businessmen, politicians, and technocrats. In Switzerland, where unemployment is not a problem, I witnessed an event some time ago that left me dumbfounded. A referendum was held on reducing working hours with no reduction in pay, and the Swiss voted the proposal down. I recall that I could not comprehend the result at the time. I confess I still don’t. Work has been a universal obligation ever since God sentenced Adam to earn his daily bread by the sweat of his brow, but we don’t have to take God’s will so literally. I suspect that this urge to work has something to do with fear of unemployment—though in Switzerland unemployment is an abstract threat—and with fear of free time. To be is to be useful; to be you have to be salable. Time that isn’t money, free time lived for the pleasure of living and not dutifully in order to produce, provokes fear. There’s nothing new about that. Along with greed, fear has always been the most active engine of the system that used to be called capitalism.
Fear of unemployment allows a mockery to be made of labor rights. The eight-hour day no longer belongs to the realm of law but to literature, where it shines among other works of surrealist poetry. And such things as employer contributions to pensions, medical benefits, workers’ compensation, vacation pay, Christmas bonuses, and dependents’ allowances are relics that belong in an archeological museum. Legally consecrated universal labor rights came about in other times, born of other fears: the fear of strikes and of the social revolution that seemed so close at hand. The powerful who trembled in fear yesterday are the powerful who strike fear today, and thus the fruits of two centuries of labor struggle get raffled off before you can say good-bye.
Fear, father of a large family, also begets hatred. In the countries of the North, it tends to cause hatred of foreigners who offer their labor at desperate prices. It’s the invasion of the invaded. They come from lands where conquering colonial troops and punishing military expeditions have disembarked a thousand and one times. Now this voyage in reverse isn’t made by soldiers obliged to kill but by workers obliged to sell themselves in Europe or North America at whatever price they can get. They come from Africa, Asia, and Latin America and, since the burial of bureaucratic power, from Eastern Europe as well.
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Statistics
In the British Isles, one out of every four jobs is part-time. And many are so part-time that it’s hard to say why they’re called jobs. To massage the numbers, as the English say, the authorities changed the statistical criteria for unemployment thirty-two times between 1979 and 1997 until they hit on the perfect formula: anyone who worked more than one hour a week was not unemployed. Not to boast, but that’s how we’ve measured unemployment in Uruguay for as long as I can remember.
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In the years of the great European and North American economic expansion, growing prosperity required more and more labor, and it didn’t matter that those hands were foreign, as long as they worked hard and charged little. In years of stagnation or weak growth, they become undesirable interlopers: they smell bad, they make a lot of noise, they take away jobs. Scapegoats of unemployment and every other misfortune, they are condemned to live with several swords hanging over their heads: the always imminent threat of deportation back to the grueling life they’ve fled and the always possible explosion of racism with its bloody warnings, its punishments: Turks set on fire, Arabs stabbed, Africans shot, Mexicans beaten. Poor immigrants do the hardest, poorest-paid work in the fields and on the streets. After work comes the danger. No magic ink can make them invisible.
Paradoxically, while workers from the South migrate north, or at least risk the attempt against all odds, many factories from the North migrate south. Money and people pass each other in the night. Money from rich countries travels to poor countries, attract
ed by dollar-a-day wages and twenty-five-hour days, and workers from poor countries travel, or try to travel, to rich countries, attracted by images of happiness served up by advertising or invented by hope. Wherever money travels, it’s greeted with kisses and flowers and fanfares. Workers, in contrast, set off on an odyssey that sometimes ends in the depths of the Mediterranean or the Caribbean or on the stony shores of the Rio Grande.
In another epoch, when Rome took over the entire Mediterranean and more, its armies returned home dragging caravans filled with enslaved prisoners of war. The hunt for slaves impoverished free workers. The more slaves there were in Rome, the more wages fell and the more difficult it was to find work. Two thousand years later, Argentine businessman Enrique Pescarmona praised globalization: “Asians work twenty hours a day,” he declared, “for eighty dollars a month. If I want to compete, I have to turn to them. It’s a globalized world. The Filipino girls in our offices in Hong Kong are always willing. There are no Saturdays or Sundays. If they have to work several days straight without sleeping, they do it, and they don’t get overtime and don’t ask for a thing.”
A few months before Pescarmona voiced this elegy, a doll factory caught fire in Bangkok. The workers, women who earned less than a dollar a day and ate and slept in the factory, were burned alive. The factory was locked from the outside, like the slave quarters of old.
Many industries emigrate to poor countries in search of cheap labor, and there’s plenty to be had. Governments welcome them as messiahs of progress bringing jobs on a silver tray. But the conditions of the new industrial proletariat bring to mind the word they used for work during the Renaissance, tripalium, which was also an instrument of torture. The price of a Disney T-shirt bearing a picture of Pocahontas is equivalent to a week’s wages for the worker in Haiti who sewed it at a rate of 375 T-shirts an hour. Haiti was the first country in the world to abolish slavery. Two centuries after that feat, which cost many lives, the country suffers wage slavery. McDonald’s gives its young customers toys made in Vietnamese sweatshops by women who earn eighty cents for a ten-hour shift with no breaks. Vietnam defeated a U.S. military invasion. A quarter of a century after that feat, which cost many lives, the country suffers globalized humiliation.