 Workers’ productivity makes bosses richer. Photo: Bill Hackwell |
I know I can
Be what I wanna be
If I work hard at it
I’ll be where I want to be.
This is the chorus of the song, “I Can” by rap artist Nas. The words are supposed to convey an important life lesson: work hard and you will succeed. It’s a lesson that is drummed into people’s heads from cradle to grave.
But does hard work really lead to riches and success? Two recent headlines point to a very different reality.
A Sept. 1 Associated Press article leads, “Americans most productive workers.” Days earlier, on Aug. 27, an AP headline declared, “Ranks of poor, uninsured rose in 2003.”
How can it be that U.S. workers are the most productive, working harder than ever, and at the same time we are being driven into poverty?
The first article is based on a survey by the UN’s International Labor Organization that found that output per worker in the United States is $60,728 per year. The closest competitor in this category was Belgium, with $54,333 per worker per year, nearly 10 percent below the U.S. The study also found that U.S. workers work more hours than their European counterparts, averaging 1,825 hours in 2002.
The second article is based on a Census Bureau study showing that the number of people living in poverty had increased by 1.3 million in 2003, to 35.8 million people. The number of people without health insurance grew by 1.4 million during the same period, to nearly 45 million people.
Workers are working harder. They are more productive. And yet for millions—for the majority—the standard of living is dropping.
Growing misery
According to the new statistics, about 12.5 percent of the population lives in poverty. That in itself is staggering—one out of every eight people in the U.S. But a look at the definition of the poverty line makes the picture even worse.
According to the U.S. Census in 2000, an individual earning over $8,959 does not live in poverty. But the average rent in 2000 was $602 a month—$7,224 a year. That leaves about $33 a week for all other expenses: food, clothing, transportation and any other expense one might incur. This is obviously unrealistic. The figures for families are no rosier.
A closer look at the statistics makes the reality even grimmer. For example, approximately 800,000 of the 1.3 million people driven into poverty in 2003 were children, the Census Bureau reported.
So it should be no surprise that infant mortality—the number of children dying before their first birthday—soared 8 percent in New York City in 2003. In some predominantly African American and Latino neighborhoods like Fort Greene in Brooklyn and Tremont in the Bronx, the infant mortality rate stood at close to 150 percent of the national average.
A major cause of the growing misery affecting millions of U.S. workers is unemployment. Officially, 8 million people were counted as being unemployed in the U.S. in August 2004—a rate of 5.4 percent (1). But that only represents part of the story.
The official statistics are based on the number of people employed or looking for work. Writing in the Sept. 6 Newsday, employment advocate Robert Walker writes, “75.7 million adults, 16 years or older, are not in the labor force (not actively looking for jobs in the past month).” (2) The vast majority of these people are not being counted in the “official” unemployment percentile.
Walker paints a grim portrait. “Half of the adult population is working less than full-time or not working at all,” he writes.
Are these statistics an accident? Is the working class being driven into poverty, even though we are working harder? Is this a coincidence, or is a real life lesson or fact being revealed? Are escalating unemployment and poverty—coupled with various other problems for the working class—linked to the rise in productivity profits for the bosses?
 Poverty hits Native, Black and Latino communities hardest. |
Bosses’ gain, workers’ loss
In his 1847 pamphlet “Wage-Labour and Capital”, Karl Marx explained that what’s good for the boss is bad for the worker: “The interests of capital and the interests of wage-labor are diametrically opposed to each other. C9 Profit and wages remain as before, in inverse proportion.” (3)
Marx lived at a time when workers were just beginning to fight against the grow ing misery caused by industrialization. He tried to analyze the economy so that workers could develop effective strategies and tactics to win in their battles with the bosses.
Marx began by analyzing production in the capitalist system—the system where factories, machinery, and other means of production are privately owned by a handful of wealthy capitalists. Under this system, the bosses’ profits come from surplus value, which is the part of work done above and beyond covering the costs of wages, machinery, and raw materials.
Productivity is a way of measuring the amount of surplus value that the workers create. It depends on several factors, like the amount of time a worker works and the technology available to do the work. But since surplus value is owned by the boss, being more productive does not necessarily benefit the worker. On the contrary, the gap between workers and bosses widens.
The bosses are only motivated by the drive to maximize their profits. As each corporation competes with other capitalists to secure markets, they are driven to lower cost by reducing wages and benefits. If they cannot expand, they will die.
For workers, however, the same process leads to a race to the bottom, with an expansion of low-wage and part-time jobs and the slashing of pensions and benefits. The gap between profits and wages grows larger.
This contradiction cannot disappear within a capitalist society. It is what explains the side-by-side growth of productivity and misery.
Fighting back
Faced with increasing poverty, unemployment and lack of health care, thousands of workers are looking for ways to fight to improve their lives. For example, over five hundred hospital workers in Alameda County, California, staged a one-day strike on word of possible layoffs. One hundred jobs had already been eliminated with no reduction in work—an example of how “productivity increases” impact the working class.
“I am tired of being short-staffed every day,” striker Jonna Freskos told the Los Angeles Times on Aug. 31.
Workers have been able to win bigger shares of the surplus value that they create by waging struggles which draw in wider layers of the working class overall. The struggles of the 1930s, when workers in and out of the labor movement joined in carrying out militant campaigns for public assistance and against evictions, forced the government to provide assistance to millions. (4)
Socialists stand with all these struggles, supporting them and leading them where we can. Our goal is to raise awareness among the millions of our class, employed and unemployed, in and out of unions, that our ultimate liberation will come when we end the system of exploitation where our productivity means their gain. By breaking the bonds of private profit, we can unleash true productivity: where our work and our social conditions rise hand in hand.
Notes
1. “Employment Situation Summary,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, August 2004.
2. Newsday, September 6, 2004.
3. Karl Marx, Wage-Labour and Capital, International Publishers Co., Inc., 1933, p. 39.
4. Gordon Black, “Organizing the Unemployed: the Early 1930s,” http://faculty.washington.edu/gregoryj/cpproject/black.htm, July 20, 2003.
