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Work Futures Daily | A Faustian Bargain
| Bottom-Up Unions | Who Manages The Managers? | Longer Commutes | Interruptions | Bullshit Jobs | George Santayana | Forgotten Newsletters |
Beacon NY | 2019–10–10 | We have — at least many of us — made a Faustian bargain: an exchange of our time for knowledge, a paycheck, and status in the world. Most of the stories in this issue touch on that in one way or another. The lousy commute, the bullshit job, the need to push back on manipulative bosses, the need to organize in retaliation to work-related grievances.
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Also, I have made my own Faustian bargain, which is why I have transitioned to a less frequent schedule here at Work Futures Daily: too many other obligations.
Stories
The Radical Manifesto Embraced by Google Workers and Uber Drivers | Naom Scheiber looks into the recent organizing in traditionally un-unionized sectors, like white collar tech workers, Uber drivers, and Starbucks retail staff, and finds the influence of Staughton Lynd, a labor historian, who wrote the first edition of Labor Law for the Rank and Filer in 1978, and updated editions in 2008 and 2011 with participation of Daniel Gross after the two met at a labor conference in 2000. Gross is 50 years younger than Lynd. The book draws its inspiration from the thinking behind the International Workers of the World, a form of bottom-up unionism from the early 1900s, that can be contrasted with top-down conventional unionism:
Mr. Lynd and Mr. Gross lay out a practical guide for staging a kind of workplace revolution that upends the balance of power between management and labor.
They explain, for example, when striking workers enjoy strong legal protections (in taking aim at unfair labor practices like retaliation) and when they are more exposed (in strikes focused strictly on economic demands). They discuss the circumstances under which workers can take their concerns to the media, such as a news conference in which coffee shop employees disclosed evidence of rat and insect infestations.
But more broadly, the book serves as a polemic contrasting mainstream “business unions” with what the Wobblies refer to as…
