The
day starts out much like any other. Children scurry about while their parents
try to corral them up for school. Mothers sweep well-worn floors and fathers
wipe the sleep out of their eyes before stepping outside, perhaps to go to work
or maybe just to get away from their wife’s sweeping. It is already warm, and
the laughter of children can be heard as they walk to school. Overhead the sun,
a vast crimson stain, begins its long climb to the top, a journey it makes
every day charting its slow, ponderous path.
But today is not just any other day. A
thin buzzing noise can be heard from off in the distance. It gets louder and
louder until it thunders with emphatic clarity. The sound of glass and metal being
promiscuously twisted together is heard, the buzzing’s terrible climax. A woman
screams before being joined by the cries of others. As a helicopter flies off
into the distance, the villagers frantically dig for the bodies below, whose
soft groans can be heard above the rubble. A finger there, a foot here; part of
a corpse hangs from a tree, set there by the force of a Hellfire missile.
There will be no school today. Brooms
will be left leaning, and it is doubtful that anyone will be going to work. Before
life resumes bodies will have to be accounted for, funerals planned, and people
– what is left of them – taken to the hospital. And though life will resume, as
it inevitably does, it will never be the same. There will be scars. Scars
etched into bodies corrupted with steel and lead; scars that pockmark the
earth, now cursed with the blood of humanity; and scars that cannot be seen, scars
that are only felt – and then, keenly – by the absence of others.
________
Half-way around the world, the day
begins. Coats are being buttoned and scarves shirked as children try to convince
their parents to not add another layer. In their hurry to make the bus, some
have forgotten their lunchboxes. Others have done so intentionally: the last
thing they want is another PB and J sandwich.
Back at home, the parents leaf through
the newspaper. An article in the middle of the “Business” pages locks their
attention, even before the coffee has taken effect. Anxious, they put down the
cup and grip the pages with both hands. A quick swelling sensation begins to
prick the bottom of their stomachs, like a heated iron; it is a feeling that
has become increasingly common. They will not be able to drink any more coffee
today, but, then again, they will not need it. In bold print the paper says that
the company they work for is threatening to leave the region unless workers
surrender their retirement benefits and the government grants it a big tax
break. The article explains: “If Boeing doesn’t get what it wants from
lawmakers and its workers by Wednesday, the giant airplane manufacturer vows to
‘pursue other options for locating… work’”.
At first they only feel anger but soon
a sense of despair seeps in. After all, what can they do? The past
few years have been “difficult” enough. One of the cars had to be returned
because its payments could not be kept up. And what about the house? Where will
they go if they cannot make the mortgage payments? The vacant lots across the
street… At work they have been talking about hard times because of the Recession,
but you saw the third quarter earnings… But there is not enough time to think.
Both parents don their uniforms and walk to the car. It is time to go to work.
A thin buzzing noise, one of tension and weariness, undulates in the back of
their minds. So off to work they go, to the business which is seeking “Forever
New Frontiers”.
_ _ _ _ _ _
Political action matters because it is
a form of human action. And like all forms of human action, its effects
resonate beyond their immediate implications. Here in the Pacific Northwest,
politics have been getting heated for some time. Boeing, one of the region’s
largest employers, is threatening to export its work elsewhere unless the
International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers agrees to dramatic
cuts in benefits, including the scrapping of workers’ retirement plans. But
this dispute is not just another of the perennial battles between capital and
labor. For as Boeing threatens to destroy the livelihood of its employees, it
is also holding a gun to the head of the Washington State Legislature: unless
it gets “some $8.7 billion dollars in tax breaks and other goodies” from the
government, it will bleed itself of its own workers, not because it has to but
because it can. In other situations people call this “blackmail” or
“terrorism.” Here it is called “economics” and “business as usual.”
Ironically, only a company as rich and
powerful as Boeing could strong-arm the legislature into holding a session
special to “save” it from leaving the region – that is, on its own accord. In
fact, the corporation is negotiating from a position of power, not because it
is actually under water or even close to being so. Instead, it is on the
offensive and taking no prisoners – not even among those who make the company
possible, its workers. An October 2013 article in ‘The New York Times’ explains that
the company is rolling in dough, as a “surge in sales of commercial jets…
[topped] analysts’ expectations for an eighth consecutive quarter,” and “Boeing
again raised its profit forecast for 2013”. A quick recovery from the effects
of the Great Recession and high demand for fuel-efficient jets has made Boeing
not only a stable company, but a highly profitable one.
Even so, its leadership feels the sadistic
compulsion to discipline its workers, to force them to tighten their belts and
prepare for an artificial period of scarcity. ‘The Oregonian’ reports that the
contract which Boeing is imposing on its workers would “replace workers’
defined-benefit pension plans with a 401(k)-style, defined-contribution plan.”
Moreover, the “contract provides wage increases of only 1 percent every other
year. It would lock in a wage structure that would see new hires take as long
as 16 years, instead of the current six years, to reach the top pay scale.”
What does all this mean? By moving to a
“401(k)-style, defined contribution” retirement plan, the company would place
the onus of retirement savings on its workers by shedding its existing
obligations. Put less clinically, they are scrapping workers’ retirement plans
for a much scrawnier, watered down ersatz. Their putative “plan” is essentially
to have workers take care of the retirement themselves while throwing in a
miserly “contribution” – “defined” so as to not be too generous – and call it
good. What is offered is nothing more than a skeleton of a “plan” created for
nothing more than the right to claim that a plan exists.
The motives behind the other measures –
better termed, punishments – are more obvious. By putting a low ceiling on wage
increases and devising a work hierarchy that is difficult to climb, Boeing will
erode the wages of its workers over time, extracting greater profits by taking
them out of the paychecks of the very people who make its profits possible. Not
everyone will feel the blow, though. CEO Jim McNerney will almost certainly be
awarded a sumptuous raise this year, just as he was “compensated” for his
Spartan sensibility with a cool $22.1 million dollars last year. The Board was
quick to explain that his raise was well-deserved, due to his “effective
leadership and successful implementation of Boeing’s business strategies” – the
substance of which we have already covered.
________
Let’s be honest. Boeing is one of the
wealthiest corporations in the region and not suffering from any financial difficulties.
Despite these facts, its executives have chosen to short-change workers. The
reason: they want more money for themselves and their shareholders. When
deconstructing the situation what one finds is absolutely distasteful. The
supposedly visionary “leadership” of McNerney and his partners in crime is
nothing more than a scheme to take from the vulnerable to pad the rich. Let us
examine these contradictions, though, as they are shared contradictions
which lie at the heart of modern economics.
For the past hundred years economics
has been guided by the principle of “managerial prerogative,” which states that
those at the top echelon should have total control over the company’s business
model. The workers – those who constitute the productive element of the company
– are to have no say over this process. Thus we arrive at that strange beast
known as the modern corporation, in which the execs claim that they are working
for the “good” of the company while threatening to gut the company of its workforce.
Through their own words and actions we see that, for them, the “company”
consists of no more than the management (themselves) and shareholders.
We are told, in effect, that Boeing does
not need, nor consist of, machinists, welders, and mechanics – people who build
airplanes – despite the fact that Boeing is, in fact, an airplane manufacturer. These
brilliant execs apparently believe that profits are generated by those who
count them, rather than through productive labor. If we follow their logic to
its necessary conclusion, we reach several novel findings:
1. Profit is generated by those who count it rather than through those who earn it via their labor. If we continue this line of argumentation we will also learn that, like Voltaire’s Pangloss, noses exist so that people can wear glasses.
2. The company leadership is the company itself. They do not preside over it, but, rather constitute the company in its totality. One may then say that they are not “leaders” in the usual sense; there is nothing within the company to “lead” but themselves. Their leadership thus consists of the pursuit of their own hopes and ambitions.
3. When the execs claim that Boeing “creates jobs,” they mean that Boeing creates jobs for those who matter: themselves. Everyone else is redundant, obsolete. After all, the “company” – that is, the leadership – can pick up and move whenever its wants. Indeed, that is precisely what it is doing now.
1. Profit is generated by those who count it rather than through those who earn it via their labor. If we continue this line of argumentation we will also learn that, like Voltaire’s Pangloss, noses exist so that people can wear glasses.
2. The company leadership is the company itself. They do not preside over it, but, rather constitute the company in its totality. One may then say that they are not “leaders” in the usual sense; there is nothing within the company to “lead” but themselves. Their leadership thus consists of the pursuit of their own hopes and ambitions.
3. When the execs claim that Boeing “creates jobs,” they mean that Boeing creates jobs for those who matter: themselves. Everyone else is redundant, obsolete. After all, the “company” – that is, the leadership – can pick up and move whenever its wants. Indeed, that is precisely what it is doing now.
In short, while dissecting the
principle of “Managerial prerogative” we find that it makes little sense even
when subjected to the most basic laws of reasoning. Indeed, this principle is
so course that one might expect to find it in a pre-classical text in which the
earth is presumed to be flat. What contradicts it is this simple observation:
in order to have a company one must first have workers. To attack the good of
the workers is to attack the good of the company itself, since it is the
workers who ultimately compose it. And because it is the workers who engage in
the day-to-day life of the company, to reject a priori their ideas about how the company
should run is both
short-sighted and unfair. It is also plain stupid.
________
But there is more to the Boeing hostage
crisis than workers, the state, and a nasty clique of businessman. While Boeing
extracts “profits” by skimming workers’ paychecks, it also accumulates wealth
by murdering people across the globe. A significant part of the corporation is
dedicated to the production of military hardware which is sold to some of the
worst human rights violators in the world. It is known, for example, that
Boeing sells missiles and other armaments to the Israeli army, which has in
turn used them to murder Lebanese and Palestinian civilians who live across
Israel’s border. I suppose, however, that this is just another part of Boeing’s
“effective” business model.
And Boeing is not unique is this regard.
Corporations like Caterpillar, Motorola and Lockheed Martin have long supplied
the tools that make Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine possible – and
profited handsomely from doing so. However, if “managerial prerogative” were replaced
by more participatory forms of decision-making then these business practices
would probably be less common. Worker participation would make business more
transparent, and prevent a small group of execs from making political decisions
– which kill thousands – under the guise of “business as usual.” And if
profiting from war, rapine and murder is “business as usual,” as so many elites are quick to interject, then it most certainly should be done away
with.
_ _ _ _ _ _
So what is to be done about Boeing? I
do not know. I do know, however, that “business as usual” does not work. I also know of a few people who surely have an idea or two in mind: the workers. Why not ask them?
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