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So Lewis like is a term called precariat.
And I'm going to tell a little story.
And we're going to see if this actually fits into that category.
So when I was in high school, I was hired to work in a grocery store.
And this was at a time when the minimum wage was $3.35 an hour
which is much lower than it is now.
But I was happy.
I was happy to get that.
And I was able to join a union which I did.
And I looked around, and I saw that there were some older people who
made a career working in the grocery store.
And they worked for many years in the grocery store.
And they got 40 hours a week in a pretty good salary and benefits, vacation.
They had the opportunity to buy stock in the company.
And I was just working after school, so I didn't really
want to get a 40 hour a week job, yet.
But there were other people, young adults a few years older than me,
who wanted to do that.
And what I discovered was the grocery store
was systematically refusing to hire them at 40 hours a week.
Instead they would hire them at 20 hours a week
and tell them to go get another part time job somewhere else.
So is this what you mean?
This is the essence.
And the term actually comes from a guy named Guy Standing.
But it is a way to juxtapose the sort of stable work of the post-war with them
more unstable work of today.
So there is an industrial proletariat, that
is all those people working in factories,
that have long term contracts, that have steady wages, that
have overt time, that have health insurance, that have job stability.
What we live in now is something that is called the precariat,
or the precarious proletariat.
In that so many people are struggling to make ends meet on his part time
jobs, on these temporary gigs, on these uncertain futures,
and it's that instability that characterizes the labor force beginning
in the 1980s and '90s.
It's something that really comes out the 1970s and stagflation.
But people start to realize that there's actually not
going to be one career for you going forward in your life.
And this is terrifying.
This is at odds with the entire American promise of the post-war.
And this is how most people begin to encounter
the new instability of the neoliberal era.
OK.
So now I get it, so precariat and proletariat.
It's kind of a play on words.
So the precariat replaces the old proletariat.
But what are the advantages of this for people involved in the system?
Are there advantages for the employers, advantages for investors,
advantages for workers?
Are there advantages?
Yes.
So the idea, as initially the idea of having temporary workers as part
of your firm is-- Well of course in the 1950s and '60s,
there were temporary workers.
And they were mostly just people who filled in when people got sick.
But by the '70s and '80s, they start to become almost an adjunct part
of this core part of the workers.
So that as times went high or times went low,
you could hire temporary workers as needed.
And this would protect those core workers.
So this set of core workers in a corporation,
whether it was industrial firm or a service firm,
would be able to have that post-war life of a stable job.
And this part right here would fluctuate.
But as time went on, by the '80s and '90s,
especially in the '90s, as you start to get into the era of downsizing,
especially after the recession of the early '90s,
companies begin to think about, well why even
have this core part of the firm anymore?
Why not just constantly outsource, constantly employ
temporary workers who we can employ without the need to pay benefits,
without any need of obligation in the long term
between the firm and the worker?
And this is really where it comes from, this instability?
So what are the consequences for workers on the one hand?
And what are the consequences for investors?
Yeah.
For workers, for those who are at the top of society,
for instance, consultants and entrepreneurs
with their own little firms.
Then it's a great thing.
They can really engage with this more unstable world
and create opportunities for themselves.
But for most people, people who are stringing together two three
jobs at the time, who work as adults at McDonald's or at a grocery
store, a job that would have been for teenagers in the post-war,
it becomes increasingly difficult to make ends meet.
And you can see this shift in the very structure
of the labor force driving part of the new inequality.
So for investors and for the corporations
that those investors buy stock from, what
we see is this time period from the '80s until 2013,
we see tremendous gains in the stock market and into profitability
and the stock prices on these companies.
Are those shifts directly related to shift
to a precariat model and the long run up in the profitability
and the capitalization of American companies?
Well certainly, the ability to depress wages
increases the profits of corporations.
And the ability to threaten any worker with the outsourcing or replacement
by temporary worker enables capital to have
a basically new arsenal against workers.
They're no longer invest in the long term stability.
They're only interested in short term profits.
And this shareholder value that is maximized through the stock market
takes priority, though there are other stakeholders in the corporation,
whether it's managers, workers, or even consumers.
So as I was working at the grocery store,
I'm looking around at these older people and also
looking at the sort of narrowing opportunity
for a lot of younger people.
I started to wonder, why is it that this company didn't try this
20 years ago or 30 years ago or 40 years ago?
It was obviously connected to increasing profitability.
Well it goes back to what we're saying about conglomerates and about
the post-war corporation and planning.
So that these corporations were afraid, they
were terrified of being market oriented.
They wanted to bring everything inside and to keep order.
And it was that long term planning, that belief in managerial science
which would make corporations profitable.
But by the 1970s, it's a way for companies to-- As companies become
more market oriented, as they begin to become more interested in cutting up
into the component parts and thinking about spreading themselves out
along the value chain, that they begin to say,
well maybe we don't need to have a stable labor force.
Maybe we can just put that part over here,
especially if it's not a high value-add part of the corporation.
And so they can employ contract labor manufacturers for manufacturing
and just keep the most essential parts of the labor force inside.
So that Nike, Apple don't manufacture anything.
They keep all their designers in-house, all the sort of high salary,
very expensive, high knowledge staff in-house.
And everything else is outsourced.
Nike and Apple do not own factories.
And this is the essence of the transformation not just for labor
but for capital in the last 30 years.
Alright, so wait a minute, you're telling this story
as if everything happen because of a change in what managers believe.
And I know that's part of the story.
Etiology does matter.
Oh yeah.
Definitely, It matters.
I agree.
But at the same time, I know that if the company I worked for
had attempted to impose those kinds of contracts in previous decades,
then there could quite possibly have been a strike.
And the union might not have won the strike,
but it would have been very uncomfortable for the company.
That much is sure.
No.
You're absolutely right.
So through the '70s and '80s, you see a succession of buyouts of unions
right on the docks, in factories, especially auto factories,
of people who are being bought out of their contracts
and replaced by younger workers who have less protection, less representation.
And temporary workers are part of the system.
They're part of a system that protects these core workers
with their good post-war Fordist union jobs.
And alongside them are these younger workers who never get access.
They're part of this post Fordist economy that's unstable,
that's flexible, that has all these benefits for shareholders but not
for workers.
And so there is this juxtaposition.
So Americans unions are somewhat complicit in this.
In that, it benefits the union workers but not possible union workers
of the generation.
So you have sort of a split in the workplace, right?
So you have an older generation of people
who think of themselves as working class,
and they identify as a working class and polls as blue collar workers.
But they've decided that their interests are different from the younger workers.
And the younger workers really are the precariat at that point.
And It goes back to partially what you were just saying about whether or not
they identified as working class.
They identify as unionists.
But really this sort of larger notion of class
as sort of a radical identity in America is really ebbing by this point.
So they identify as people who work and in these unions,
but they don't see themselves as part of a radical class.
And this is both the promise and the poison
of the way in which American unions become
part of corporate liberalism in the post-war.
They rely on the state to enforce their contracts.
They rely on the state to enforce their identity.
And so they abandon these older notions of radical class.
And so the AFL CIO is successful in many ways
but not in sustaining itself for the next generation.