Beginning with day one of the election campaign--which now seems ages ago--and all through the long tortuous process up to this very day, one dominant theme has run through all the speeches, all the position papers, all the promises. It can be summed up in three words: jobs, jobs, jobs.Promises of jobs were made by all the politicians--Bush, Perot, and of course the Clinton-Gore team. There is no question that this was the principal issue in the campaign and attracted the most earnest attention.
All the messages from the politicians and print and electronic media were directed to the mass of the population--the workers, the unemployed and the middle class. The message consisted of assurances that the issue of jobs would be taken care of. Each political grouping, each candidate had his own approach. Yet if we examine all this more closely, we note that one aspect was never referred to by either the Bush administration or by president-elect Clinton. And with only two weeks left before the inauguration, it still is overlooked as though it does not exist.
Talking to the wrong people
These politicians have been preaching only to the masses who are already convinced they need jobs. They have made no approach, direct or indirect, to those with authority over the jobs question. And who are they? They are the giant Fortune 500 corporations that control the basic arteries of the economy.
No direct approach has been made to them. And yet they hold all the levers of economic authority.
Let us take one example which literally stares in the face of hundreds of thousands and could affect millions of jobs. Let us consider IBM.
Have they heard about the message to save jobs? They have proceeded as though this does not concern them whatsoever. They have laid off tens of thousands of workers and plan to eliminate the jobs of thousands more.
The question is: Has Clinton talked to them? Has he raised the issue to them?
Thousands of workers are directly and immediately concerned and have been asking themselves: "Why hasn't he said something to them?"
The layoff of 40,000 or so workers from IBM alone last summer may not seem so much in light of the millions of unemployed. But what is often not considered when these layoffs are mentioned is the so-called ripple effect. It often leads to four or five times as many jobs lost.
But IBM is not alone. The same cruel practice has been employed by General Motors as well. The number of GM workers who have lost their jobs is roughly equivalent to IBM. Furthermore, GM has also acted as though all this talk about saving jobs does not concern it.
None of the giant corporations has paid the slightest attention to the flood of daily promises on saving jobs, made more imperative by the continuing process of so-called restructuring. A so-called auto summit meeting of the three big U.S. automakers, along with UAW President Owen Bieber, with a broad agenda, does not specifically include discussion of layoffs and recalls.
Is it because they don't understand that all these promises about creating jobs, halting the layoffs or beginning the recalls requires the collaboration of those who control the arteries of economic life in the U.S., the Fortune 500? Otherwise, how is the process of re-employment ever to begin?
Almost every day since the election, Clinton and his horde of advisers, many of them economists, have been on television making statements of one sort or another about their grand plans for the economy. Yet neither these advisers nor Clinton himself have thought it necessary to publicly warn the giant monopoly corporations to halt the process of layoffs.
Why hasn't Clinton said something to them? Of course, the unemployed workers may have welcomed the message of job creation, recalls and the halting of layoffs, but isn't this really directed at the wrong people? Shouldn't these issues be raised directly with those who really wield the power? Yet this has been avoided.
The leaders of the union movement, of the mass organizations of women, of Black, Latin, Asian and Native people, of lesbians and gays, of the thousands of progressive organizations of all kinds need to raise this issue directly or it will be lost.
Where does the buck stop?
It's been almost two years since a small company, Tastee Bread, threatened to close its plant in Queens, N.Y. The workers and the people in the neighborhood, failing to get any satisfactory reply from the company, appealed to the mayor of New York City. The mayor in turn said he had no power over the company, that it was perhaps a matter for the governor. The governor passed this on to the federal government.
We are now at the stage where a similar process has been followed after literally hundreds of small plants closed, where local and state authorities have passed the buck to the federal government because it is the repository of political power in the United States.
How must this issue be addressed? By the president-elect himself.
It must be raised that the Fortune 500--the engine of the capitalist system, the basic core of the capitalist industrial and technological establishment--need to be directly spoken to, especially since they pretend--as do IBM, General Motors, General Electric and dozens of others--that they are not relevant to the issue of jobs.
There are two ways for the president-elect to proceed. One is to raise the issue to them informally. It could have been taken up at a secret Blair House meeting of Clinton and his principal economic advisers described recently by Time magazine (Jan. 4). "In the early evening of December 7, a small group of economic advisers met secretly with Bill Clinton at Blair House in Washington," says the magazine. "Their message was depressing: the long-term outlook for the nation's economy is worse than the public appreciates."
If this is so, then all the more was it imperative to publicly call this to the attention of the leaders of the capitalist economic establishment, the Fortune 500 giant corporations. But obviously nothing has come of it.
Kennedy and Big Steel
There is, however, a precedent available to Clinton from previous administrations, particularly the Kennedy administration. At that time, the issue was voluntary price controls, especially by big business. The U.S. Steel corporation, headed at that time by Roger Blough, unilaterally decided not to abide by these so-called voluntary price controls. When called to the White House for a meeting with Kennedy and Arthur Goldberg, then Secretary of Labor, Blough arrogantly brought with him a press release outlining his company's refusal to go along with price controls.
Kennedy was incensed, and gave Blough a dressing down himself. Of course, Kennedy was a member of the ruling class in his own right, since he came from an extremely wealthy family. He was especially sensitive to such insubordination.
It was not that U.S. Steel or the Kennedy administration were so deeply concerned about the voluntary price controls, since they were about to be lifted anyway. It was the arrogance of the corporation. Kennedy finally forced the steel magnate to come to the White House after he had proceeded as though it didn't exist.
Of course, Clinton is not yet in office. But enough time has passed since the election for him to get the lay of the land. It is impossible that the leaders of the giant industrial and technological apparatus of the U.S. are unaware that the issue foremost in the minds of the general public right now is jobs.
Under these conditions, Clinton could, without going beyond the scope of any capitalist president of the U.S., take measures to bring this crucial issue to the forefront and show the responsibility of the Fortune 500 in the ugly phenomenon of continuing unemployment, plant closings and layoffs.
There is an appropriate strategy available to Clinton that does not by any means go beyond the constitutional limits of the president. He could issue an executive order directed to the entire Fortune 500 industrial-technological apparatus of the U.S. It could tell them that 1) they are ordered to cease and desist from any further layoffs; 2) that they must present a plan for the recall of laid-off employees, and 3) that the Clinton administration will invoke its authority to call a special session of Congress with an agenda exclusively confined to one item: how to absorb the unemployed back into industry and make the necessary appropriations for such an endeavor.
This is the minimum possible for an administration that genuinely seeks to address the very acute problems created by the capitalist economic crisis.
It would be foolhardy for the progressive labor movement as well as the many organizations of Black, Latino, Native, and Asian people, of women, of lesbians and gays, to rely on the Clinton administration alone to carry out such measures. This program, modest and minimal though it is, must have the backing of the millions upon millions of workers and oppressed masses throughout the country.
How to reverse downsizing
There has been a historic tendency on the part of the capitalist establishment to downsize the industrial and technological apparatus. This tendency has been remorseless and relentless and continues unabated to this very day. It operates on the assumption that profits come before people. Each of the industrial and technological monopolies, particularly the giant ones, employ hordes of advisers on how to accelerate this inhuman process without any letup.
The urgent task facing the people, and the working class in particular, is to reverse this insidious process by insisting on a reabsorption of the millions of unemployed. The heads of the capitalist establishment must get the message that what they must do is not continue the downsizing of establishments but reabsorb the unemployed work force.
Science and technology must be used to produce rather than be instruments for garnering lucrative profits at the expense of the destruction of productive facilities. Some of these may not be profitable, but can be highly useful from the point of view of human needs. This is the message that must be brought out loud and clear.
It must be made clear that technology, which is developing at an especially rapid pace, must be an instrument to respond to human needs and not to the inhuman, insatiable lust for profit of the few at the expense of the millions.
Corporate execs being pounded
Of late, particularly since the crisis at GM, IBM and dozens of other giant corporations, it has become the fashion for literally hordes of economic advisers, consultants, and insider analysts of all sorts and shades to goad the heads of the large corporations into accelerating the process of restructuring. Quite a number have gone to all lengths attacking the chief executives and chairmen of the boards in language which would astonish a reader of 20 or 30 years ago, when these giant corporations were enjoying lush profits with a minimum of technological or labor problems.
But now it is commonplace to attack the heads of General Motors and ask why they should not be removed. It happened in April when GM removed Robert Stempel as chairman of the executive committee and replaced Lloyd Reuss, Stempel's number two man, as president. An article in Fortune magazine in July 1992 asked: "Could IBM be ripe for a similar shakeup? ... The conditions are there for it happening, absolutely."
What is the meaning of all this? According to Kim Clark, a Harvard Business School professor, "What you have here are two companies [GM and IBM] that at one point dominated their industries by producing very large products--mainframe computers and big cars--and they created organizations that were good at doing that. Then the world changed."
"The similarities between the giants are striking," says Noel Pichy, a professor at the University of Michigan business school. "GM and IBM are both number-one companies whose inward-looking culture keeps them from waking up on time."
Like trained animals, this horde of experts knows when to keep silent and when to start barking at their masters. Why are they barking so loud now, sometimes calling for the resignation of the top executives? It is to force them to accelerate the process of downsizing and dismantling the plants and equipment in the interest of super-profits. The attacks are not directed at the capitalist corporations themselves, but only at the executives. The objective is to goad them into the unsavory business of cutting loose not only the ordinary workers but also managers, all in the name of strengthening the profit motive, the bottom line.
This ilk is not attacking the capitalist system. Their function is similar to that of scabherding and strikebreaking consulting companies. Only the job varies, not the objective.
And what is their so-called analysis? As Pichy puts it, GM and IBM have an "inward-looking culture." So there you have it. This is the problem. Would the problem be different if the culture were outward-looking?
Capitalist competition and capitalist monopoly
What they seem to close their eyes to is that both corporations, not to speak of dozens of others, got to the top of the heap due to the very process they are continually urging on management--that is, more and more cutthroat capitalist competition. They eliminated so many rivals that capitalist competition went through a quantitative growth as a social process and turned into a new quality, monopoly.
It has nothing to do with culture, inward-looking or outward-looking. The pursuit of capitalist competition ultimately results in the destruction of some of the rivals and the establishment of a monopoly. Capitalist monopoly, in its turn, begins to evince a familiar disease--hardening of the arteries. It is a sociological process, the result of the driving forces of capitalist competition and its inevitable tendency toward conversion into capitalist monopoly.
Monopoly does not abolish competition. Capitalist competition continues on a higher plane and exists side by side with capitalist monopoly. This is the problem.
The productive forces engendered by the capitalist mode of production have grown so large, for instance in auto and in such high-tech fields as IBM, that they have outgrown the confines of private property. The answer, according to these experts, is to break them up, downsize them. For instance, IBM's method is to break up its organization into 13 competing units. This is a reactionary process because its sole purpose is to downsize in the interest of profit.
What is needed, however, is not a sledgehammer to break down what has been built up via the competitiveness of private property, but the conversion of private property into socialized property, to go from competition and monopoly to socialist cooperation. This is the only alternative. Using a sledgehammer in the conditions of such high technology is pure and simple vandalism. It is also costly, not only in terms of the productive forces but more so in human life, as we are seeing.
The only process that can reverse the downsizing is the socialization of the means of production and the recognition that the primary reason for developing the means of production is for human need and not for profit.