The Invisible Handcuffs of Capitalism: How Market Tyranny Stifles the Economy by Stunting Workers (35 page)

Consumers also assist in guarding the commodity by putting up with the nuisance of cutting through a series of plastic or cardboard containers in order to extract the commodity. Next, the consumer must dispose of the wasted materials. A long chain of guard labor associated with the packaging extends from the production of the raw materials to those who finally haul away the garbage.

Much white-collar work consists of nothing more than guard labor. Even some blue-collar work that appears to be directly providing services is actually guard labor. Years ago, gas station attendants pumped gas. In exceptional cases, some people needed assistance in filling their tanks, but most people did not. The attendant, who was supposed to be a service worker, was actually performing guard labor to make sure the customers paid.

Eventually, this deception fell apart. Once modern technology allowed one person to lock and unlock the pumps at a distance, one guard could supervise several pumps. People began to pump the gas on their own, revealing the previous attendants’ chief function as guards.

The rise in guard labor represents a significant drain on economic potential. The United States Department of Labor predicts that by 2012, the nation will have more private security guards than high school teachers.
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Although such comparisons do not constitute proof of inefficiency, they do indicate a distorted set of priorities.

Guard Labor in the Workplace

Where the commodity in question is the employees’ working time, the direct supervision of labor represents an obvious form of guard labor. Rather than empower workers to take on more responsibility, employers restrict workers’ autonomy by relying instead on guard labor (supervisors).

This form of guard labor has a distinct Procrustean dimension, but the degree of Procrusteanism is indeterminate. Employers have a
choice. They can either empower workers to take on more responsibility or they can restrict employees’ autonomy, relying instead on discipline to enforce their commands.

The nature of guard labor reflects larger social conditions. For example, according to historical accounts of the decisive Battle of Salamis in 480 B.C., the Athenian navy with 360 ships under sail defeated 1,000 Persian ships. The Persians used slave rowers who required squads of armed overseers. Their weapons were intended for the control of the rowers rather than for fighting enemies. As a result, the Athenians, with free men at the oars, had a distinct advantage since they had more space for archers and infantrymen on deck.
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Despite the traditional celebration of the Athenian roots of Western democratic society, the United States is coming to resemble Persia (or Sparta) more than Athens.

The growing costs of guard labor offer a revealing window into the self-defeating nature of Procrusteanism. In 1890, U.S. supervisors made up a mere 0.8 percent of the labor force. By 1979, just before the time when corporations began their efforts to flatten their hierarchical bureaucratic structures, the share of supervisors in the labor force had risen to 11.7 percent. By 2002, that number had risen by more than a third to 15.7 percent.
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In addition, many millions of workers supply the material resources necessary for the supervisors to carry out their work, including the modern technology used to spy on workers.

The rising share of guard labor is not a necessary consequence of modernization. The workers producing labor-saving advanced spy technology are not included in the statistics for guard labor, although they should be. However, this estimate does include prisoners and the unemployed, whose fate serves to warn existing providers of labor power to keep their noses to the grindstone. These two factors partially offset each other.

Significant differences exist among modern societies. In particular, the United States uses a far higher share of supervisory workers than any other advanced capitalist economy, employing 14.9 percent of its labor force in some sort of supervisory position. England, with 13.4 percent, is not far behind. In comparison, Sweden, with its more egalitarian
society, has only 4.4 percent of its labor force working as supervisors.
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The share of guard labor appears to be closely related to the extent of inequality.
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The shameful increase in inequality in the United States over the last thirty-five years, approaching a degree akin to that found in impoverished Third World countries, tears at the social fabric. The ensuing conflict spills over into the workplace, intensifying the demand for guard labor. As a result, even teachers have to perform their share of guard labor.

Over and above the time and resources devoted to the direct exercise of authority, the Procrustean economy requires additional resources to maintain the authority of guard labor. This aspect of guard labor is probably most transparent in the military. For example, part of the training of soldiers includes marching around in formation. The ability to perform in this way does nothing to improve the soldiers’ ability to fight.

Nothing would make soldiers more vulnerable in a battle than to march in formation. Instead, marching according to the officers’ commands merely habituates the troops to take orders without a moment’s reflection. Once responding to command becomes instinctual, soldiers in the heat of battle will instantaneously follow orders regardless of the consequences for their own well-being.

Procrusteans welcome this same kind of mindless obedience. Frederic Natusch Maude, a British officer and later an influential theoretician of military tactics, understood how military training would suit industrialists:

The sense of duty (the essence of a man’s whole teaching in the ranks) [has become] the very corner-stone of modern industrial efficiency. I submit that if no Army existed they would have to create one, simply as a schoolroom for the factory.
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Here are the impressions of a U.S. engineer of a scene at Toyota, which seems to follow Maude’s advice:

A large group of company employees were lined up, military-style, shouting company slogans. They were all dressed in Toyota company uniforms
of one-piece jumpers and soft-brimmed hats. The hat was the same style used by Japanese soldiers during the Second World War, and it was standard issue for all employees at the company. One employee stood at the front directing the drill. He would shout out a slogan and the group would shout back in unison. This display of group obedience reminded me of old films of the Japanese military. “But why here?” I wondered. “Why would a company need to engage in military drills?”
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The point of the observer, who had been working for a Toyota-related firm, was that the system dissipated enormous energy in enforcing dysfunctional hierarchies.

The reliance on guard labor is counterproductive because it does not just enforce discipline. It also blocks workers’ development. That Toyota profited as much as it did in engaging its workers is a testimony to what could be accomplished without the irrational incentives of capitalism.

Samuel Gompers, the first president of the American Federation of Labor, gave another example of the possibility of a system that transcended markets. Gompers recalled that in his youth, late in the nineteenth century when he worked as a cigar maker, one of the workers would be selected to read books, including those of Karl Marx, out loud. This reading cost the employers nothing except the expense of providing a chair. Instead, the others would pay the readers by crediting them with making some of their cigar production.
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This environment provided a rich education to people who would have otherwise had no opportunity for further formal education.

This arrangement proved incompatible with an advanced capitalist economy. Later, as the cigar industry replaced adult male workers with unskilled young girls, the organization of work took a giant step backwards. Gompers complained to a committee of the United States Senate that the cigar industry had instituted harsh authority relations to diminish the autonomy of the young cigar workers. The employers prohibited the girls employed as cigar strippers from conversing with each other under pain of fine or dismissal.
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Prisons

The metaphor of guard labor becomes literal for many of the workers in the employ of the government. Between 1982 and 2001, employment in the criminal justice system in the United States rose from 1.2 million to 2.3 million people.
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The figures have risen considerably since then.

The prison clientele has also multiplied. In a flourish of Procrusteanism, by 2003 the number of prisoners had reached more than six times the level in 1972. As of year-end 2006, more than 2.2 million people in the United States were in federal or state prisons or in local jails, representing a population larger than that of seventeen states. An additional five million adults were under probation or parole jurisdiction.
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Between 1982 and 2001, the cost of the criminal justice system in the United States soared from $37.8 billion to $167 billion, representing about $600 per American. In California, the state has built twenty-three prisons in the last twenty-five years, in contrast to a single new campus for the University of California and another campus for the larger state university system. Prisons now claim a greater share of the state budget than higher education, and the disparity keeps becoming more extreme. Prison guards presently earn more than assistant professors.

Although a criminal justice system is necessary, the U. S. system is absurdly excessive. The incarceration rate in the United States is five to eight times as high as in Canada or Western Europe. Perhaps symbolic of the end of the Cold War, the United States has now displaced Russia as the world’s leading incarcerator.
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Prisons represent an important ingredient in a Procrustean economy. Besides serving as a vital component of guard labor in protecting private property, the criminal justice system threatens members of the working class who might resist the discipline of the market. What might pass for an immature prank for a wealthy college student will be punished as a serious offense for a member of the working class. Perhaps nothing symbolizes the class nature of the criminal justice system as much as the differential penalties for powdered cocaine and
crack cocaine. A gram of crack cocaine (stereotypically associated with dangerous black youths) draws a far harsher sentence than an equal amount of powdered cocaine (commonly thought to be the misguided recreation of the more affluent). More often than not, the courts require nothing more of privileged young people than to enter some sort of clinic.

The intended lesson of the prison-industrial complex is that working-class people are expected to work hard and toe the line. No deviations will be tolerated. Only if they get rich will society permit them to do more or less what they choose.

Less Obvious Forms of Guard Labor

Business meetings offer an interesting analogue to the military marches. The ostensible purpose of meetings is to improve efficiency, but anybody who attends a few soon realizes that they are mostly pointless. Simon Ramo, the ninety-six-year-old co-founder of TRW Inc. (a conglomerate that Northrop Grumman acquired for its defense business in 2002), estimated that he had attended more than 40,000 meetings—an average of two or three per workday. Ramo guessed that about 30,000 of these meetings could have been shorter or eliminated altogether without any loss to the company—even ignoring the extra productivity that the company could enjoy allowing people to work rather than attend meetings.
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Since he probably called many of these meetings himself, he may be giving too much credit to them. Yet the frequency of meetings continues to rise. The average executive participated in twice as many meetings in the 1980s as in the 1960s.
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Much of the time spent in meetings is more ceremonial than functional. People come face to face with their superiors. Each of the underlings sees how others fall in line and realizes that to express any dissent can jeopardize a career. Meetings thus function as a means to impose discipline on white-collar workers, much like the soldiers’ marches.

At issue here is the dissipation of productive potential in the effort to maintain authority relationships. Such efforts prop up authority,
consume time, energy, and resources, but even more costly consequences are at stake.

Although managers who call meetings might justify them in terms of improving morale, meetings negatively affect workers. Survey data indicate that frequent meetings reduce participants’ sense of well-being.
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Besides, authoritarian relations themselves snuff out valuable creativity. A system more devoted to meeting the needs of people and less intent on solidifying hierarchy would encourage more autonomy and voluntary collaboration.

Unfortunately, the human and economic costs of guard labor usually pass unnoticed. However, despite the outpouring of economic rhetoric praising the productive merits of markets, in a Procrustean world, authority always trumps efficiency. A more rational system would both nurture and draw upon the expertise of the entire workforce rather than relying on a system of command and control.

By any rational standard, guard labor should be in decline. Rapid progress in information technologies should have the effect of reducing the number of people keeping track of others, but instead, business has largely taken advantage of information technologies to intensify the Procrustean workplace. At least some of the efforts of scientists and engineers who develop such technologies should be included as guard labor. The same logic holds for the workers who build the computers and maintain the buildings that support this technology.

Some forms of guard labor become so familiar that people might not recognize it. Consider the ubiquitous cash register. The original purpose of the cash register was to help storeowners deter employee theft. Since the register kept a record of each transaction that the employee rang up, clerks were more likely to deposit customers’ payments. Warren Buffett’s partner, Charles Munger, once proposed, “The cash register did more for human morality than the Congregational Church.”
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