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NEWS & LETTERS, October 2004Workshop TalksOvertime ‘reform’ to extend working dayby Htun Lin Bush’s Labor Department claims that their new rules on overtime pay will benefit many more workers on the lower pay scale than those it hurts on the higher pay scale. The real impact of the measure is to deny overtime pay for much of the non-unionized professional workforce--the most prominent examples belonging to categories such as nursing, clerical, and other administrative and technical service industries. Less than ten percent of the American workforce today even belongs to an official labor union. Many workers don’t realize that even though they are “professional,” or might consider themselves proudly non-union, what they enjoy today in pay and prestige in fact came as collateral benefit from achievements of a movement which was once “union and proud” inside manufacturing, a sector which capital has undermined by moving jobs offshore. Ironically, it was our own union bureaucracy which got comfortable with the business unionism of wages and benefits. But by ignoring working conditions, and accommodating to capital’s revolutionizing processes, business unionism ultimately led to our own demise. Nevertheless, the historical labor movement, especially what Marx specifically singled out as the protracted battle over the “normal working day,” was a crucial struggle for all workers, whether or not they belong to a union. Whether in manufacturing or the service industries, we workers are more connected to each other than ever before. Clever company executives redefine whole categories of their workforce as independent contractors in order to deny them the overtime pay which decades of the union movement succeeded in institutionalizing. But it is not just a matter of pay, as bureaucrats pro or con in the debate have put an inordinate amount of focus on. In fact, the overtime premium pay we union members enjoy today is part and parcel of the "protracted battle over the normal working day." That battle is not over. 24-HOUR WORKING DAY It is not hard for us workers to see that the employer, if left to his whim alone, would extend the working day to the full 24 hours. Many of us have sustained life-long injuries through numbing repetition for extended hours. This is the kind of toll which no amount of overtime premium pay will ever repair. Those of us not directly in manufacturing, but other related service industries, will often do large amounts of overtime, not for overtime pay, but for the satisfaction of realizing a job well done. A nurse presiding over a sick patient, a teacher staying after school, or a clerk over an office deadline would know exactly what I’m talking about. Often we are pushed to the brink of our performance simply because of the working conditions set in the workplace, not so unintentionally, by the employer. Working conditions are the issue not addressed by “over-time” pay, and which bureaucrats, counting their beans, inside government or inside unions, miss. But working conditions don’t merely exist on the outside. It exists inside as well, inside the worker’s subjectivity. ALIENATED LABOR This is precisely the intangible criterion which no amount of dispassionate economic consideration, based on the phantom-like objectivity of capital, will address. It comes from the very heart and soul of the worker. It is not reflected by any numerical manipulation or any mathematical computation which treat the worker as object. The overtime pay rule, in essence, is not only a battle line drawn over the normal working day, but is also a line which divides mental from manual labor. The length of the working day became our means of declaring, “When does my time become my own?” rather than let the employer rob all of it. The key question is not pay but alienation. The normal working day cannot be instituted from above. What is normal recompense for one’s labor cannot come from anyone but the workers themselves. It is a debate which ultimately needs to occur between workers. What is fair and normal will inevitably have to come from the workers themselves--not just related to his pay alone regarding the working day, but reaching for the larger philosophic question: What kind of labor should a worker, any worker, perform? It is this market of unfreedom which the workforce would inevitably have to abolish, if we are ever to redefine what a normal working day means. But that abolition of the market concept will have to begin at the point of production itself. I believe that is what Marx meant by a vision of a new society based on the “free association” of laborers, and "the development of human power which is its own end." |
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