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NEWS & LETTERS, August-September 2006Don't allow boss choice of weaponsby Htun Lin This year, the HMO where I work is launching a new computer system. All our transactions will be conducted via the world wide web. Management has bragged that all patients' medical records will be online in one big database. We clerical workers know that their main concern is putting all patients' financial records online. Our prime directive for the last few years has been to raise "revenue recovery" (co-payment collection) rates. One of my nurse friends, who retired this year, warned us of this before she left: "If you think all this computerization is to make your life easier and improve care, you're in for a rude surprise. Their real purpose is to track every penny." OFFSHORE OUTSOURCING The other day, I got an unusual call. A young man with a thick accent said, very politely, that he wanted me to discharge a patient. He told me he was calling from India, from an "I.T. department" working under contract with my employer. In the past, all discharge calls came directly from local hospitals to our office. This shocking call was a rude awakening that many of our jobs are now threatened. Up to now we thought we were immune from the kind of off-shoring that devastated workers in manufacturing. We don't know if or when the union signed an agreement to allow the company to subcontract some of our work out to India. I blame the union. This is the final result of the "Labor-Management Partnership" instituted about ten years ago. I blame the kind of mindset which has deeply infected organized labor as well as the corporate world. It's an ideology that says, "You can't fight progress." This idea was used to suppress workers fighting automation on the assembly line. Now labor bureaucrats tail-end whatever management comes up with to cut costs in organizing work as they see fit-even if that means using technological "progress" to eliminate jobs here, only to reappear somewhere else at a fraction of the pay, with no union rights. This kind of "progress" was the key ideological component of the new Change-to-Win coalition, which recently broke away from the AFL-CIO. Andy Stern, president of the SEIU International, leads that coalition. Stern says you mustn't fight the employer whenever they try to compete in the international arena, in a globalized economy. As I was rudely reminded by that call from India, that strategy includes off-shoring operations to Third World countries, whether by computerization or other means. Stern goes even further. Not only mustn't we fight it, he even suggests that we employees must help our employers contract out our work. If this isn't suicidal for the labor movement, I don't know what is. Nearly ten years ago, Stern secretly initiated a partnership (with the blessing of AFL-CIO head Sweeney) between management and the union betraying nurses and other health care workers. We were in the middle of a wave of strikes and working together with nurses for the right to deliver quality health care. Management gained Stern's help to set up newly created "call centers" just when the nurses were winning that fight. New call center procedures put clericals in place of nurses to cut cost by cutting down on appointments and patient access to health care providers. Savvy bureaucrats from both management and the union bureaucracy have recruited many of us minorities into the "Labor-Management Partnership." Hungry workers cannot be blamed for wanting to improve their lot in life. That is also why sweatshops in India and China are thriving. We don't need union leaders telling us we must cooperate with capital. Stern says he wants to "replicate the kind of Labor-Management Partnership" initiated at our workplace. REBELLIOUS LABOR This reminded me of a debate in the 1960s between Raya Dunayevskaya and Herbert Marcuse over the question of "progress" and "automation." Marcuse insisted that labor today "has a highly co-operative attitude and...vested interest in the establishment." That is certainly true of labor leaders. But when officials and intellectuals least expect it, new forms of worker revolts surface. Dunayevskaya singled out rank-and-file wildcat strikes against automation, questioning the very nature of their work as they took on the concept of progress embraced by both the company and the union. Workers don't have the same idea of progress that capitalists have. Workers yearn for change that comes from within that overcomes the dominance of capital over our labor. Only taking our own ideas seriously can overcome the anti-labor ideas coming from labor bureaucrats. The choice of reality is up to us. |
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