9/30 "Americans are constantly confused by the lack of positive examples."
That's from class last night. We were also talking about the fact that positive examples abound, it's just nobody knows about them. A highlight of discussion was regarding the recent, announcement by Gilette via major newpapers (what a shitty way to be laid off) that they are laying off 17% of their workforce. It seems that all of the layoffs are of shopfloor workers. Now, folks consider jobs at Gilette good -the pay is decent, etc.-, and many families have worked there for generations. Of course, the union there had been constantly asking that more workers be hired, and Gilette just required huge amounts of overtime. Which the folks worked. But now, when things get tight, blammo. Thanks for years of service and overtime, no more job now.
Treating workers as disposable is 1)callous, 2) often inefficient, 3)not a law of nature/survival/economics. My prof suggested another way to deal with lower profits --reduce dividends (the amount of money that stockholders get). The standard answer is "the stockholders wouldn't stand for it." But this attitude is also not a law of nature. As our class talked about, there are examples of other ways of doing business; for example Motorola, which has not laid people off in recessions, but rather trains them for other internal jobs. Boeing, where they invest so heavily in their workers that even if they are laid off, they are so skilled its easy to get another job. And then there are the Green Bay Packers. Community-owned, the people of Green Bay Wisconsin bought stock without being given seats, a plaque, money back, anything like that. It was a community effort. Stockholders standing for no dividends at all. These are all positive examples. So why haven't I heard of'em before? (Actually I had heard of the Green Bay Packers. Like almost everything sports-related, I like it only when it's symbolic of other things. the Ali-foreman fight in Zaire, the Joe Louis-Max Schnelling fight in Germany in 1934. Joe Namath. The World Cup -especially Croatia beating Germany.)

Regarding my earlier maunderings about Hank Ford, apparently Ford was a big moralizer. I remember reading this before. The "pin money" argument for why women were not eligible for the $5 day seems to be true. Ford thought women should be home. With the kids. He was a big fan of thrift, as well, not conspicuous consumption. Assuming that if a woman was working, it was for frivolous or at least supplemental income. Men were the breadwinners (in his mind). He also was one of the first to set up an in-house "Sociological Department" to study the outside lives of his workers. Any employees (or potential employees) had their morals investigated. Nothing like that is running here at my job.

Oh, by the way. Everyone should read Wicked; The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire. Exploring concepts of good and evil, second-class citizens, eugenics, local vs. centralized politics, rural-urban debates, science-vs-magic (or science as magic), via the land of Oz. multiplying Baum's original Populist-fantasist fable, troubling it, kaleidoscoping it. A smashingly good read too. Go find it. Right now. I'm telling ya.

9/29selfreferencing From reading a whole new passel more online journals, I'm realizing it's a cliche among online journals to write about how weird it is to be doing an online journal. this is new media, with new social codes. (Still, here I go) One of the things less talked about is the effect on people who do not go online. Is this relevant? I'll try to explain. There are endless debates about how to deal with the fact that people you know or who know you might read your journal and judge you/affect you in your day-to-day 'real' life. Employers/supervisors and parents especially, friends, acquaintances. contrast this with the confessional nature of many journals. For some reason it is attractive to me to confess here about myself. Partly it is because I am curious to be judged by my written responses, even those that may not reflect well on me. What's the precedent for this kind of behavior? What about books written about people still living? Fiction or non? How do friends of authors feel about autobiographical anecdotes stolen, changed or not and mined for material? curious. In what ways is this different than publishing a book (in terms of audience and judgement)? hmmm.
Anyway, the oddity is also, what if you write about people who never, or rarely, get to the internet. Who don't have access or choose not to. On one hand, you're safe. They will not come across your words. But then again, eventually, they might. Who is responsible? Am i taking advantage of their lack of hookup, mining them at their expense? revealing them with no chance to rebut? Solipsism may be the only answer. A constant reminder that this is your point of view, by definition partial, by definition holey. but that's not satisfying either. Where's the responsiblity?

Only questions today, no answers.

9/28 O well another monday morning. As usual, blown away by mimi's writing.

I'm continuing to be supported by my reading in Economic history. More good highlights for arguments with co-workers: In the 1920s, when the US became definitively the world leader as far as industrializing, it was the oligopolized sectors of the economy that made the great leaps ahead in productivity. This means that it was sectors where a few firms controlled a lot (if not all) of the market. The industries that were more "competitive" (in the sense that most economists/policy folks mean it today), mostly remainded stagnant. this is very interesting stuff. this historical evidence totally contradicts what most people assume. And why is it that these huge firms (think Ma Bell, think big airlines) leapt ahead? because they could afford to put a lot of their profits into research and development, and into planning and coordination. As I wrote about down below, this is something the US government did with agriculture. in both cases, it led to qualified success -or at least great gains.

The main thing I'm having trouble with, is where to fit my feminism into all of this. If I think of myself as a feminist economist, where is the feminist critique on a macro level? Women were for the most part defined out of the macro economics -being such a statistical mionority for so long. So far my only answers have been partial ones:
For example. Henry Ford turned factory work on its head when he declared the 5-dollar, 8-hour day. This was twice as much money and much fewer hours than anyone else was offering. He did this because he knew that the new assembly line jobs would be so stressful and boring that people would need more dough in order to stick around. However, women were not eligble for the 5-dollar day (there was no discussion in the piece I read on how many women were employed at Ford then, or what they did). My first guess (and it is a guess) for this is that women were assumed to be working for supplementary income -"pin money"- rather than to take care of their families, while the 5dollarday was for a man to feed himself and wife-and-kids. This started me thinking. If the new job was so alienating, plus it might be shift work at odd times of the day or night, that meant that the stay-at-home wife may have had had more duties at home. Whether the husband's day job stress inspired him to hit the pubs and stay out late or crash into bed, there may have been a shift in the duties a wife had -or an intensification. Not to mention the other domestic issues around stressful work (how about incidences of battering? How about shift work and marital fidelity?) So an interesting bit of economic research would be the proportion of married men with kids, married men without kids, single men, single women (with and without kids) and married women (with and without kids) employed a Ford. And also some idea of a factoryman's wife's duties in the home when he was NOT at Ford, or when he WAS at Ford.
My point? well one would be that it'd be worth it to know if the economic cost to wives of Fordworkers was as high or higher than the benefits of the 5dollar day?

It'd also be interesting to know the racial breakdown of Ford Employees. Usually higher-paid jobs are reserved mostly for whites. In the 20s, there may not have been many people of color in manufacturing (although there were european immigrants). I wonder if the 5dollar day coincided with a whitening of the workforce. I wonder...