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Imagine if your job were set up in such a way that your value within the company rose over time, yet that value could not be extracted and put to work at any other company. For example, you’ve been working for IBM for 15 years, but now IBM does something that really pisses you off. Yet you can’t pack up and leave for Google, because they will not recognize your 15 years at IBM. They will only recognize your several minutes (and counting) of time at Google, and pay you accordingly. Imagine that.

You could respond by saying “I’d never go into a field that was set up in such a way; I’d do something different.” But say you really liked doing what only IBM does. Or say your natural progression through life led you down this path, almost unbeknownst to you, until you finally had a chance to look back to see where you came from. In other words, your tenure at IBM is a kind of fait accompli. And if for whatever idle reason you ended up at General Motors or Best Buy or Barney, Barney, and Tate instead, other people, people you know, just like you, ended up working at IBM through the magic of statistical probability. It’s like this: some people are blue-eyed, some people have a recessive gene for dwarfism, some people work for IBM. There is a certain amount of choice involved in working for IBM, but some bodies, many bodies, work for it, and that is ineluctable. Try to remember how you fell into the job you have now, and remember how serendipitous that was. Remember?

Imagine that IBM is old, its industry is hoary. Generations of workers have imagined it as their goal, and a great press of workers is ready to do IBM’s work for almost any amount of money, because they don’t know any better. But IBM cannot hire these workers for any amount of money; they can only hire them for a contractually certain amount of money. A union-bargained amount of money.

Imagine that Unionism caused the devaluation of your work at comparable companies at the same time it caused your value to increase at IBM, but that this is not ipso facto a consequence of unionism itself. One can point to other industries where this did not happen, because a union was nascently and presciently fashioned to include all companies in the industry, not each company individually. But for IBM the time of nascence is long passed; the union is what it is, and too many people would be economically hurt to change its charter now. So from a worker’s standpoint, there are better and worse ways for a union to have come about. An industry-wide union will exist and bargain and allow its workers to prosper for as long as the industry exists; a company-specific union will exist and bargain and allow its workers to prosper for only as long as the company exists and prospers. Imagine there were political reasons that the latter was the only initial path to Unionism for IBM’s workers.

Imagine all that; now tell me how distaste for unions and Unionism can arise in workers without a concerted political effort to undermine unions and Unionism by powers that would rather hire workers for any amount of money, and fire workers for any reason. “But my distaste for Unionism comes from my personal, considered distaste for unions’ excesses and corruption;” but what unregulated or poorly regulated social or political agency ever maintained its original aims? And now that unions are better regulated, and have been better regulated for decades now–much the same way that some industries (oil, mortgage, health insurance) and the management of those industries have not– now that this is true, from where does the distaste arise? From considered thought? Or from politically-managed perception?

“I’m a manager at IBM. I can tell you that the unionized workers here are lazy, that they hide their laziness behind their contract, and that they feel entitled to that laziness.” With all due respect, Mr Manager, there are inefficiencies on both sides of the managerial divide. Inefficiencies are what make a job bearable. Inefficiencies are what keep one from being forced to work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The difference between managerial and worker inefficiencies is that the workers bargained for theirs, and you take yours when you think the Board isn’t looking or doesn’t care. That’s the difference. And if by some chance the Board does glance your way and sees you taking a little personal time in between moaning about the workers’ sense of entitlement, and fires your ass, you have the opportunity to pack up and start over at Google at a comparable salary, because that is the way your job was set up long before you took it.

I have no idea how I ended up working in a unionized industry. I look back, and all I can say is that it just sort of happened that way. But now that I’m here, now that my life is intertwined with the well-being of my union (and the well-being of my company, since that is how the Unionism ball bounced in my industry), now that all that is true, I find myself paying attention to how Unionism is portrayed in the media. It’s not a good portrayal; the public does not view Unionism in a good light. Perceptions have been managed.

Imagine that this kind of perception management happens all the time, in other ways, for other movements. Liberalism, for example. That’s not hard to imagine, is it? How else can we reconcile the way many citizens vote against the very people and things that would help them most? Or vote for the very people and things that help them the least; that, in fact, willfully cause great misery in their lives?

There is no way.

And how can we justify the actions of the worker who votes against fellow workers because raising their standards of living will be an inconvenience?

There is no way.

“First they came for the Communists,
And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist;
And then they came for the trade unionists,
And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist;
And then they came for the Jews,
And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew;
And then they came for me;
And by that time there was no one left to speak up.”

Superjumbo ends historic flight - CNN.com

The airline says its jets will set a “new standard for luxury and comfort,” fitted with 399 economy seats, 60 business seats and 12 Givenchy-designed “suites” featuring a flat bed behind sliding doors.

Thank goodness new standards for luxury and comfort are being set for those who can afford it.

A remote cam 70 feet in the air in Maine watches birdies sit and tweet and occasionally fly off. Baby birdies are in there, too; at least one was borneded this week.

This entry has been changed since I can’t depersonalize it enough to guarantee maintenance of total anonymity, which is vital since I don’t get paid. So screw it.

It’s the mark of a worker-controlled company if that company will give a worker a leave of absence for the purpose of making him less dependent on the company. An owner-controlled company would have no qualms with denying that leave. Give you more control of your destiny? Be less dependent on the company for a livelihood? That’s absurd.

I’ll find out, maybe, whether Brand X Airlines is a company of the first sort when I apply for a leave of absence four or five years from now to go to nurse anesthetist school. I’ll find out whether Brand X considers me a person or a serf. That’ll be interesting to know.

I was watching the Bill Maher show the other day. During the call-in segment; one caller asked Bill (and Arianna Huffington, apparently his usual guest) how they felt about the “new bailout” for the airlines. Arianna, who somehow became pro-worker between now and when she played would-be kingmaker to her conservative husband back in ‘94, was essentially for stabilizing the industry by reducing the new post 9/11 security taxes. Bill was adamantly opposed to a bailout of any kind, preferring instead that market forces work their unfettered magic on the industry by weeding out the sick and the injured, in order to leave the industry stronger in the long run.

My point is: what unmitigated bullshit. The reason we have a government at all is to prevent the rail barons of the world from squashing their workers underfoot, whether they be programmers, pilots, or garbagemen. Maher (whose opinion I normally respect, or at least pay attention to) prefers to play the dispassionate Darwinian, which seems to be all the rage the last few years, and plays nicely into the hands of the powerful few. The powerful cultivate that philosophy. It allows each industry to be looked at, not as a group of people with families and needs, but as some kind of dumb mechanized vector to be straightened regardless of the human toll.

Every consumer (so by extension, every person) is a member of some big dumb vector, whether he knows it or not. And Consumerism teaches each of us to pride himself on his ability to analyze other people’s industries, and to make personal, dispassionate judgments based on those analyses. Like Bill was doing. I’ve certainly done it, and do it every time I walk into Wal-Mart to buy something for a dime less than I could’ve gotten it elsewhere. I feel bad about it, when I think of it, and I try to spread my dollars around a little. But most people don’t feel that way; most people are smug about saving a few bucks like that, and even though they know, somewhere in the back of their minds, that the reason they’re saving that money is because someone who was paid 10 dollars an hour was replaced by someone making minimum wage, they don’t care.

Those smug consumers are oblivious to the certainty that the mean eye of consumerism will be trained on their own industries eventually. Totally oblivious.

That’s where we are today, where each industry can be scrutinized and straightened in turn, to the ruin of its workers, and everyone else sagely nods while the most vituperous Darwinisms fall out of their heads.

Well, I want Bill Maher’s big, dumb vector straightened next.