Kicking. Squealing.
I chuckle when progressives who’ve most likely never held real blue collar jobs act as if they know anything about the work world.
Amanda Marcotte recently wrote about the Alex Castellanos-Rachel Maddow excursion. After a long paragraph lamenting Castellanos’ style of argumentation (big meanie face!), Marcotte writes this:
Considering how much effort conservatives put into fighting labor, you can see why this myth might arise, but in reality, the war on labor is less about actual cost-saving and more about an ideological commitment to keeping the little guy down.
Marcotte gets it completely and utterly wrong. Managing labor is almost completely about economics and hardly ever about preserving clean and neat class lines.
I draw on my own experience as a plebe and that of the other plebes with whom I’m friends. At work, my bosses watch hours and cut people off of their shifts because they want to save money. They never say “oh, you’re making way too much money, we can’t have you doing well for yourself.” It’s a completely preposterous assertion that only a person with a theoretical understanding of the workplace would make.
Besides cost containment (there are arguments to be made against such managerial decisions, but I think they’re completely economic ones) one other front in this so-called battle is similar to the one between young people and full-grown adults; the inexperienced verses the experienced; challengers and incumbents. In every realm of social interaction there is a proving ground. Some people will forever be pure wage laborers. But to consider them an intractable class – to assert that the same people who are in the labor pool at point A will be the same people in the labor pool at point B (plus prole kids, minus prole deaths) – is pretty much wrong. If there is an opportunity to escape from that labor pool on up to a higher level of status, then this argument about keeping labor down or keeping people in their places is a non-starter.
Just as I don’t get to show up for the first time at an old neighborhood bar and be the most popular guy around, I don’t get to enter the workforce as a big swinging dick. But there will always be unpopular bar newbies, though they don’t have to always stay that way.
Does Marcotte care about American low-wage earners? If she does, she should be adamant about stopping the importation and legitimization of millions of unskilled competitors. If she doesn’t, her stance meets with the warm embrace of the US Chamber of Commerce and the WSJ editorial board. They don’t, either.
Of course, maybe she cares much more about the low-wage workers of the world. As far as her pampered country
menpersons, “it sucks to be you.” I suspect this is a common underlying thread to the left’s infatuation with mass immigration. It’d be nice to have it stated forthrightly, so we could see how this notion fares in the marketplace of ideas. Some voters might become less charmed by it, once they reflected on the implications.Chuck, have you seen what’s going down at Jezebel?
http://jezebel.com/5906648/the-angry-underground-world-of-failed-pickup-artists
767 comments so far, btw.
My mind, no matter how hard I try to make it (?), simply cannot accept that this woman REALLY believes this crap.
If I am some rich guy, why on would I want to keep the little guy down? If the little guy has no disposable wealth, who would buy my products/services?
someone should beat this woman about the head and shoulders with a clue-stick
“Does Marcotte care about American low-wage earners?”
What more is there to say. The destruction of labor scarcity ENSURES that it will NEVER be possible for anyone to rise up out of the lower classes, but then they have an agenda that serves a higher purpose now don’t they?
MArcotte is a de rigeur marxist. She has no means of analyzing anything beyond the crudest of marxist paradigms. Worse, she’s from a relatively comfortable, privileged background, so she’s an armchair socialist as well: her socialism is all roses and light. She’s one of these marxists who get eaten alive during revolutions, and then cast around to blame someone, inevitably blaming reactionaries or monsters in the night – and never seeing the root cause.
MArcotte is a de rigeur marxist. She has no means of analyzing anything beyond the crudest of marxist paradigms.
Yep. It’s like the Bill Maher/Charles Murray exchange posted here last weekend, where Maher instinctively and immediately distills everything into a framing about income gaps. Their egalitarianism is the water they swim in. They hardly even realize it’s there.
You’d have to sit one of these people in a room and drill down with some Socratic process for days just to get them to recognize the first principles all their arguments stem from. Most of them are just blithely swimming in the egalitarianism water, winging it as they go.
Amanda Marcotte, yeah, there is a person who knows something about working class. NOT. If little missy Marcotte wanted to really do something about for men like me she’d shut the hell up.
I work in an environment where various trades are responsible for the day to day operations of a large health care facility in Center City Philadelphia. Our department consists of carpenters, painters, building systems operators etc. I can affirm positively that management directly above my level does everything in the power to keep us down, I.e. would rather sub-out work to outside contractors than dole out overtime in-house. The shirt and tie guys are fiercely protective of “their turf” and DO NOT want us to make a comparable salary. Various reasons abound including a certain level of envy in that they lack the skills we possess. Sounds childish but it is the Truth.