One of many things I really appreciate about my time w/ the wobblies is a sort of “we’ll make the call” sensibility. We’ve rethought what a union is, a group of people coming together to have more control over their lives by having more control over their jobs (though I think this is in some ways a return to an older version of the term), and we’re a union when we say we are, not when the boss or the state allows it.
There’s also an occasional rethinking of what a shop is. There have been some campaigns in the union (and at least one outside that I’m aware of) that define a geographic area as their target, and aim at all the workers or all the workers in some industries, who work within it. So, a big shopping district, everyone working there is a potential member. This treats the area as one big unit, one big shop, with individual boutiques and eateries inside it as departments or as points in the larger whole. This serves to allow for more power (because more people) to act on individual grievances in individual locations, and one longer term goal is to raise standards in the whole area - make and achieve some demands, set some minimums, then fight with any attempt to break them. Once that’s established, go for more. And of course actions all along about individual grievances, and support for folks in other ways, whatever they need.
Along these same lines, I wonder what an industry is or might be. I’ve been reading the Kolinko call center book, which I bought at the Leicester conference. I recommend it. One of the interesting things that comes across in the book is that call centers aren’t really an industry, or not just one. They’re … a technique or an apparatus. Like a computer or an assembly line. That is, there are outgoing and incoming call centers, in finance, retail, travel, telecommunications, and other industries.
I thought about this today while talking with my wife. She works as a nanny. She and her charge stopped by our place on a walk today and invited me out. It was fun, and good to get out of the house. I’m inside a bit now as I’ve not yet started (looking for) summer work. We were talking about other people she knows who work in childcare. Here’s what we talked about, more or less.
There are at least the following childcare providers: unpaid or paid in-kind (usually family, neighbor, or close friend), state subsidized home childcare, out of the home childcare facilities (daycare, camps), and nannies. Nannies tend to be paid better and are paid out of pocket by the parents of the kid(s). There is talk among some nannies about how it is a profession - one that takes skills and for which one can get training (I’m told there are professional degrees and such for it in the UK and at least some other Commonwealth countries). Nannies also tend to have less kids they take care of at a time, and less (or no) co-workers.
There are nanny agencies, who get a fee from parents for helping them find a nanny. My wife said today that someone told her about agency top-level advertised rates in our area, which are lower than the higher rates one can get for the work. That means, presumably, that agencies exert something of a downward pressure on pay rates. I think it works something like this: with a single income family, the wage pays for the worker and the family. There is, or can be, an interest on the part of the worker to minimize family costs in order to keep as much of the wage as possible. The employer has an interest in this being so, as more expense for the family creates more pressure or desire for higher wages. The wage earner doesn’t exploit the family, or not in the same way that the employer does, rather the wage earner, like a foreman in a shop, facilitates and is rewarded for facilitating an exchange between the family and the employer (and/or capital as a whole, re: the production of future labor power). A household with a nanny is basically directly monetarizing that set of exchanges and outsourcing it to someone outside the family. Agencies, if they do actually depress wages, serve a function of securing a larger share of the family wage for the family (member or members) that pays the nanny, thus facilitating the exchange with the employer and capital. The nanny as outsourced idea also applies to other forms of childcare work. This is what set me to thinking about this.
We were talking about how in this kind of work it’s hard to confront the employer: it’s just one person against one or both parents. (This is leaving aside that confronting an employer is always hard, and leaving aside legal status etc.) One function of cooperation among nannies, though, is to communicate about wages. Someone new to that kind of work can ask around “is this offer a fair one, is this a competitive wage?” Other nannies have an interest in this happening, as dropping rates of pay can potentially exert downward pressure on other people’s wages who do the same kind of work. Other points of pressure, though, have to be exerted on employers and on the state as collective capital, in order to have more money earmarked to pay for childcare via wages and the social wage of state subsidies. My wife was saying how the awful rates of pay for state subsidized at home care prevent wages from rising in other areas. That’s where I started to wonder. Is that so? This is, of course, an empirical question at least in part, one which I don’t know how to answer.
It’s also a question about what is an industry (and/or what is a segment or department in an industry). If we think of the childcare labor market as a bucket of water with a relatively fixed (at any given point in time) quantity in it, lowering the bottom lower the top. Lower wages below trickle up to lower wages above. This is, I think, generally the case with the working class as a whole. At the same time, there are stratifications within this, sort of like the systems of locks in place at some dams in rivers and lakes, whereby water levels and transitions between them are carefully managed. So low subsidies at the bottom may not immediately pull down wages at the top, if it does at all. Nor might low pay at the bottom necessarily transfer upward. In the same way, there are segmentations across national boundaries in industries, as well as even in the same shop (merit raises and the like). This is, of course, all political, such that changes in one area have to be used in another. In that sense, then, generally I’d want to say low wages at the bottom could be used to lower wages at the top (or threaten and thus exert higher productivity), just as a segmentation of high and low wages can be used to keep wages how they are by stratifying people into narrow interests in retaining positions above the bottom levels. If capital’s not currently using these phenomena for those ends, that doesn’t mean it couldn’t. By the same token, addressing these or challenging these could also function politically, to say what is and is not an industry.