Transcript
Speaker: I'm Jane Williams. This is the Red Eye Podcast. In our show today, Lorraine Chisholm talks with Simon Black about a manifesto saying that the pandemic shows why we must democratize work. Over 5 ,500 academics have signed a letter calling for the democratization of work in the wake of the COVID -19 pandemic. From that letter, authored by a core group of eight women, we hear this.
Speaker: Every morning, men and women, especially members of racialized communities, migrants, and informal economy workers rise to serve those among us who are able to remain under quarantine. They keep watch through the night. The dignity of their jobs needs no other explanation than the eloquently simple term, essential worker. That term also reveals a key fact that capitalism has always sought to render invisible with another term, human resource.
Speaker: Human beings are not one resource among many. Without labor investors, there would be no production, no services, no businesses at all. Dr. Simon Black is one of the co -signers of the letter, which is titled Work, Democratize, Decomodify, Remediate.
Speaker: Simon Black is a writer, activist, and academic. He is currently assistant professor at the Center for Labor Studies, Brock University. Hello, Simon. Hi, Lorraine. Pleasure to join you today. It's our pleasure. The letter begins by calling for people at work to be considered as more than, quotes, resources as in human resources. What's wrong with the resources framing?
Speaker: Well, you know, go back to the Declaration of Philadelphia in 1944, and that's when the International Labour Organization, the Labour body of the United Nations was formed and was formed under the auspices of the United Nations. It reaffirmed the first principle of the ILO that Labour is not a commodity.
Speaker: And that principle expressed in the preamble to the ILO's founding documents really expressed the view that people should not be treated like inanimate commodities, capital, another kind of mere factor of production. You know, instead people should
Speaker: who work for a living should be treated as human beings and accorded dignity and respect. And that has always been a truth of the labor market, but it's a matter of the last 40 years or so, this period that we can refer to as neoliberal or the neoliberal period or era,
Speaker: in which mainstream economists and the big banks and CEOs have treated.
Speaker: labor like a commodity, like just any other commodity, like something that is disposable, something that is flexible, something that can be hired and fired with no consequence to how it impacts workers' lives, self -esteem, psychological well -being, or the greater impact on society in terms of our social fabric.
Speaker: So while labor is not a commodity, it has been treated as such, especially in the neoliberal period of the last 40 years. So this manifesto is just one reminder to the powers that be, that labor should not be treated as a commodity and it is not a commodity.
Speaker: Well, I guess taking that to another level in the, in the, uh, this, um, terrible time where a hundred thousand people are dead in the United States, the senior White House economic advisor, Kevin Haslatt called, called workers human capital stock. Yes. I did see that. Um, I think that's just reflective of, I think kind of mainstream, uh, economic thinking.
Speaker: You know, that labor, if you talk of physical capital stock, like plants, tools, and the other things that businesses need to produce goods and services, the human capital
Speaker: human capital stock is just reducing labor essentially to another input, to another factor of production, as opposed to what it is, which is living human beings who have lives and aspirations and needs that extend beyond the needs and aspirations of any one company or business, which seeks to maximize profit.
Speaker: How has the coronavirus pandemic brought to the forefront the situation of people who we now recognize with that term, essential workers? Well, I think it's interesting. You see in cities and towns across the country, and not only in Canada, but across Europe and other countries, you know, usually at 7 p .m. or sometime in the evening, people step outside of their house or onto their balconies if they're living in apartments and condos and they
Speaker: They bang pots and pans to show their appreciation for those who are now deemed essential for frontline workers, for nurses, PSWs, cleaners, childcare providers who are caring for the children of essential workers.
Speaker: You know, I can't remember a time. It's really nobody now or ever has done that because stepped outside and bank pots and pans for hedge fund managers or stock brokers or CEOs of the big banks. And I think this crisis has revealed a major contradiction at the heart of our economic system. And this is what this manifesto tries to lay out, this contradiction that, you know, our capitalism essentially degrades and undervalues precisely those who create real social wealth.
Speaker: nurses and other workers in hospitals and healthcare, farm workers, workers in food factories, supermarket employees and delivery drivers, waste collectors, teachers, child carers, people who care for the elderly. And much of this work is low paid and is done disproportionately by women, immigrants and people of colour in the Canadian economy or the Canadian labour market. And yet society cannot survive without these workers. They're essential to our health and wellbeing.
Speaker: So we now have an opportunity to rebuild an economy that puts the needs of these workers, and all working people for that matter, the needs for dignity, respect and security at its heart. Whether we can build that economy in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic and the economic crisis that it's brought about has yet to be seen.
Speaker: The statement that you co -signed points to the democratization of work. What's meant by that and how would it shift the power balance in companies? Right, so the manifesto lays out kind of three demands. The democratization of firms, the decommodification of work and the remediation of the environment.
Speaker: What it means by the democratization of work is essentially involving employees and decisions relating to their lives and futures in the workplace. By democratizing the corporation, by democratizing businesses, and also democratizing the public sector, although the manifesto doesn't go into the public sector as a space of employment in great detail.
Speaker: But it means that we have an economic system which most of us will spend our working lives in institutions and businesses and corporations and workplaces that more resemble dictatorships than democracies, even though we're told we live in a liberal democratic societies.
Speaker: The basics of the economy, the who, the what, the when, the where of production under capitalism, these decisions are made by someone else. They're made by a very small number of people. And those decisions impact all of our working lives and our lives more broadly.
Speaker: So the cult of democratized work is a recognition that we need, if we want to live in a democratic society, we need to democratize the workplace and we need to democratize the economy more broadly. And then there's kind of specific
Speaker: examples of how that could be done. In Germany and some of the Nordic companies, there's laws that provide workers formal representation on supervisory boards that kind of give them a voice in the management of the company. There's different ways of organizing work in the economy such as cooperatives or the social economy, which put the needs of workers and the voices at workers at the very center of kind of decision making.
Speaker: So it's kind of broad demand to rethink how we organize work, to ensure that work is organized on democratic lines. One of the terms that the manifesto uses is labor investors, which wasn't something I'd ever thought about. But then when I heard it, I think, oh, that's so logical. You are investing your work. Yeah. And I like the term. I'm a little bit, actually, I do like the term, but I'm somewhat ambivalent about it.
Speaker: because I'm ambivalent about language that tends to concepts that try to kind of mirror the language of the system itself. But I think in terms of having people understand, you know, how we think about labor and how we think about, you know, we do invest our lives
Speaker: in work and we lend our talents or sell our talents and our capacities to work, our labor power to businesses that then are able to turn a profit out of that labor. So yeah, it's a way of framing how we think about labor. Labor investors is definitely better than thinking about human capital stock, that's for sure.
Speaker: I mean, I take your point too. I think we don't want to frame our humanness and what we do with our lives as investors, but it did kind of, it sort of tweaked. Maybe it could be a transitional
Speaker: term that we use sure yeah and you never know what you know when you use different terms it open ups it opens up different people's way of thinking about things so if it's if it has that impact then then you know maybe it is a catchy new way of framing this i like thinking about labor as opposed to human capital stock because labor
Speaker: makes me think of, you know, labor as a class, the class of working people whose interests are different from those of capital. I mean, going to sound like an old school Marxist here, but maybe guilty as charged. But I prefer that, prefer thinking about labor as a social class rather than just as us being invested in our labor.
Speaker: Another critique is that, and quotes here, profitability is an intolerable yardstick when it comes to our health and our life on this planet. How's the commodification of labor a problem, for example, in healthcare?
Speaker: Well, it's a problem because when we treat something that is essential to our social and well -being and our health as something that should be dictated to or subject to the forces of the market as a commodity,
Speaker: and the labor that goes into providing those services as a commodity. Now we get the types of outcomes that we see in long -term care homes right across this country in the midst of this pandemic where we've had years of privatization and deregulation basically subjecting what should be a public service, a social service, something that we all need
Speaker: or we may need as we get older, we need to be taken care of in a long -term care home or nursing home. And we've treated that as something that is a commodity. We've treated it as something that is subject to the forces of the market. And the result has been that we have long -term care homes, companies that are
Speaker: more interested in profitability, in making money than they are in providing the adequate care and the protection that this very vulnerable population who find themselves in long -term care homes near the end of their lives really need. So it's important to think about the distinction between a service that is provided as a public good and services that are provided through the market.
Speaker: What's meant by a job guarantee?
Speaker: A job guarantee is one of the demands of the manifesto or laid out in the manifesto under the idea of decommodifying work. A job guarantee is just the idea that we collectively guarantee useful employment to all, that all people who want useful employment are able to find employment and that we can build an economy in which we kind of maximize our individual talents and collective capacities.
Speaker: We're living through and we've been living through an era in which we're so far from having a job guarantee. In fact, what we're guaranteed of in this economy is we're guaranteed almost to have precarious work. 50 % of Canadian workers find themselves in work that is, along some dimension, precarious. And what we now have is a guarantee of insecurity in this labour market, in this economy.
Speaker: So decommodifying work is laid out in the manifesto means collectively guaranteeing useful employment to all to ensure that we use all the talents and capacities that people have to build an economy that works for everyone and works for our planet as well.
Speaker: Well, let's talk about the planet there because the manifesto advocates that the environment must be taken into account when restructuring work as part of a COVID -19 recovery program. What are we thinking of there?
Speaker: Well, I think that when we think about the economy more broadly, when we think about the challenges of climate change, confronting the climate crisis, the ecological crisis that we face, confronting that crisis is going to require that we organize economy that is just not built around the maximization of profit.
Speaker: And to have everyone's input, to have an economy in which is controlled by the people who participate in it, by the workforce, means that we're linking our fate as a humanity in terms of our climate and our planet to this idea of everyone having a say. And if people have a say collectively over their economy, then I think you'll find that most people want to build an economy
Speaker: that is a green economy that is going to be able to be resilient in the face of the climate change that we're going to be living through and the climate change to come, an economy that it's going to be environmentally sustainable. So that demand, that third demand that we need to really marshal our collective strength and effort we need to preserve our life together on this planet is intimately linked to the other two demands laid out in the manifesto.
Speaker: I think, well, certainly for progressives, I think this is seen as an opportunity to really change things up. How could these principles be fought for in Canada as we deal with this massive crisis and then start to move forward towards recovery?
Speaker: Yeah, so I think the idea of a Green New Deal brings together a number of the kind of demands that are laid out in the manifesto. The idea of building an economy that works for all, the idea of building a green economy, an economy that can confront the challenges of climate change, that moves towards a low carbon or no carbon economy.
Speaker: and one that ensures that human well -being is at the centre of that economy. But more specifically, I think we're seeing demands that are coming out of social movements like the Fight for 15 and the Decent Work movement, such as the demand for paid sick leave that are being taken up with an announcement by the federal government just the past few days,
Speaker: that they're looking into establishing 10 paid sick days for workers across the country. Now the details of that have to be worked out.
Speaker: But I think we're seeing a number of social movement demands that are fit within the demands of this manifesto in one way or another, whether it's demand for paid sick days, whether it's the demand for decent wages and working conditions for essential workers, whether it's the demand that some are making for a universal basic income, or whether it's that broader demand for a Green New Deal.
Speaker: It's been fantastic talking with you this morning. Simon, I've really enjoyed it. Thanks for having me on, Lorraine. I appreciate it. I've been speaking with Simon Black. He's a writer, activist, and academic. He is currently assistant professor at the Center for Labor Studies at Brock University. You can find the full statement, work, democratize, decommodify, remediate, at democratizingwork .org. The letter has over 5 ,500 cosigners and is available in more than 20 languages.
Speaker: The Red Eye podcast is produced at the studios of Vancouver Co -op Radio. You can support us by supporting Co -op Radio. Go to coopradio .org and click on the donate button. Independent media relies on the support of people like you.
