Neoliberalism is alive and kicking -- kicking the asses of American workers, hard. And it's no wonder. Read the "Kick Me" sign slapped on the backs of all US workers:
Leo Gerard, president of the United Steelworkers, said there were smarter things to do than demonstrating against layoffs -- for instance, pushing Congress and the states to make sure the stimulus plan creates the maximum number of jobs in the United States.
"I actually believe that Americans believe in their political system more than workers do in other parts of the world," Mr. Gerard said. He said large labor demonstrations are often warranted in Canada and European countries to pressure parliamentary leaders. Demonstrations are less needed in the United States, he said, because often all that is needed is some expert lobbying in Washington to line up the support of a half-dozen senators. (Steven Greenhouse, "In America, Labor Has an Unusually Long Fuse," New York Times, 5 April 2009)
Source: Critical Montages
But in recent decades, American workers have increasingly steered clear of such militancy, for reasons that range from fear of having their jobs shipped overseas to their self-image as full-fledged members of the middle class, with all its trappings and aspirations.
ReplyDeleteDavid Kennedy, a Stanford historian and author of “Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945,” says that America’s individualist streak is a major reason for this reluctance to take to the streets. Citing a 1940 study by the social psychologist Mirra Komarovsky, he said her interviews of the Depression-era unemployed found “the psychological reaction was to feel guilty and ashamed, that they had failed personally.”
Taken together, guilt, shame and individualism undercut any impulse to collective action, then as now, Professor Kennedy said. Noting that Americans felt stunned and desperately insecure during the Depression’s early years, he wrote: “What struck most observers, and mystified them, was the eerie docility of the American people, their stoic passivity as the Depression grindstone rolled over them.”
The current plan is to keep it that way.