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Page 1 - Page 2 - Page 3 The glimmering schemes of corporate dreamers like Tom Peters, ridiculous though they will seem in just a few years, are far realer than any desultory facts of life on some assembly line somewhere. Fast Company magazine, the publication which, to the great acclaim of advertising industry pundits everywhere, has successfully merged rock 'n' roll hip with managerial efficiency, offers up a manifesto baldly equating office work with society and announces that "corporations have become the dominant institution of our times, occupying the position of the church of the Middle Ages and the nation-state of the past two centuries." Jerry Maguire understands human relationships as questions of more or less honest salesmanship; French advertising executive Jean-Marie Dru writes that "people perceive countries as they do brands." Is this a great time or what? As market-worship becomes the monotheme of official economic commentary, class disappears. Yes, individuals might suffer some species of discrimination in the workplace, but labor's more universal claims against management will not be part of the settlement. The objective facts can be recited easily enough: the New York Times Magazine once regularly ran solid labor reporting, as did business publications like Fortune; neither bothers today. Most daily newspapers once had writers or editors who worked the labor beat; almost none do now. As late as the 1960s newspapers could assume that the issues and specialized language that were part of labor coverage were familiar to readers, that people knew why unions existed and what they did, that unions were a normal part of working life. Now writers routinely address whatever labor questions they think it appropriate to raise in the specialized language of investment authorities (how will this affect the company's dividends? Its share prices?) or by passing them by altogether with the condescending usual: unions are obsolete, strikes are sad. You can see the consensus of forgetting even in odd places like the recent declaration by Michael Lewis in the New York Times Magazine that "hostility to the market" is a form of elitism and that "only two classes of citizens" still exist who are "antimarket snob[s]": artists and aristocrats. Or in Swing magazine's listing of the various causes favored by politically-active Generation-X stars of popular music and TV: four go out for voter registration; two each have made a stand for animal rights and the environment; the homeless and freedom of speech turn the well-coiffed heads of one apiece; and the magazine even finds a star who has made that selfless commitment to "leadership training." It finds none are interested in workplace anything, even in foreign countries. Or in the patently bizarre explanation given by the CEO of an Ohio-based manufacturing concern for why his company had moved thousands of jobs to a low-wage, union-hostile Southern state: "Unionism is going down because corporations have changed their views," he told the New York Times. "We empower our people now." Labor unions continue to exist, of course. Were one to consider the millions of people unions represent, the even greater millions of people who would like to be represented by them, and the vast millions of people in whose interests they act, it's easy to make the case that contemporary journalists are simply doing their jobs poorly. But in fact they're only doing them ideologically, and according to the great archetypes of our time they're doing them correctly. You may not have heard about the battle but it happened nonetheless: business has captured the high ground of normalcy; unions only make sense as a troublemaking special interest. The troubles and battles of working people only sound through to us as meaningless pulses from a distant universe, as personal grudge-matches between those too stupid or too resentful to get aboard the incredibly liberating and fulfilling pleasure-train of information capitalism. They inhabit, in Tom Geoghegan's accurate phrase, an "anti-world. The black, sulfurous, White Sox anti-world. The South side. The secret world of organized labor." Do we want to be a postindustrial country? Do we want to entrust our lives to the whims of the market? Once these were questions Americans would have decided for themselves; today they are none of our business. Page 1 - Page 2 - Page 3
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