Per
ragionar
The lunatic you work for
From The Economist print edition
If the corporation were a person, would that person be a psychopath?
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TO THE anti-globalisers, the corporation is a devilish instrument of environmental destruction, class oppression and imperial conquest. But is it also pathologically insane? That is the provocative conclusion of an award-winning documentary film, called “The Corporation”, coming soon to a cinema near you. People on both sides of the globalisation debate should pay attention. Unlike much of the soggy thinking peddled by too many anti-globalisers, “The Corporation” is a surprisingly rational and coherent attack on capitalism's most important institution.
It begins with a potted history of the company's legal form in America, noting the key 19th-century legal innovation that led to treating companies as persons under law. By bestowing on them the rights and protections that people enjoy, this legal innovation gave the company the freedom to flourish. So if the corporation is a person, ask the film's three Canadian co-creators, Mark Achbar, Joel Bakan and Jennifer Abbott, what sort of person is it?
The answer, elicited over two-and-a-half hours of interviews with left-wing intellectuals, right-wing captains of industry, economists, psychologists and philosophers, is that the corporation is a psychopath. Like all psychopaths, the firm is singularly self-interested: its purpose is to create wealth for its shareholders. And, like all psychopaths, the firm is irresponsible, because it puts others at risk to satisfy its profit-maximising goal, harming employees and customers, and damaging the environment. The corporation manipulates everything. It is grandiose, always insisting that it is the best, or number one. It has no empathy, refuses to accept responsibility for its actions and feels no remorse. It relates to others only superficially, via make-believe versions of itself manufactured by public-relations consultants and marketing men. In short, if the metaphor of the firm as person is a valid one, then the corporation is clinically insane.
There is a tendency among anti-globalisers to demonise captains of industry. But according to “The Corporation”, the problem with companies does not lie with the people who run them. Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, a former boss of Shell, comes across in the film as a sympathetic and human character. At one point, he and his wife greet protesters camped on the front lawn of their English cottage with offers of a cup of tea and apologies for the lack of soya milk for the vegans among them. The film gives Sam Gibara, boss of Goodyear, time to air his opinions, which are given a reasonably neutral edit. Ray Anderson, boss of Interface (which claims, with psychopathic grandiosity, to be the world's largest commercial carpetmaker) is given the hero treatment. Having experienced an “epiphany” about the destructive and unsustainable nature of modern capitalism, Mr Anderson has donned the preacher's cloth to spread the religion of environmental sustainability among his peers.
The main message of the film is that, through their psychopathic pursuit of profit, firms make good people do bad things. Lucy Hughes of Initiative Media, an advertising consultancy, is shown musing about the ethics of designing marketing strategies that exploit the tendency of children to nag parents to buy things, before comforting herself with the thought that she is merely performing her proper role in society. Mark Barry, a “competitive intelligence professional”, disguises himself as a headhunter to extract information for his corporate clients from rivals, while telling the camera that he would never behave so deceitfully in his private life. Human values and morality survive the onslaught of corporate pathology only via a carefully cultivated schizophrenia: the tobacco boss goes home, hugs his kids and feels a little less bad about spreading cancer. Company executives and foot soldiers alike will identify instantly with this analysis, because it is accurate. But it is also incomplete.
Although the moviemakers claim ownership of the company-as-psychopath idea, it predates them by a century, and rightfully belongs, in its full form, to Max Weber, the German sociologist. For Weber, the key form of social organisation defining the modern age was bureaucracy. Bureaucracies have flourished because their efficient and rational division and application of labour is powerful. But a cost attends this power. As cogs in a larger, purposeful machine, people become alienated from the traditional morals that guide human relationships as they pursue the goal of the collective organisation. There is, in Weber's famous phrase, a “parcelling-out of the soul”.
For Weber, the greater potential tyranny lay not with the economic bureaucracies of capitalism, but the state bureaucracies of socialism. The psychopathic national socialism of Nazi Germany, communism of Stalinist Soviet rule and fascism of imperial Japan (whose oppressive bureaucratic machinery has survived well into the modern era) surely bear Weber out. Infinitely more powerful than firms and far less accountable for its actions, the modern state has the capacity to behave even in evolved western democracies as a more dangerous psychopath than any corporation can ever hope to become: witness the environmental destruction wreaked by Japan's construction ministry.
The makers of “The Corporation” counter that the state was not the subject of their film. Fair point. But they have done more than produce a thought-provoking account of the firm. Their film also invites its audience to weigh up the benefits of privatisation versus public ownership. It dwells on the familiar problem of the corporate corruption of politics and regulatory agencies that weakens public oversight of privately owned firms charged with delivering public goods. But that is only half the story. The film has nothing to say about the immense damage that can also flow from state ownership. Instead, there is a misty-eyed alignment of the state with the public interest. Run that one past the people of, say, North Korea.
The
labour market
Make mine a latte
From The Economist print edition
A new role for America's coffee houses
EIGHT in the morning, and seats are filling up fast at the coffee house on the corner of 3rd Street and Avenue A in New York. All day long, the café swarms with young professionals clicking away at laptop computers and gabbing on mobile phones. Business is being done. But there's a hitch: many of these frenetic patrons are out of work.
The story is the same at the Torrefazione Italia, on a chic stretch of Boston's Newbury Street. Alana Raftery, who used to be in software sales, sits there for hours with an iced coffee and paperwork. On Fridays, she pushes tables together with five other women to plan a software-services venture.
America is becoming a café culture. But the reason is less Starbucks marketing than the economic downturn. The white-collar army of the unemployed are making cafés their offices and job-search centres. Going there every day provides the same sort of structure and routine as a formal office—but with much better coffee.
Of course, cafés have long served as the locus of business activity for independent consultants, creative types and teleworkers (as well as brewing-places for novels, coups and revolutions). But the new clientèle is different. In contrast to previous recessions, more professionals are out of work. Technology has changed, too, allowing people to job-hunt or devise new business plans untethered from their clunky desk computers and tangled-cord home phones. Moreover, with the number of cafés growing from under 2,000 in 1991 to over 14,000 today, these people now have plenty of places to go.
Their habit may also herald a deeper trend in the workforce: an era of nomadic teleworkers, whose jobs are no longer tied to one particular spot. Quinn Mills, a professor of economics at the Harvard Business School, believes that companies, “with their urge to regiment”, are unprepared for this. Not only the unemployed, but workers too, may prefer to decamp to Starbucks: great for reducing overheads, but perhaps less good for productivity.
For coffee houses themselves, their new status as job centres has helped the industry buck the slumping economy. In 2002, the gourmet-coffee sector earned a record $8.40 billion in revenue, with cafés accounting for more than half the sales. Many coffee houses, belonging both to publicly-traded companies and independent retailers, are reporting sales growth of roughly 7%. And though $4 for a cappuccino may seem steep, it's pretty good for a New York per diem office rent.
IL COMMENTO
Lavoro in frantumi conflitti in aumento
di LUCIANO GALLINO
"LAVORO in frantumi" s'intitolava un libro del sociologo francese
Georges Friedmann, uscito in Italia nel 1960. Il lavoro cui si riferiva
Friedmann era quello ripetitivo, spezzettato in mansioni insignificanti,
caratteristico dell'organizzazione tayloristica dell'epoca. Fosse ancor vivo,
ora potrebbe scrivere un nuovo libro dallo stesso titolo, guardando non più
ai contenuti del lavoro, bensì ai rapporti tra lavoratori e datori di lavoro,
quali sono prefigurati nella legge delega appena approvata.
In realtà le deleghe concesse al governo sono almeno sei, nè è dato sapere
quali sorprese riserberanno i dispositivi d'attuazione degli interventi sul
mercato del lavoro che ognuna di esse prevede. Per ora le caratteristiche più
evidenti della legge sono la spinta che essa eserciterà in direzione di una
marcata individualizzazione dei rapporti di lavoro, e di un ulteriore
ampliamento della già vastissima tipologia dei lavori atipici: quelli che
propongono al lavoratore una trentina di tipi di contratto, tranne quello a
tempo indeterminato e ad orario pieno.
Dalla individualizzazione dei rapporti di lavoro, che in questa legge inizia
moltiplicando i canali di avviamento al lavoro, potrà trarre qualche
vantaggio la minoranza di coloro che sono molto giovani, e in possesso di
capacità professionali scarse sul mercato del lavoro: beninteso, fintanto che
sono giovani, e finché dura il momento in cui quelle capacità sono scarse.
Ne riceverà invece serio svantaggio la maggioranza di coloro che a causa
dell'età o della qualifica ordinaria si trovano in condizioni di sostanziale
debolezza contrattuale non solo nei confronti della grande impresa, ma anche
dell'artigiano, del piccolo imprenditore, del commerciante. Fu per trasformare
simile debolezza in una forza relativa che nacque storicamente il sindacato.
Il quale da questa legge delega esce, in prospettiva, non poco indebolito.
Da un lato perché organizzare una miriade di lavoratori titolari di contratti
individualizzati è molto più arduo che non organizzare una massa di persone
che cercano protezione nella stipula di contratti collettivi. Dall'altro,
perché la frantumazione dei rapporti di lavoro fa sì che fra la massa dei
lavoratori si sviluppino interessi materiali e ideali profondamente divergenti
e sovente conflittuali, che sarà sempre più difficile rappresentare su ampia
scala al fine di stipulare con la controparte soddisfacenti contratti
collettivi.
Dalla parte dei lavoratori, è probabile che questa legge contribuisca nel
breve periodo ad accrescere la quota dei lavoratori poveri, e, a lungo
periodo, quella dei pensionati poveri. I lavoratori poveri sono coloro che pur
lavorando una gran parte dell'anno, non guadagnano abbastanza per restare al
disopra della linea della povertà. Essi sono in aumento in tutti i paesi
avanzati, in forza di processi analoghi a quelli che vediamo attuarsi in
Italia: la pressione per il contenimento dei salari, altrimenti l'impresa si
trasferisce in Indonesia o in Moldavia, unita alla deregolazione del mercato
del lavoro, che sta tramutando l'occupazione di durata indeterminata e ad
orario pieno in un privilegio riservato a una minoranza.
Quanto ai pensionati poveri, sono quelli che, versando gli scarsi contributi
che è possibile versare quando si passa da un lavoro a termine all'altro,
magari con ampi intervalli tra i due, potranno contare su una pensione
corrispondente grosso modo al trenta per cento d'uno stipendio medio. Come ha
ricordato pochi giorni fa il presidente dell'Inpdap, uno dei maggiori enti
previdenziali italiani.
Servisse almeno, il lavoro in frantumi, ad accrescere la competitività delle
imprese. Ma neanche questo risultato è detto sia conseguibile in forza della
legge in questione. Chi ha qualche pratica di organizzazione aziendale
incontra sempre più spesso tecnici, quadri e dirigenti i quali cominciano a
chiedersi se con il mercato del lavoro deregolato, che permette ad un'azienda
di impiegare al proprio interno anche dieci o dodici imprese terze, ciascuna
delle quali utilizza lavoratori atipici con dieci o quindici contratti
differenti, non si sia ormai andati al di là delle buone pratiche
organizzative.
Con tanta varietà di aziende e di tipi di contratto, accade che il centro di
controllo non riesca più a controllare segmenti essenziali del processo
produttivo. In tal modo la deregolazione del mercato del lavoro,
internalizzata nell'azienda, porta alla sregolazione dell'intera
organizzazione.
Da questa legge, ovvero dai suoi provvedimenti attuativi, i lavoratori hanno
parecchio da temere. Forse anche gli imprenditori, prima di rallegrarsi,
dovrebbero riflettere su quello che potrebbe succedere nella struttura
organizzativa delle loro aziende quando si utilizzano quote sempre più ampie
di lavoro in frantumi.
(8 febbraio 2003)
The
jobs market
The young and the
rested
From The Economist print edition
One part of the American workforce is hurting badly—teenagers
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THROUGHOUT its 104-year history, Ruttger's Bay Lake Lodge has employed a lot of teenagers. Each summer, around two-thirds of the 325 staff at the remote holiday resort are high-school and college students. The end of August sparks a crisis: the students go back to school, leaving Ruttger's, which closes in November, scrambling to find dishwashers, waiters and housekeepers.
This year, the resort's managers are less frantic than usual. Before Ruttger's opened in April, it got an uncharacteristically high number of applications from adults, even though many of its jobs pay below $7 an hour. Ruttger's is thus employing around 25% fewer teenagers than normal, even though they also applied in droves.
American teenagers are an atypically industrious lot. In most developed countries, teenagers work only if the family needs income. Yet the American teens most likely to work have historically been white, attended college, lived outside a big city, and (perhaps most surprisingly of all) had a family income above $40,000 a year. By contrast, poor inner-city kids have been much less likely to hold jobs.
A new report by the Centre for Labour Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston points out that this has been the toughest summer-job market for teenagers in 37 years (see chart). The problem extends beyond seasonal work. Many starter jobs once filled by America's youth—at cash registers, griddles, dishwashing stations and on newspaper routes—have now been nabbed by adults.
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The unemployment rate for people aged 16-19 (and seeking work) was 17.7% in July. That compares with 14.8% in the same month last year and 13.4% in 2000. More tellingly, if you include those who have given up looking for work, the employment-to-population (EP) ratio for teenagers has dropped to 38.7% this summer, compared with 44.5% two years ago. Andrew Sum, a professor at Northeastern, sees a “depression” in the teen-labour market.
Such language is a little dramatic. The employment situation varies by state, and even within states. Richard Judy, an economist, points out that in regions such as central Illinois and the Tampa Bay area in Florida, there are too few people to fill unskilled jobs. Others think that teenagers are simply concentrating on different things: a new report by the Bureau of Labour Statistics says more teens are studying during the summer than in past years.
That might perhaps help to explain the changing EP ratio for teenagers, but it does not explain rising unemployment among those teens who want to work. A lot of teens looking for jobs are not finding them. How much is this due to the current economic downturn and how much to deeper structural changes in the workforce?
The experience of teenagers hints at something of a crunch in service jobs at the bottom of the employment ladder. Some labour-market experts argue that lay-offs, or fear of them, have persuaded adults to take jobs which were once filled by college graduates, pushing some of the latter back down into jobs once held by high-school graduates and dropouts.
Minnesota, for instance, actually has one of the country's highest rates of teen employment (alongside Iowa, Nebraska, and Wisconsin). But job vacancies in Minnesota in the second quarter of this year were 41% below the same period last year. That prompted many adults to look for jobs once held by less skilled workers.
Another factor has been Wall Street. The drop in personal savings caused by the stockmarket plunge has prompted many older Americans either to postpone retirement or re-enter the job market. According to the AARP (formerly known as the American Association of Retired Persons), there are 8% more Americans above the age of 55 working now than there were a year ago. Many are in skilled fields such as consulting; but plenty are also doing odd jobs part-time. However, there are also longer-term forces at work:
•Immigration. The surge of new immigrants over the past decade has created a huge new labour pool, mainly along the east and west coasts and in big cities like Chicago. Many have little education: about a third lack a high-school diploma, three times the rate of native-born Americans. Many speak little English, and thus qualify only for the unskilled, low-wage jobs that teens used to pick up.
•Welfare reform. In 1996, Congress passed a law requiring welfare recipients to work or get job training in exchange for benefits. The number of people on welfare has dropped from 14m in 1994 to 5m today. Many who went from welfare to work were unskilled and took entry-level jobs.
•Demography. There is an unusually large number of teenagers around, thanks to a “baby-boom echo”—a generation born to the original boomers between 1977 and 1994. Tom Dilworth, a labour expert with the Employment Policies Institute in Washington, DC, points out that around 35m echoers had turned 16 by last year (“eligible worker” age). They now account for around a fifth of the total workforce. The EPI estimates that by 2010, nearly 74m members of the echo generation will be 16 or over, accounting for about 37% of eligible workers. An ever-increasing number of these young workers are Latinos.
A teenager having trouble finding a job might seem a harmless form of preparation for the rigours of the “proper” job market; after all, few are their family's primary wage earners. But there is now quite a lot of research arguing that such experiences can have serious consequences. A 2001 study for the EPI by Thomas Mroz and Timothy Savage from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill linked teen joblessness to lower lifetime earnings, future unemployment and a variety of other social ills.
Inevitably, there have been calls for special help. Northeastern's Mr Sum, for instance, wants a federal jobs-stimulus programme for young Americans. Others argue that some proposed laws are actually damaging chances for teens. Mr Dilworth at the EPI points to a health-insurance bill proposed by Senator Edward Kennedy, which he says would make it more difficult for employers to hire teens.
Naturally, some things may improve if the economy does. But some things have probably already changed forever. These days, Mr Judy notes, “paper delivery by kids on bikes is something out of Norman Rockwell”. But perhaps it was inevitable that adults would take over the newspaper routes. How many teens want to get up at 5am anyway?