COMMENTARY: Killing jobs, destroying lives

c. 1996 Religion News Service (Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and sociologist at the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center. His home page on the World Wide Web is at http://www.greeley.com. Or contact him at his e-mail address: agreel(at sign)aol.com. Check RNS Online for a photo of Andrew Greeley.) […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

(Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and sociologist at the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center. His home page on the World Wide Web is at http://www.greeley.com. Or contact him at his e-mail address: agreel(at sign)aol.com. Check RNS Online for a photo of Andrew Greeley.)

CHICAGO (RNS)-There is a world’s worth of difference between losing one’s job and losing one’s life.


But the mass firings of workers that are occurring with increasing frequency in American corporations have one thing in common with ethnic cleansing in what used to be Yugoslavia. In both cases, perpetrators engage in brutal actions because they refuse to recognize the humanity of their victims.

While corporate bosses such as AT&T’s Robert Allen, who fired 40,000 workers and walked off with $16 million in salary and options last year, don’t actually kill anyone, they are able to indulge in mass firings because they have dehumanized workers, just as the Serbs dehumanized the Bosnians they raped and murdered.

Corporate executives can draw lines through boxes on their organizational charts and thus mess up the lives of thousands of fellow human beings only because, in their minds, the people in the boxes have ceased to be people. To my mind, someone like Robert Allen belongs in jail. Unfortunately, what he is doing is perfectly legal, however immoral it may be.

The fatal flaw in American capitalism is the fiction that corporate executives are responsible to their stockholders but not to their workers. Until that fiction is changed, executives can do to their workers pretty much what they please, unless unions are strong enough to fight them.

The argument that such job-killing is necessary for corporate survival is another fiction. Corporations in Germany and Japan, our chief economic rivals, can’t engage in such massive layoffs and yet they do very well in the international marketplace.

Why is”down-sizing”so popular with American corporations? The answer is simple: There are no structural constraints against it as there are in Germany, whose labor unions are strong, and no cultural constraints as exist in Japanese society, where an employer’s obligations to his workers are woven into the social contract.

The underlying assumption of job-killing in America is that workers must be loyal to corporations but corporations need not be loyal to their workers. Only drastic legal reform can challenge this assumption. Ironically, the middle-class workers who gave Republicans control of Congress in the 1994 election because of their economic unease have, in fact, turned over power to those who, through proposed tax cuts, want to make the rich even richer than they already are.


A second irony is that it required the anti-Semitic, racist, isolationist and homophobic Patrick J. Buchanan to call the attention of our national elites to the problems of blue-collar and mid-level, white-collar workers. While the income of the richest citizens is going up, these workers’ real income is declining. Their job security is tenuous, their future looks grim, and no one seems to care about them.

Many of these same people voted for Bill Clinton in 1992. Yet, until the advent of Buchanan, neither party seemed interested in them. A balanced budget, tax benefits for the rich, curtailment of welfare and reduction of immigrants will not help these men and women at all.

The president proposes worker education programs and an extension of health care coverage. That is hardly a platform on which to sweep the Republicans out of power. Yet many of his advisers warn him about going after corporate America. It is still”the economy, stupid!”as the Clinton motto for the last presidential election proclaimed. Only now the problems of the economy are far more complicated than anyone realized four years ago.

Certainly the government should impose penalties in its”corporate welfare”programs on businesses that fire large numbers of workers and pay their executives exorbitant salaries. It could insist that those who are fired remain vested in pensions and health care. It could make certain kinds of down-sizing and out-placing illegal. It could strengthen unions, which are still the best available check on corporate greed.

The president is so far ahead in the polls now that many of his advisers may believe that his campaign does not need the flaming populist rhetoric that carried Harry Truman to victory a half-century ago. Perhaps not. But such a campaign would give him an overwhelming victory and focus the attention of the American people on what is surely the country’s most serious problem.

MJP END GREELEY

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