Neoliberal Strikebreakers

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Clarissa

September 3, 2022

For white collar workers, #MeToo, BLM and the rainbows are what strikes were for factory workers 100 years ago. They are the picket lines created in an attempt to prevent employers from firing them in favor of cheaper workers who’ll agree to work in poorer conditions. It’s usually the low-rung, most dispensable people at an organization who do pronouns and BLM slogans in email signatures.

Since I’m on this topic, yesterday I was asked about the difference between capitalism in the manufacturing stage and today. Here’s the answer: factory capitalism needed people. It needed them to come and stay put, showing up dependably every day at the conveyor belt. Digital or neoliberal capitalism doesn’t need people. It wants them to go away. The capitalism of firing substituted the capitalism of hiring.

The first thing our new top administrator said to us is that there are too many people. These were his literal words, too many people. He proceeded to firing everybody in sight with fanatical zeal. Nothing is more annoying to a neoliberal than workers, payrolls, all these people expecting to be paid, demanding working conditions, vacations, sick days, leaving at the strike of five pm, encumbered with families – what a bother.

This is why there’s a vogue of putting “diverse people” in leadership roles. They can do the firing without the employees managing to BLM or LGBTQIA+ them. They are the strikebreakers.

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2 responses to “Neoliberal Strikebreakers”

PaulS

September 3, 2022

In SA the firing is taken rather literally. This is how many of the black elite made their money including the current president.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marikana_massacre

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Post Alley Crackpot

September 3, 2022

A clever idea, but in reality, not quite bang on.

Ever been to Havana?

It’s an interesting place in terms of multi-generational living arrangements where people continue to live in the echoes of the pre-Castro regime, living in buildings that in a more functional economy would have been razed and rebuilt.

You see old cars everywhere, even newer old cars that are merely newer than the old cars of Havana’s infamy that consisted of whatever was left behind.

People there are reasonably happy to live in the ruins left behind by an earlier society.

What they perceive is an inability to be able to build back anything “better”, and so they have infiltrated the earlier society’s habitat, rearranged some of the furnishings so that they fit present needs, and continued to live as infiltrators of that earlier society which has been made no longer possible.

So these people of which you speak are not neoliberal strikebreakers.

They are neoliberal infiltrators.

This behaviour exists when it’s easier to infiltrate than it is to innovate.

Usually by the time a company is so fully infiltrated by people who play “word games” as what they believe to be a productive activity, it’s too far gone to be much of anything except an IP holder and a manager of outsourced processes, both of which in the short to medium-term don’t require the expertise that made it possible for the company to continue to exist.

This is why “Get Woke, Go Broke” is such a safe investment bet.

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