[Translated from broadcast by Gegenstandpunkt Marburg 8 December 2004]
Wage cuts, work time extension, layoffs – not a single company doesn’t work on it. Successful companies want to protect and thus increase their success; the less successful want to become successful again. For all of them the way to success consists of lowering costs in order to be able to undercut the prices of their competitors on the market. For labor costs this means: get more work out of fewer workers for less wages. More unpaid work increases the profit of the business and limits the living costs of the workers to the same degree. The less the workers receive, the more they have to work for it, the better for the business. The free market economy is based on this fundamental conflict and its representatives admit it themselves when they denounce the “social,” which was once attributed in former times to the “social free-market economy,” as a historical aberration.
The last and only ones who do not want to know anything about this conflict, who on the contrary deny it as much as possible, are the professional representatives and spokespersons of the workers who have to suffer from this conflict: the labor unions. They persistently insist on the nice conception that until recently the interests of capital and the needs of employees could still be harmonized in the best possible way. It could continue too, if only smarter “decisions” were built into the “business strategy.” Completely realistically, the union management consultants assume that the living standard of the workers represent a restriction of the aimed-for business success and they accept thereby the principle of capitalistic exploitation. However, they point to the fact that the larger part of the problem should be charged to the fixed costs -- the costs of raw materials and machinery, of intermediate products and bookkeeping -- whose growth the staff has nothing to do with, so whose lowering they also should not be made liable for. From enlightened public opinion, however, they receive only the offensive reply that in addition to these long-run operational fixed costs, the nation is up to its neck in labor costs that are too high for too many people who work too little.
To the nation as a whole this is supposed to apply: The whole location suffers, above all, from the fact that the people are altogether too expensive and work too little. Not only the competitive success of individual companies depends on fewer people getting more badly paid for more work, but capital growth as a whole compels this. Its logic does not allow everything to continue as “comfortably” as before. Quite bluntly, the whole magnificent free market system is fundamentally hostile to employees -- and that is correct and there is nothing to improve in it.
Free market politicians, economic bosses and experts can afford this offensive insolence in confessing the meanness of their free market system because the practical implementation of this meanness meets no effective resistance; on the contrary it meets a lot of understanding. Of course, employee representatives grumble about “wrong business decisions” and so hold fundamentally correctly to the superstition of the workers’ friends, i.e. successfully managed capitalism. Then, however, they take part in every step of the only business strategy that conforms to the system: let fewer people work for less wages longer and more effectively and fix this by contract. No wage component does not stand for restructuring and no piece of spare time could not be given up: Management dictates the exploitation conditions which it considers necessary in order to win their next competition -- the staff in the form of their appointed representatives bang on. Thus capital positions its interest in the business across the board.
But of course it is not so simple. The whole expertise of unionized staff representation proves itself in the fact that it manages to deliver agreement to the demands of management in the form of an exchange. That can be done very simply: they agree to everything; but at each individual point break in something about why agreement to this point means the price of the imposition to be accepted would not be as high as originally threatened:
“Our people pay a price for keeping their jobs,” praises the deputy of the metal industry union. How is the case for an exchange supposed to happen here? This is a bad joke: The “price” must be put on the table not this one time, but must be paid again and again. Lower wages and longer working hours are fixed for the future as conditions for employment. And in return the staff does not even buy a small moment of security in that at least everyone who depends on it can continue to earn their wages in the company. Adept members of the work councils demand nothing “impossible” because they estimate the state of business the same way, on the side of capital:
A crazy deal in each case: The staff lets itself be exploited better -- and asks that it may happen in protection of their own interests.
The fact that employees are ready to understand their across-the-board subjection as a kind of exchange, to explain their increasingly worsened situation in life as an agreement, is because of the fact that their entire existence depends on the need of a business for their work. This makes them extortable! For every employee the threatened alternative is complete impoverishment, designed for them and put before everyone’s eyes. This should reasonably be regarded as an irrefutable argument for the abolition of this kind of living condition. However, the affected persons make the mistake of calculating their private damage in this unambiguous position as a comparison -- in this way, according to the “logic” of the lesser evil, they take part in the cynical calculations that are made with them. They position their dependence on each brutal calculation of their employers’ advantage as a good reason to offer themselves to them as a totally special deal in anything related to wages and labor performance. They look for their welfare exclusively in this submissive maneuver, which takes place fully at their own expense. The competition for the status of the most useful idiot is open.
This competition takes place within businesses and more than ever between the staffs of different enterprises. With the competition between the individual work crews everyone presents themselves to management as the most efficient profit production machine that the world has ever seen. Mostly union managers beguile company management with special conditions for what could still be taken out of its workers with more “lost” staff as worthwhile labor output -- in contrast to their dear colleagues elsewhere. All strive to help “their” company again achieve competitive success. The companies provide the means for the next rationalization that makes workers superfluous and prepare for new difficulties with the competitors, who reorganize exactly the same way, i.e. with wage lowering, additional work time and layoffs. Thus the wage earners actively increase the damage which capital does to them.
This is welcomed as the first sign of “economic reason” by the labor unions. Economic reason in this best of all economic systems demands that a lot more must still be taken from the employees -- they must be made much worse off before the economy can go up again.