Whose Job Is It, Anyway? Capital Strategies for Labor

Abstract

[Excerpt] When corporate mergers and takeovers create massively debt-ridden new entities, with the resulting pressures to sell off assets, reduce costs (especially wages) and close "marginal" operations, it is the company's workers and their communities who suffer. And, when corporate managers accept, and even encourage, huge levels of waste, or ignore obvious opportunities because they aren't profitable enough, workers and their communities end up paying for the resulting inefficiencies and lost potential. I believe that a hallmark of the new economic era we seem to be entering will be that workers and unions will be forced to actively concern themselves with all aspects of an employer's business — with the intricate details of corporate structure, finance, and operations. In the process, they will have to evolve a comprehensive approach to the process of production and distribution, to investment and financial issues, as well as to corporate organization and control. In short, they will need to begin learning how to organize economic resources themselves and evolve what have been called capital strategies.