Public sector workers

[fa2991]

I've always had trouble explaining how capitalist exploitation affects them, since they don't work in for-profit industries. Any suggestions?

[Stephen Colbert]

Non-profit work can still be hierarchical, and it still identifies with some notion of wage slavery. There is, and even to a larger extent than for profit groups, exploitation of the worker(obnoxious hours) and unorthodox demands(weird pay/unusual requests/no gas money etc).

Thats my opinion, ive worked in one. :)

[Ele'ill]

It depends on what public sector you're referring to- many- despite their apparent position to help things- continue to instill a notion of 'authoritarian' pro capitalist rule. It's basically a game of 'yeah- we see the issues- but we're going to let the exploiters tell us how to approach the problem and deal with it.'

They're exploited by either hiring what leftists would consider undesirables to run the show- or by simply not being allowed to help by challenging existing laws- or by challenging existing and proposed growth in local communities.

The two 'not for profit' type sectors I'm thinking of specifically would be 'Job Core workers' and 'Social Workers'.

[jake williams]

In a capitalist society, state (public) services tend to function much like capitalist enterprises with public funding. I actually work for a union comprising workers at a "public university". So because I have some knowledge about universities I'm going to talk about them, but may of the same principles apply analogously to other institutions in capitalist societies, such as hospitals.

Legally in Canada, as far as I know, all universities are nominally public (at least all the major or accredited ones, so any of the ones you could conceivably have heard of). Any employees of universities, thus, are nominally public employees. But they function, in terms of their institutional structure and in terms of their labour relations, similar but not identical to the way private universities would.

Universities produce two major commodities, graduates and research. Graduates are regarded by the capitalist economy - and the capitalist state - as skilled labour, as a commodity input to be purchased. The state funds universities with public money for the express purpose of educating workers as inputs in capitalist enterprises. Research is often even more explicitly regarded as a specific commodity input. Presently at my union we're tying to organize research assistants on our campus. Many of them, while nominally employees of a nominally public university, are being paid directly by grants from private corporations directly to do specific research which those corporations need done for the purposes of their own profit making.

In either case, the labour relations on the part of the management are consistent with that of an effectively private enterprise trying to maximize its commodity output (and the financial returns they gain, in the form of grants and of public funding) at the lowest cost. Thus administrations of ostensibly public universities work vociferously to lower "public sector workers'" wages and benefits, and as a corollary, their rights, their organizational strength, their unity and their political power. Moreover, universities are often governed by boards of governors peopled by highly class-conscious corporate executives, even while they're still employed in those capacities. Basically, public institutions in capitalist societies, while certainly different from private ones, function in many of the same ways, adopting many of the same labour practices.

The differences are important. So, for example, the very act of providing a public service has a very important positive effect on the level of class consciousness which workers tend to have. Publicly owned services, even when controlled by capitalist states, are much more democratizable by working class movements with sufficient strength to pressure or overwhelm that capitalist state. While it is not easy for the working class to force school or transit board administrators to treat their respective employees well while encouraging strong provision of services to the public - both for subjective reasons having to do with the level of class consciousness, and for objective reasons in terms of the institutional barriers one finds within a capitalist state - it is much easier to do so, in fact and in principle, with public services than within private corporations.


edit: I forgot to mention a lot of important things. The fact that public sector workers are members in good standing of the working class is very visible even outside of the workplace. Their wages are directly linked with the wages (or, for that matter, the level of political and organizational strength) of private sector workers - increases or decreases in one directly affect those in the other. Public sector workers are hurt by all the inevitable consequences of long-term falling rates of profit, and the related phenomena of capitalist crises. This is very visible now - the present pinch ultimately caused by financialization (itself ultimately caused by falling rates of profit in "the real economy") results in serious cuts either to public sector compensation, public sector employment, or both. The only way to fight this is through very serious class struggle. Public sector workers are as hurt as private sector workers by prices rising faster than wages (a phenomenon due in part by an expansion of credit by the capitalist state aimed at desperately trying to rescue the ailing capitalist economy). And so on and so forth. There's substantial mobility between public and private sector jobs - no such mobility exists between the working class and any other.