Originally posted by
[email protected] 23, 2006 04:12 pm
I'm very skeptical. Of course, managers and the other workers are of the same class, but the power dynamic leaves me a little troubled.
Yeah, I understand that the federal government has been changing the Fair Labor Standards Act, particularly over the past two years or so, so as to reduce the number of workers getting overtime in the usa. That has been done by, among other things, reclassifying people as managers so that they are not eligible for overtime pay. For example, someone who oversees two or more people and who has the abililty to hire and fire, or even recommend to hire and fire, is now considered a manager -- a pretty broad definition. That particular change to the FLSA was passed in 2004.
Now, Congress is considering even more significant changes. Any employee who spends more than 10-15% of their time at work overseeing another person -- even just one -- and who exercises "independent judgement" could be classified as a supervisor and thus be made ineligible for union membership. That is very broad, too (ever trained a new person at your job? then you were overseeing their work). This is clearly being done to further weaken the already ailing organized labor base in this country.
So, yes, those managers WalMart should probably be considered members of the working class, since their situation is not in many respects different from other workers' (they certainly put in a lot of hours). There will be many others like them in the near future -- people who magically migrate from "worker" to "manager" through governmental fiat. What struck me most about the article I linked, though, was this: even though those folks managerial responsibilities were likely limited, they were still the ones who led the walkout. I agree with rouchambeau: that is problematic. Working peoples' movements should not replicate the kind of negative power relations that we see in the workplace, where one category of people make the decisions and another category simply follow. Workers certainly shouldn't be taking orders from a manager in the workplace and then... taking direction from the same people in labor struggles. :wacko:
I've never really heard of anything like this in the usa. Managers historically (?) have had a vested interest in serving their company and an ideological attachment to their position and strata: for instance, management during many labor actions would go to the assembly lines and attempt to perform the work normally done by the striking workers, to keep production going. For a major corporation like WalMart to create a section of management that is, at least on the surface, unreliable -- this is most curious.