Thursday, May 1, 2008

May 1 special: The Pinoy Worker in a Flat World




Workers of the world, awaken!
Rise in all your splendid might
Take the wealth that you are making,
It belongs to you by right.
No one will for bread be crying
We'll have freedom, love and health,
When the grand red flag is flying
In the Workers' Commonwealth.
--a song by Joe Hill commemorating the struggle of the first May 1 movement

German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote that beyond human existence lies nothing.

If this is true, then, what hope lies for the Pinoy worker? What life awaits those who traditionally work in factories and sweatshops throughout the country?

In a flat world such as ours, intellectual capital is perceived to be more valuable now than production. With technology totally eliminating the human factor in production, the machine has proven to be more important than the worker.

This begs for a re-examination of the worker’s place in the scheme of things.

During the Industrial Revolution, the workers know how powerful they are. Without them, factories can’t go on producing.

Now, everything has been mechanized. You see less and less people being employed by factories because computers can do the same stuff that a worker can do, and with less stress of a shutdown due to a picketline or a labor strike.

Lazzarato (1996) puts it simply as an era of “immaterial labor”, a dig against Karl Marx description of labor as related to material production. Like all labor, such requires physical activity, but an “immaterial” one due to its result. Lazzarato defines it as “the labor that produces the informational and cultural content of the commodity” (1996, 133). According to Hardt and Negri (2005, 108), it creates “immate- rial products, such as knowledge, information, communication, a relationship, or an emotional response.”

It’s a departure from Marx in the sense that it makes not just objects but “subjectivities” (Hardt and Negri, 2000, 32). Hardt and Negri agree that its “biopolitical production, the production of social life itself, in which the economic, the political and the cultural increasingly overlap and invest one another”

I think this administration is aware of this. That’s why, today, in commemoration of the 1884 struggle of Chicago workers in the State which led to May 1, they’re encouraging workers, especially the OFW’s, to engage in entrepreneurship.


Whatever my friends from the labor movement would say, this shift from material production to immaterial labor poses a serious threat to the relevance of labor unions. Why?

In a highly mechanized world, labor’s place is threatened with extinction. With the world being increasingly transformed into geo-economic divisions, how will the Philippines stand a chance against such giants of production, like China and India?

Compare the Filipino worker with their counterparts abroad and you’ll see that companies prefer Chinese and Indian workers than Filipinos. First, the standard of living there is quite low. Second, they don’t complain. And third, they are not pricky or choosy in their work.

Yes, we do say that we’re more educated and speak correct English than these Chinese or Indian workers. Yet, the new trend nowadays is for companies to adapt to the language and trash the language barriers instead of workers adapting to the company. Likewise, Chinese workers are learning English. Indians, by the way, speak the Queen’s language, better than us.

So, where’s our advantage?

As the world behaves in an informational mode, fewer and fewer companies produce material capital and more and more rely on intellectual capital. With the paradigm shift, more people need more info-based education rather than skills-based.

That’s good for modern, highly-industrialized societies like those of the US, Europe and Singapore. But, what about the Philippines, which positions itself as a viable investment haven for producers of goods?

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