Even though I know it’s kind of a joke, this turns my stomach:
No one wants to hire an American worker anymore. Too expensive. Too prone to high medical bills. Too likely to sue. This entire blog item could easily be outsourced to a well-educated Google-adept blogger in Bangalore. (Maybe it was. How do you know?) (Because the Bangaloreans wouldn’t waste their time on a blog when they could make a lot more money doing high-level data analysis and remote medical diagnoses.)
When did Americans decide that other Americans were lazy ingrates? American workers are the most productive in the world (I realize this study is a few years old, but it’s the best one I could find and I doubt things have changed much on this front since 2007).
I realize this will get me in just as much trouble here as the times I’ve dared to criticize Saint Jon Stewart, but this is why I stopped watching “The Simpsons”. Some show about how American men are lazy screw-ups who don’t do their jobs? Fuck that. Give me “Roseanne”, which treats working people with the dignity they deserve.
I know where this self-hatred all comes from, it’s Galtian propaganda in defense of outsourcing and importing, and gutting unions and social programs. It’s depressing how widely accepted this propaganda has become.
superluminar
I stopped watching when it stopped being funny, several years back.
Mnemosyne
Interestingly, a lot of companies have quietly started moving their outsourced operations back from India to the US because it turns out that it’s actually a gigantic hassle to communicate with your offices in India when they’re 12 hours away and there’s no time during business hours when you can put a conference call together to straighten things out.
The Giant Evil Corporation I work for does seem to have offshored a chunk of our accounts payable grunt work, but they also have just plain ol’ local offices in India that sell our products to that specific market, so it seems slightly different to me than simply offshoring “expensive” workers but keeping the rest of your operation in the US.
c u n d gulag
A commenter on Steve Benen’s site said something I hadn’t noticed before – Hollywood has stopped making movies about working people, and there are no network TV shows about them either.
Gone are the Kramdens, the Nortons, on TV, and the Norma Rae’s on the big screen.
Stan of the Sawgrass
Thanks, Doug–
needs to be said more often, especially today. And it’s also a good day to remind your Fox-addled relatives that workers in unions got us things like 8-hour workdays by demanding them, not by trusting in the generosity of our revered Galtian overlords.
(Hey, remember 8-hour days? makes me nostalgic.)
beltane
Funny. I stopped watching The Simpsons for the same reason though I was not able to articulate it as well as you. But, yeah, Galtian propaganda disguised as satire is no longer my cup of tea. In some ways, our love of snark and irony makes us more susceptible to this kind of thing. Compare the portrayal of workers in popular culture in this recession to the Great Depression and you’ll see where I’m coming from. “Liberal” Hollywood has been awesome at selling this new-style fascist propaganda.
The Other Chuck
Bangalore? Screw that, Indians are starting to cost something more than a latte. They’re already shifting to cheaper places like Sri Lanka.
FlipYrWhig
@c u n d gulag:
I don’t think that stands up at all. For one, the much-imitated Apatow/”man-child” formula for comedy virtually requires its characters to have un-cushy jobs.
beltane
@c u n d gulag: When I was a kid I loved watching reruns of The Honeymooners because the Kramdens lived in a crappy NYC apartment just like I did (my neighbor was even a bus driver) and so I could totally relate in ways I cannot relate to anything I see on TV now. Look at f*cking Reality TV, it’s full of nothing but mean and condescending portrayals of average Americans as grotesque freaks.
Karmakin
Here’s the deal. It’s so foreign for my generation to actually have a real “blue-collar” job that because they’re making movies to generally target us, you’re not going to see that sort of thing.
Lots of movies have characters which work in the service industry, or below.
sfrefugee
Not only are Americans the most productive, they are, in many cases, the LOW COST PRODUCER.
Yes, that’s right folks, American total production costs (labor + materials + taxes + transportation to market) have fallen so low that some companies find it cheaper to manufacture here.
What companies you say? How about IKEA. They pay $19 per hour + paid vacation and benefits in Europe, and $8 per hour or less with fewer benefits in Virginia. See: http://bit.ly/nwxcW3
FlipYrWhig
@beltane:
Mostly what people liked to watch during the Depression was Shirley Temple and gangsters.
jwest
Watching Obama give a strained speech to the bussed-in union audience of Detroit.
He’s going to lose bigger than anyone can imagine.
Anon
That productivity study was about American persons. The statement probably still holds for the (other) American people.
That last sentence can be read w/ or w/out the “other” with similar results.
gogol's wife
@FlipYrWhig:
Or Shirley Temple and gangsters, as in “Little Miss Marker” (okay, bookies, but still).
Lit3Bolt
Just like “Dad” is a alcoholic boob who’s apparently so inept he can’t tie his shoes but always has a harebrained get rich quick fantasy scheme, to the kleptomaniac shallow hag of a wife “Mom,” along with utterly self-absorbed and underachieving “kids…”
DougJ, I think you’re onto something. This should be an entire essay and distributed widely.
R. Porrofatto
Not only are American workers the most productive in the world, but since 1980, their share in the vastly increased profits they’ve produced has gone almost entirely to they who own (viz. Wall Street), instead of they who work.
Graph here.
srv
Reagan was the one who realized he could call unions lazy ingrates and still get their votes.
D’OH.
As for the Simpsons, now you understand why my mother didn’t yuck up I Love Lucy and turned it off whenever it came on. Quaint you are so offended when a guy is the clown.
handy
@jwest:
RON PAUL RON PAUL!
(Amirite?)
FlipYrWhig
@beltane:
True, but the other recurrent reality show premise — think of Real Housewives and Kardashians — involves watching hyper-rich people act like spoiled brats. Reality TV is invested in mean-spirited portrayals across the class spectrum. I agree that there’s a shortfall of sympathetic portrayals of less-than-pretty people with less-than-wealthy lifestyles, but I’m not sure that’s ever been prevalent, in good times (wink) or bad. The Norman Lear shows were anomalies.
JPL
@handy: We can party like it’s 1920…wahoo
Davis X. Machina
@beltane: Hollywood’s one of the most unionized industries left.
We tend to remember some movies, and forget others. There were lots of gangster movies, and costume dramas, and proto-rom-coms, that don’t make into the film classes.
1936 — the middle of the Depression — Best Picture nominees — The Great Ziegfield, Anthony Adverse, Dodsworth, Libeled Lady, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Romeo and Juliet, San Francisco, The Story of Louis Pasteur, A Tale of Two Cities, Three Smart Girls.
Top grosses for the decade:
1930: Tom Sawyer or Hell’s Angels
1931: Frankenstein
1932: Shanghai Express
1933: King Kong or I’m No Angel
1934: Viva Villa! or It Happened One Night
1935: Top Hat
1936: How to Be a Detective or One in a Million
1937: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
1938: The Dawn Patrol or You Can’t Take It With You or Alexander’s Ragtime Band
1939: Gone With The Wind
Rather a mixed bag. Viva Villa is a shocker, though.
Samara Morgan
trollmaster, you still dont get it/
hiphop dance and science are goin’ save the the World.
just not white christian free-market Murikkka.
get to shufflin dude.
Tuffy
Keep jerking your tiny dick to your self-written fanfics, jwest. Someday there will be a non-black president, though. You still have hope.
barath
Slightly OT: DougJ – what’s your Galtian hedge fund friend doing with his money now? Is he selling and piling his cash in pillows in anticipation of a 2008 like crash? I always figure the insiders get their money out and leave the public and their 401k accounts holding the bag as it all goes down, so I’m curious whether he’s already headed for the exits.
Big Baby DougJ
@srv:
I had the same sort of reaction to Allie McBeal your mother had to I Love Lucy, if it makes you feel any better.
Lit3Bolt
@FlipYrWhig:
They also had songs like Brother Can You Spare a Dime? and Remember My Forgotten Man? both from around 1933. The Depression wasn’t just “Top Hat” and “Wizard of Oz,” you know.
Big Baby DougJ
@barath:
He’s spending most of it on women, booze, and a phat SoHo rental. The rest he is just wasting.
(I think his investments are cash and bonds.)
Satanicpanic
It used to be just liberals that were lazy. Now everyone is.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@FlipYrWhig:
That’s true, Rob and Laura and Samantha and Darrin were proto-yuppies. I remember when I was a kid I could never figure out why Mike and Carole were complaining about money when they had a fucking live-in maid. I recently heard an interview with Roseanne Barr where she said she had to fight in the first season to keep her characters from being portrayed as mouth-breathers.
The Simpsons…? I don’t know. Rich people/totebaggers are portrayed pretty badly too. And as others have said, the show has been kind of limping along for the last decade or more.
c u n d gulag
@beltane:
Yeah, reality show are horrible, but for another reason besides the one you mentioned, which is bad enough:
They’re job killers for actors and writers.
Instead of writers creating scripts, and actors interperting what’s been written, you have some vain attention-starved freaks who’ll do ANYTHING for face time, from the rediculous to the obscene, to the down-right stupid and dangerous.
Elizabelle
@jwest:
Here’s the C-Span link to Obama’s speech in Detroit.
http://www.c-span.org/Events/Obama-Previews-Jobs-Plan-in-Detroit/10737423798-1/
Somehow, I am not seeing the same event jwest is.
Fucking troll.
jwb
I’m fascinated by the extent of the anger showing on the blogs and the twittermachine today.
Chris
Thanks for the link.
As far as TV shows, don’t get me started on South Park… though at least that one’s fairly all-around-the-board in who it makes fun of.
beltane
@FlipYrWhig: Shirley Temple was pure escapism while gangsters were at least gritty, working-class ethnics. Everyone on TV these days looks so utterly well-off compared to the people I know.
FlipYrWhig
@c u n d gulag: Following up, I realized you may have been making a different claim. Do office drones count as “working people” for your premise? Because I can’t think of many blue-collar movies and TV shows, but I can think of a lot that feature unfulfilled office workers. And of course there are all kinds of shows and films about cops.
barath
@Big Baby DougJ:
I guess I should have realized how different that lifestyle is…
The Raven
Also, when people can’t make it no matter what they do, most people blame themselves.
And there is no-one to tell them that the game is rigged. It’s starting to dawn, and people are angry.
Elizabelle
Such timing. Just ended.
handy
@Chris:
That show’s creators are notorious glibertarians.
Elizabelle
@jwb:
re the anger: I think it’s anxiety.
Big Baby DougJ
@barath:
It is very different, it’s hard to believe he’s the same guy who used to look for cheap burritos with me in Berkeley.
Big Baby DougJ
@jwb:
There’s not enough to suit my tastes. People should be angry.
Mark S.
I stopped watching the Simpsons because it really started to suck about twelve years ago. I’m shocked it’s still on the air.
But in its prime, it was the best show on television.
Chris
@The Raven:
Sure there are, there have been for forty years. It’s just that they’re being told it’s the gubmint rigging the game, and the lazy
spics“illegals” andn!ggers“welfare queens” who’re benefiting.@handy:
Oh yes, I know. Probably not unrelated to my not being its biggest fan…
bleh
Not to get all class-warfare here, but I’m afraid it’s not that simple. If it were, we wouldn’t see a lot of the problems we do see.
Productivity, generally and in the report you link to, is calculated by dividing GDP by total hours worked. But GDP, while in part due to hours worked, is also due in part to capital stock employed and in part to the quality of each (training for labor, technology for capital). Thus, for example, one American worker using the latest Komatsu earth-mover is a hell of a lot more productive than one African worker using a shovel, because s/he has the training and the expensive high-tech equipment, not because s/he is inherently “more productive.”
And indeed his/her advantages are offset by such things as health care costs, time off, etc. But s/he is still more productive, even though s/he has health care benefits, paid vacations, etc., and s/he probably would be even if s/he worked fewer hours, just because of the advantages of capital, training, and technology.
And this is where the comparison starts to come undone. Because American workers in many jobs do NOT have those advantages. Data processing, for example, requires computers and computer skills. But many Indian workers have those same advantages, and in addition they are paid less, get fewer benefits, and/or work longer hours. In that industry, we are NOT the most productive, and that’s why many businesses have shifted data-processing jobs overseas.
In many service industries, the comparison is not meaningful. And in many other industries — both service and manufacturing — Americans still have th advantage in capital, technology and/or training. But the criticisms are apt in some industries, and that’s where we have a problem.
FlipYrWhig
@beltane: I don’t watch as much TV as I used to, especially the kind that has, whatchamacallit, “characters” — lots of news, sports, HGTV and fashion/makeover stuff on my screen — but the Louis C.K. show takes some interesting leaps with portraying economic and emotional struggle being experienced by imperfect people.
Elizabelle
@Big Baby DougJ:
Doug, seriously: how do you suggest channeling that anger?
Screaming on the blogosphere is enervating.
Mnemosyne
@c u n d gulag:
It’s even worse than that — the shows actually are scripted for the most part, but the writers get classified under other jobs, so they don’t get Writer’s Guild protections. The Guild has been trying to organize them, but it’s slow going.
beltane
@c u n d gulag: I agree with you on that score. That’s why I probably find these shows to be, above all else, horribly boring.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
this is even more important, I think, in the non-entertainment media. During the ‘crash’ of ’87 (which seems so quaint now), the joke was “In 1929, reporters called their editors, in ’87, they called their brokers”– that problem has metastasized. From David Gregory’s “this isn’t about the fat-cats, this is about people like you and me!” to the NYT’s bi-weekly “it’s hard to make it on only 150k/yr” articles, everybody knows we have to cut ‘entitlements’, the problem with education is those damn teachers’ unions, and on and on and on
Emdee
I still watch The Simpsons and I still laugh. It was funnier when it was more outrageous and fresher 15-20 years ago, but it still consistently gets at least one LOL per new episode, which is far more than most shows.
If we want to defend the politics…Homer is lazy and a bum when he’s working for people who hate him on tasks he cares nothing about (nuclear power). When he has his hare-brained schemes, he’ll often work amazingly hard on them. They did build a monorail, two walls, and the world’s largest escalator! Homer risked everything to save the town in the movie. Lisa works hard all the time, as does Marge, who regularly finds that her outside ambitions can’t supplant her family, which she explicitly realizes is her preference and not everyone’s. Yeah, the comedy dumbs things down, but that’s the case in all TV shows.
As for I Love Lucy, well, Lucille Ball explicitly wanted her character to be her opposite—”ordinary,” on a budget, struggling under the rules of 1950s America even as she was talented, rich, and capable of doing just about anything she wished. Although the writers decided that the Ricardos had to work their way up in life after a few years (leading to eventually moving to Connecticut and new comedy sources), the initial directive was that the Ricardos and their apartment should look like they lived on average-or-below income in New York City.
The sexism is kind of hard to take 60 years later (well, even 20 years later), but it’s like complaining about the portrayals of African-Americans in “The Jack Benny Show” and “Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House.” That’s how those things were back then, and I still get to laugh at the comedy even as I wince at how bad things used to be for people of color, and remember how far we still have to go.
Just my non-hipster left-center mid-American take on the situation.
gogol's wife
@beltane:
Strangely enough, Shirley Temple movies often involve difficult topics like unemployment, child neglect and abuse, etc. There’s always a magical happy ending, but sometimes the early parts of the movies (“Curly Top,” for example) are very depressing and sad.
Mark S.
@jwb:
My guess is that it’s hard to feel great about Labor Day when you’re
a) unemployed,
b) underemployed,
c) working more than one job out of necessity, or
d) sticking with a job you hate because you know you’ll have a hell of a time finding another one in this shit economy.
Kathleen
@c u n d gulag: While “Unstoppable” is billed as an “Action Adventure” movie, there is a strong sub-text of how big companies value their employees (not so much) and the value of experience, skills and wisdom as depicted by Denzel Washington’s characater. I think the title not only referred to the runaway train, it also reflected the will and courage of the two main characaters. In that sense I saw it as a very pro worker film.
barath
@Big Baby DougJ:
Maybe that makes sense then, because there are very few good burrito places in Berkeley. SF on the other hand…
Big Baby DougJ
@Elizabelle:
The usual ways, giving money to candidates, volunteering. Even writing letters to the editor. All of that stuff.
Vasya
I don’t understand the Simpsons thing – it’s not like they show Homer to be one of the average American workers. The whole point is that he’s a lazy fat moron. Originally the idea was, perhaps, that the Simpsons was about the average American family, but that idea was abandoned pretty quickly after the first season.
aisce
yeah, yeah, the show that invented c. montgomery burns is just such insidious galtian propaganda.
god, what fucking caricatures you all are. this is why people hate “liberal elites.” because you’re snuffling dipshits.
the reason to not watch the simpsons anymore is because they only make three decent episodes a year. not because of some fake classist narrative.
beltane
@gogol’s wife: The same thing can be said for The Little Rascals. Those kids looked only a slight bit removed from the tragic world of Victorian chimney sweeps and street urchins.
Elizabelle
@Big Baby DougJ:
Yeah, yeah, yeah but I was asking about literal anger.
Which, as jwb has pointed out, is out in force.
(Am planning an internet break in a few. Too much angst.)
PurpleGirl
@FlipYrWhig: The cops are workers but the focus of the shows is on the crime and the apprehension of the criminals. The humans could be robots and the stories would be the same.
Omnes Omnibus
@aisce: Christ, what an asshole.
c u n d gulag
@FlipYrWhig:
Yeah, I was thinking more along the lines of blue collar type jobs, and I should have excluded cop shows, because I think they belong to their own genre.
suzanne
@Big Baby DougJ: I had a smilar reaction to “Sex and the City”. I watched one episode, and was impressed with the topics it dealt with: abortion, infertility, female friendship. But every one of the characters were just horrible, materialistic people, and I couldn’t bear to spend ten minutes around any of them.
Yutsano
@aisce: If your whole point in being on BJ is to prove how much more of a Kool Kidz you are, then you will get rightfully labeled a troll. In other words, shove your sanctimony up your keester.
Dennis SGMM
@Omnes Omnibus:
This has been another episode in the continuing series “aisce Explains the World for the Elucidation of Lesser Minds.”
Mnemosyne
@Davis X. Machina:
@Lit3Bolt:
I’ve been reading a lot about pre-Code movies in Hollywood (aka the movies made between 1929 and mid-1934 that mostly paid lip service to the Production Code) and it’s really fascinating to see how much the Breen office was created to provide political controls over Hollywood, which was going further and further left with every year the Depression continued. Ginger Rogers was a working-class heroine before she was paired up with Fred Astaire. Shirley Temple didn’t start making features until after the Breen office was empowered to censor films starting at the script stage. Etc.
It’s really pretty fascinating. They’re out of print, but Mick LaSalle has a pair of books, Complicated Women and Dangerous Men, that address a lot of what was going on in a jargon-free way.
Here’s “Remember My Forgotten Man” as performed by Joan Blondell in Gold Diggers of 1933. Pretty amazing to see how fiercely political it was when you compare it to the films that were made only a couple of years later.
Mark S.
@PurpleGirl:
The few episodes of CSI I’ve seen lead me to the impression that the cops are robots.
Robin G.
I miss Roseanne something fierce. As an adult I identify so much with those early seasons, and it was amazingly respectful (in a weird way) to the class it was portraying. Never seen anything like it since.
Samara Morgan
@Elizabelle: evryday im shufflin
you should try it.
:)
greennotGreen
I believe part of the reason American workers are often portrayed as lazy is because we are culturally programmed to suspect that it’s true. Protestant work ethic applies no matter the color of your skin or the accent on your last name if you grew up in this country. I was working full time and going to school before I finally looked at my life and decided that the criticism I’d accepted growing up was actually not true: I was *not* lazy. But I go to bed every night thinking I didn’t get enough done during the day.
Aren’t we the CAN DO country? How come we’re not getting it done? It’s not because we’re lazy – we’re not. It’s because our leadership sucks in a major way because we’re ignorant, and we’re ignorant because it’s beneficial to the oligarchy to keep us that way. Until the masses see that and respond in a meaningful fashion, we’ll just be serfs – hard-working, but serfs.
Happy pseudo-Labor Day
Big Baby DougJ
@aisce:
The Simpsons has always had such a hard-core working-class viewership.
Maybe it’s time to take your trolling somewhere else.
HRA
Our office had 67 people in it when I arrived there. Now we have 16 plus 1 new hire from another college. As a result, I was given the duties of 3 who left in addition to my own duties. This is the 1st time we are not getting a raise which in the past never counted for much since it was always swallowed up by the raise in health insurance, disability insurance, etc. In addition, we have to take 9 days of furlough to save the jobs of those who would have been laid off. Of course, there will be layoffs.
There were 2 periods in which I did work 2 jobs. Certainly, it was not the best of times for the body. Still, it was necessary for providing what was needed to survive and it does give you strength to do it.
Observer
Doug, from your own darn link:
So in fact Norway is number one.
American “knowledge” workers are too busy surfing the net trying to find new propaganda articles they think mistakenly claim America is #1 in everything to actually be #1 in everything.
Mnemosyne
Also, too, if you think Hollywood movies dealt in sweetness and light before Bonnie and Clyde ripped everything open in 1967, allow me to introduce you to Barbara Stanwyck in Baby Face.
Make sure you stick around for the big confrontation with her father at the end of the clip.
t jasper parnell
@Lit3Bolt: Sometimes they put diametrically opposed material in the same movie. Say My Man Godfrey; or “Remember My Forgotten Man” right before “We’re in the Money” in Golddiggers of 1933. Odd times.
aisce
@ hra
sounds tough, hra. have you considered boycotting an over-the-hill animated sitcom? i hear it’s a popular thing to do these days.
t jasper parnell
Lit3Bolt: Sometimes they put diametrically opposed material in the same movie. Say My Man Godfrey; or “Remember My Forgotten Man” right before “We’re in the Money” in Golddiggers of 1933. Odd times.
The version with the links is awaiting moderation
Big Baby DougJ
@Observer:
So you found another measure by which we’re only number 2.
Mnemosyne
@t jasper parnell:
Actually, “We’re In the Money” is at the beginning of the film … and it’s interrupted by the sheriff’s deputies closing the rehearsal down because the producer hasn’t paid rent on the theater.
Real Depression musicals (as opposed to the post-Code ones) are surprisingly hard-hitting, though of course you have benevolent rich men to bail all of the pretty girls out by marrying them.
ETA: “Remember My Forgotten Man” is the closing number of the film — as you can see in the clip I posted, the song ends and “The End” comes up with the end credits. That’s the song they sent their audience out into the street thinking about.
Omnes Omnibus
@aisce: You do know the difference between simply deciding not to watch something anymore and boycotting it, right?
FlipYrWhig
Remember when George H.W. Bush said that American families should be more like the Waltons and less like the Simpsons? And then the clip popped up on The Simpsons itself? Bart said, as I recall, “We’re just like the Waltons. We’re both waiting for the Depression to end.”
I don’t know about this “Galtian”/condescending view of The Simpsons. Obviously the staff changes and storylines aren’t consistent, so the politics isn’t consistent either. But I’m a bit leery of an analysis of The Simpsons that begins and ends with Homer Simpson as oaf, because conservatives have been using the same evidence (of sitcom depictions of schlubby, ineffectual men in particular) to bolster their claims that Hollywood liberals are blatantly anti-male.
birthmarker
As far as the blog post linked to here-I am not sure that the car dealer anecdote the writer uses to judge the strength of the economy would be all that dire where I live. I don’t hear chatter locally about no one buying cars. In fact on the road I see many new cars, nice selection of newer hybrids, etc.
Also, the housing market is warming up some. We went from not seeing movement in sales at all to spotting Sold signs. My neighbor has sold a house in less than 6 weeks. I know someone else who built a house and got their older home sold in a few weeks. Granted, I have seen the sprouting of some New Price signs, too.
Once again these are anecdotes, but so are the writer’s.
Honest question–does Bangalore and other places like it have reliable electricity (like 24 hours a day), phone service and clean water? I don’t mean this snarkily, I just really want to know.
Yutsano
@birthmarker:
In parts. Bangalore also has huge slums with crushing poverty and horrific conditions, like most cities in India. There is still a massive class divide in India that exists for more reasons than just money. And a lot of those cheap workers live in those slums.
WereBear
@Mnemosyne: Wow, pre-code.
Mr WereBear made me laugh and laugh about the night he, a growing boy, discovered why his Dad just loved those old musicals; the dancing ladies wore no underwear.
They explored a lot of “dangerous” territory, all right. After the Code came in, you never saw so many convenient suicides and tractor accidents in your life.
On Broadway, the Bad Seed survived and went on. In the movies, she was struck by friggin’ lightning.
Mino
@FlipYrWhig: Studs Turkel Hard Times
William Hurley
The irony of citing “productivity” stats is that productivity is an aggregate measure of technologies, processes, hours worked and output calculated against a distillation of profit margins, GDP performance and other data. Additionally, “productivity” as a stat is used in other abstractions to divine the relative level of national well-being. In truth, as its applied in the post-regulation era, “productivity” represents the level of workers’ impuissance in the face of income and wealth stratification.
It’s also a number/measure that when stagnant or declining becomes a weapon wielded by corporations and corporatists to further disenfranchise unionized (code for inefficient) workers, cut employee benefit packages further, squeeze wages and to rationalize more and/or accelerated exploitation of externalities (read: outsourcing).
harlana
A few years back, when I started a 2 year assignment at a software development firm, the HR mgr told me they had so many foreign nationals because American workers were not as smart or productive. They were officially purchased by another big software firm that same week, followed by hundreds of layoffs.
Sly
As I half intimated here, much of the elite opinion in the United States is founded on the assumption that the average middle-class worker is overpaid, underworked, and, in many cases, intellectually unfit to be in the middle-class. And they’re talking about a group of people who have been squeezed so hard over the past 40 years due to increases in housing, medical, education, and finance costs that they had (at least up until 2008 before everything went to shit) a negative savings rate.
The problem is that this squeeze has been slow to the point of literally being generational. People in their thirties and forties, desperate to hold on to what they have, are looking at their parents and wondering what kind of qualities they had that allowed them to make it when the truth is that the current generation is more educated and more productive than any prior generation.
By way of analogy, its like the soldier coming home from Vietnam with severe PTSD wondering why he has so much difficulty coping compared to his father and uncles who served in WWII. “They must be stronger than me,” he’ll say to himself. What he doesn’t realize is that, largely due to advancements in airlift technology (i.e. the helicopter), the average GI in the Pacific Theater saw about 40 days of combat while the average GI in Vietnam saw six times that.
Here’s where the analogy fits: Roughly 85% of people who declare bankruptcy hide the fact that they’ve declared bankruptcy from their parents and siblings. They don’t ask for help, they just try to hide it the best they can and try to make up some excuse as to why they’re downgrading their standard of living.
Yet the solution proposed by elite opinion is that these people need to feel more shame and degradation. If middle-class American’s are weak in any respect, its that they take too much shit from social parasites in the upper class.
nancydarling
@Robin G.: Amy Goodman had a great interview with Roseanne this summer.
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/7/25/pioneering_comedian_roseanne_barr_on_her
That woman carries a lot of heft and I don’t mean in pounds which are considerably less than when her series began. She looks great!
t jasper parnell
@Mnemosyne: You are correct. In the still in moderation post I’ve links as well; of course, I didn’t bother to watch them trusting instead to perfectness of my memory instead of acknowledging its ever more parlous nature.
Mnemosyne
@WereBear:
G watched some of the Barbara Stanwyck pre-Codes with me and said, “You know, I never understood what people saw in Barbara Stanwyck, but now I get it.” She had to really tamp down her personality and adopt a certain coldness so she could keep working after the Code came in, but when you see her in something like Baby Face or Night Nurse, it’s a revelation of what Hollywood movies could have been like without the Code’s clampdown.
Another great pre-Code movie — Three on a Match, where a young middle-class housewife becomes a drug addict because she’s so bored with her life. Ann Dvorak for the win!
gogol's wife
@Mnemosyne:
The ending of “Three on a Match” is so chilling. I just love pre-Code movies! Between my Shirley Temple and pre-Code obsessions, I’m living in the 1930s. Thank God for TCM!
Mnemosyne
@t jasper parnell:
As I said, I’ve become obsessed with them in the past year or so, so I’ve probably seen them more recently than you have. TCM has been showing a whole lot of pre-Codes lately, plus they’ve been reissuing them on DVD as part of their Forbidden Hollywood series. I also bought a whole mess of films from the Warner Bros. website when they had their Fourth of July sale that I haven’t had a chance to watch yet.
I really should start up that movie blog I keep talking about doing so I can stop boring people in comments sections with my off-topic rantings.
WereBear
I will be there.
And I adore Barbara Stanwyck, always. She was orphaned, kept in sporadic homes by her older sister, mired in poverty, got out as a dancer. She knew what she played.
Linda
According to Richard Reeves, this is not a new phenomenon. Commentators in the fairly new America of the early 19th century were griping constantly about how lazy people were, that they didn’t want to work, etc. And 30 years ago, when I lived in Tennessee, people told me that they would never buy American cars because they were built by lazy, doped-up union workers. Self and mutual hate for working people is the American way.
t jasper parnell
@Mnemosyne:
Nice of you to excuse my lapse, but I watched on TCM as well. Speaking of precode, did you ever see this Tarzan?
Mnemosyne
@gogol’s wife:
Watching pre-Codes makes me wonder what we might have been like as a country if the US hadn’t been forcibly infantilized by religious and political interests. It’s an interesting, if depressing, thought.
gil mann
Credit where it’s due, there are more laughs to be found in this passage than there were in the last Treehouse of Horror.
Shlemizel - was Alwhite
A couple of notes – I worked a gig at a certain large discount retailer (think RED). The managers there had a goal for the number of jobs they were expected to move to India. The economics of it were that they could hire 5 Indians for the cost of one American – but they needed to hire 3 Indians to get the same amount of output. Still it is a saving of 40%. I ended my gig trying to get presentable work out of my 3 replacements in Bangalore. I couldn’t take it any longer.
Also – about Productivity: The FRENCH are the most productive workers in the world. Yes, the hated FRENCH produce more per hour than Americans. But, because they are gifted with a civil society they get huge amounts of vacation time. If they worked as many hours as Americans do their total would go down. If Americans got some real amount of down time we would do better.
Mnemosyne
@t jasper parnell:
I have it on DVD, but I haven’t watched it yet. Howzabout Claudette Colbert’s nude bath in The Sign of the Cross? Uber-conservative Cecil B. DeMille was one of the biggest promulgators of nudity in the pre-Code era, the old hypocrite.
ETA: Heh — I forgot the whole “take off your clothes” line right there at the end. Cecil, you randy old goat ….
harlana
@Mnemosyne: I have all 3 of those! I’m a pre-code enthusiast. Looove Barbara Stanwyck in those two and Three on a Match was ever so racy for the time.
On another note, we have the musings of 5 repub pres candidates in Columbia, SC with Big Bad DeMint doing some of the questioning. Just finished with Bachmann and Cain.
harlana
@Mnemosyne: DeMille mixed sex with religion, ironically, the entice audiences to “receive” the biblical message or, more likely, folks told themselves they were watching a religious film so it’s okay to gawk at the ladies in skimpy outfits, that’s just how they dressed (and acted, those naughty heathens) back then!
Shlemizel - was Alwhite
I don’t understand the hating on the Simpsons. Yes Homer is an incompetent boob but he really does not get ahead being a boob. The Episode with Grimes in it showed how competence is not rewarded in America & I felt that was true.
The worst feature of TV programing is that they show people with mediocre jobs living like they are wealthy. The best part of Roseanne, like The Honeymooners and Married With Children was that they showed shlubs living like shlubs. Compare that to how most ‘middle-class’ TV characters live – huge houses, excellent decor and high end cloths. Not how we live.
t jasper parnell
@Mnemosyne: Yes, indeedy on both counts. Plus and also, during the the run up to the WWII the PCA routinely suppressed anti-Fascist films and generally acted like the Conservative Catholic organization it was. It’s leader:
God forbid Americans ought to have seen naked boobies let alone criticism of Fascist regimes.
harlana
also, Redheaded Woman and Red Dust :)
harlana
I’m glad we are finally talking about something I like (I’m not much of a cook) because Newt Gingrich is on the teevee right now.
Mnemosyne
@harlana:
I think DeMille was your classic American showman: give ’em all the debauchery and nudity you can crowd onscreen but end it with a “moral” and you can get away with almost anything.
And, now, sadly, I have to run errands. If I do finally get my butt in gear and get that website up, I’ll post it in one of the open threads. Between my DVD collections and my mass Tivoing of any movie TCM says was made between 1929 and 1934, I would probably have at least a year of weekly posts if I could make myself sit down and write them.
fuckwit
Remember the old Soviet-era joke: “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us?”
Dennis
@Observer:
Read the whole article. Norwegians get more done per hour, but work fewer hours.
Mnemosyne
@t jasper parnell:
If you can track down the LaSalle books, I think you’d really like them. He hits on Breen’s anti-Semitism and points out how much of the Code was focused on regulating and punishing the behavior of women for doing things like daring to have a career or wanting something more out of life than being a wife or mother. He really, really came to despise Breen and the Code the more pre-Codes he watched and the more Breen letters he read.
And now I really do have to go.
nancydarling
Harper’s Magazine had an article in 2005 called “Let There Be Markets: The Evangelical Roots of Economics” which is a good read this Labor Day when trying to understand attitudes toward the poor and the working man and woman. Turns out, they are really concerned about our immortal souls and helping us will put us in danger of eternal damnation. Poverty is part of God’s divine plan, doncha know?
http://harpers.org/archive/2005/05/0080538
MM
@Big Baby DougJ
I don’t read the comments often enough to know whether aisce is a troll or not, but given that this post is essentially a purity troll, I find your response…interesting.
t jasper parnell
@Mnemosyne:
Anybody else read Self Styled Siren?
t jasper parnell
@MM: Big Baby Doug is often wrong or boring or both, but pointing out that the worker in America is now a moocher while the parasite class is now the productive class isn’t purity trolling; it’s stating a fact of the matter. Is the Simpons complicit in this? This suggests it is.
I’m not Catholic and point out that John Paul was right doesn’t make me a sympathizer; it makes John Paul right for once.
FlipYrWhig
@Mnemosyne: Going from one cat licking milk to two just before the second woman climbs into the bath… I can’t tell if that’s subtle or unsubtle.
TheWorstPersonInTheWorld
This:
If Obama wins the election, he has to spend four more years pretending to lead the country. But if Obama loses, he gets to make speeches to rich people for a pile of money and maybe join the Carlyle Group or one of those other things that you get as a reward for making sure that no one saves your national economy. So, if you’re Obama, do you really want to win the next election? If the answer is “No,” his policies make a lot more sense.
Capri
@beltane:
Watch Raising Hope on Fox.
That’s what the working class looks like today.
Cain
@Yutsano:
I had a massive rant on the whole thing (I am not pro-poor in India, although there are definitely legitimate concerns) There is poor, and then there is poor.. and most of the poor you see IMHO are a bunch of lazy jerks.
PeakVT
@Shlemizel – was Alwhite: The data I compiled a while ago says the Norwegians are the most productive OECD country. But they’re a small country on sitting on top of a large puddle of oil, so they’re an oddball. Of non-petro-states, Belgium and the Netherlands are slightly more productive than the US, and France is about equal. However, I think US productivity was inflated by the housing bubble in the crude way I calculated it, so France probably is more productive on a per-hour basis.
I agree that that US productivity would improve if the country had better worker protections. Our laws need big improvements.
MikeJ
@Shlemizel – was Alwhite:
Part of that is probably technical. It’s just easier to shoot and easier to stage in big spaces.
Go into your living room, and imagine even with one wall gone where you put three cameras and a boom mic, then how you get other angles.
SRW1
It’s a bit mangled, but you clearly know your George Best.
gogol's wife
@t jasper parnell:
Self-styled Siren is great.
Yutsano
@TheWorstPersonInTheWorld: You don’t vote anyway, so why do you care?
Sly
@TheWorstPersonInTheWorld:
Let’s see. Obama is going to spend the next 14 months building the largest campaign war chest in human history and actively campaigning in, likely, all fifty states. From this we can draw two hypotheses:
1) Obama wants to get reelected.
2) Obama secretly wants to be defeated so he can cash in on all those great speaking fees that he’ll be getting anyway (and more of them) after his second term.
One wonders why “hippy punching” is such a widespread phenomenon.
Chris
@Sly:
Yeah, it’s kind of absurd.
But in fairness, I’ve been wondering for some time if Republican strategists might not also be wishing very quietly for a loss in 2012.
The worse the economy gets, the likelier to win, but the worse the economy gets, the worse the public pressure to fix things will be on the person who wins. And their solutions won’t work – some of them at least know that.
Dennis SGMM
@Sly:
I wonder why someone would conflate simple-minded trolling with being a hippy.
birthmarker
@Cain: Once again I ask this totally without snark, b/c I don’t know anything about it–do you think Slumdog Millionaire was at all realistic as to the way the people live in India in the slums? Or was it dramatic exaggeration?
Augie
Its good to see that Doug is boycotting, hands down, the two most liberal television shows on air. Excellent principle.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Sly: I’m almost embarrassed for the presumably) politically engaged adult that wrote that. Being Eschaton, I’m sure the comments make that look like a polisci masters thesis
birthmarker
@Chris: I wondered this in 2008. But I tend to be a bit of a CT.
TheWorstPersonInTheWorld
@Yutsano:
I follow college football, too. Haven’t picked up a pigskin in many years.
I love old war movies. I’ve never flown a WWI propeller fighter plane.
I enjoy horror films. I’ve never seen a ghost.
You’re not bright, are you?
Yutsano
@TheWorstPersonInTheWorld: None of those activities affect the outcome of the citizens of this country. But false analogies are fun anyway!
Give it up. John Cole is never going to fuck you.
Sly
@Dennis SGMM:
Considering that the troll is linking to a site that quite possibly coined the phrase, or at the very least significantly pushed it into the heart of Progressive ennui, I believe my use of it was rather apt.
Chet
Although it’s a silent and therefore falls outside the Pre-Code era as such, I’ve found King Vidor’s The Crowd to pack a wallop every time I’ve seen it. Its star, James Murray, wound up a penniless alcoholic and drowned after falling into the Hudson River in 1936, which makes his performance all the more heartbreaking.
Kathleen
@Shlemizel – was Alwhite: @t jasper parnell: Yup. From time to time. Love that blog. Got link from James Wolcott’s blog.
Shlemizel - was Alwhite
@MikeJ:
Compare Roseanne or MWC sets with most shows though. Sure they are big & spread out but they are not high-end stuff all shiny & new. The look worn & messy. I think a lot of people see that over and over so it is reinforced that they should live with all that expensive stuff too because all the middle class people they see on TV do.
I remember one of the famous killers (Richard Speck, maybe?) who express rage that his mom was not like Donna Reed (a TV mom of the 50s) And it occurred to me that some people think everyone lives like the people on TV do. Instead of messy lives with petty arguments some times everyone is always happy, or will be in 30 minutes or less.
Brian
I stopped watching The Simpsons, cuz, you know, it hasn’t been good in like 12 years.
Janeane The Acerbic Goblin
This post reminds me of a Simpsons episode where Grandpa Simpson starts getting checks because Lisa and Bart used his name to submit a script to the Ichy and Scratchy show, and they bought it. Lisa asks “didn’t you think it was weird that you were getting checks for doing nothing?”, and Grandpa said “I thought it was because of Democrats were in power again”. Remember, this was 1993 or so when Clinton and the Dems came into power. That kind of lazy writing enforced a theory that Dems are the fiscally irrepsonsible ones when the opposite is actually true.
Janeane The Acerbic Goblin
@Mnemosyne:
The Sign of the Cross is one of my favorite DeMille pictures.
The “pre-code” stuff, by today’s standards, isn’t that bad. You get to see Colbert’s nipples in a milk bath and some intense violence. Even back then, I don’t think it was that bad.
gil mann
@Janeane The Acerbic Goblin:
That is pretty damning. Remember this one?
“You can’t keep the Democrats out of the White House forever, and when they get in, I’m back on the streets, with all my criminal buddies!”
~Sideshow Bob, yet another Simpsons creation whose words are clearly meant to be taken at face value, because that’s how comedy works
Canuckistani Tom
If TV doesn’t show enough people working blue collar jobs, then what do you call the following:
-Axe Men
-Deadliest Catch
-Dirty Jobs
-Ice Pilots NWT
-Coal
-Billy the Exterminator
(Not trying to be snarky, just want to know why these don’t count)
Mnemosyne
@t jasper parnell:
I don’t, but I may start — I love her take on “Leave Her to Heaven.”
DougW
@superluminar: Sorry, but I never started watching them. They were never “funny”, and were always a shill for the wrong sort of groups of business. Yes I get the irony, but could never stand it long enough for that irony to impress me… Probably my fail…
jefft452
Mnemosyne
I agree that her earlier work was superior
But even post code, The Lady Eve, Ball of Fire, Double Indemnity, etc
I don’t see how anybody could not understand what people saw in her.
PS
Baby Face was one of the finest movies ever made
and Night Nurse, with its Stanwyck/Blondell combo was well acted for a B film (even without it’s … um..selling points
Darkrose
@Mnemosyne:
Please post a link when you do.
sneezy
@birthmarker:
Utility power in most of India is notoriously unreliable. For this reason, large commercial construction often includes diesel power generators for each building.
sneezy
@birthmarker:
I didn’t see the movie, so I can’t comment on that. But consider this:
“According to a 2005 World Bank estimate, 41.6% of the total Indian population falls below the international poverty line of US$ 1.25 a day.”
The population of India is about 1.1 billion, so 41.6% is
about 458 million people, or about 1.5 times the population of the US. It is very difficult to exaggerate the problem of poverty in India.
If you are genuinely curious, there are many, many sources of information better than random commenters on this blog.
As for the person to whom you were responding, he is either trolling or grossly misinformed and a total asshole.