Minda, Gary

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California Western School of Law

California Western Law Review Volume 33 Number 2 Symposium: Towards a Radical and Plural Democracy Article 6 1997 Democratic Pluralism in the Era of Downsizing Gary Minda Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarlycommons.law.cwsl.edu/cwlr Recommended Citation Minda, Gary (1997) "Democratic Pluralism in the Era of Downsizing," California Western Law Review: Vol. 33 : No. 2 , Article 6. Available at: https://scholarlycommons.law.cwsl.edu/cwlr/vol33/iss2/6 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by CWSL Scholarly Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in California Western Law Review by an authorized editor of CWSL Scholarly Commons. For more information, please contact alm@cwsl.edu. DEMOCRATIC PLURALISM IN THE ERA OF DOWNSIZINGGARY MINDA*I am interested in considering how Chantal Mouffe might respond to theplight of workers struggling to survive the current wave of "restructurings,""downsizings," and "reduction-in-force" displacements occurring in what is,for lack of a better term, the "downsizing era." "Downsizing era" refers tothe wave of corporate restructurings which have left millions of unemployedand displaced working people in its wake.' It is hardly sensational to claimthat working people in America and abroad are finding they are the victimsof a widespread global corporate restructuring movement fueled bytechnological change, free trade, and a new form of competition stimulatedby cost containment strategies. 2There was a time when mass-production industries created lots of goodjobs with good job security for most working people. Today, a worker witha good job is likely to be downsized (a corporate euphemism for being"fired," "dismissed" or permanently "laid-off') at sometime during his orher career. The President's Council of Economic Advisors reported in 1993,for example, that in "each year between 1981 and 1990, an average ofalmost 2 million workers lost full-time jobs and were not recalled by theirformer employers [as a result of corporate restructurings and down-sizings].3Of course, many of these workers do find jobs, but once downsized,workers are likely to find jobs only at lower levels of pay. As the New YorkTimes reported last year in a Special Report, The Downsizing of America,sixty-five percent of all workers who have been downsized have becomeemployed, but only after accepting lower levels of pay.4 Studies ondisplacement rates of U.S. workers show that the relationship betweenemployer and employee is less important today in determining the employee'slong-term job security.5 Factors outside the relationship with an individualemployer-factors associated with the outside market-are more important.* William J. Maier, Jr., Visiting Professor of Law, West Virginia University College ofLaw.; Professor of Law, Brooklyn Law School. What follows is an edited version of a paperpresented at a symposium entitled Towards a Radical and Plural Democracy, held at CaliforniaWestern School of Law, February 22, 1997.1. See CONGRESS OF THE UNITED STATES, CONGRESSIONAL BUDGET OFFICE STUDY:.DISPLACED WORKER TRENDS IN THE 1980S AND IMPLICATIONS FOR THE FUTURE (1993)[hereinafter Congressional Budget]. See also Downsizing of America, N.Y. TIMES, Mar. 3-9,1996; Dec 29, 1996.2. See Simon Head, The New Ruthless Economy, 43 N.Y. REV. BOOKS, Feb. 29, 1996;Peter Cappelli, Rethinking Employment, 33 BRIT. J. OF INDUS. REL. 563 (1995).3. Congressional Budget Office Study, supra note 1.4. See Downsizing of America, supra note 1, at 5, 34.5. See Cappelli, supra note 2, at 583.1Minda: Democratic Pluralism in the Era of DownsizingPublished by CWSL Scholarly Commons, 1996CALIFORNIA WESTERN LAW REVIEWThe word "downsize" first appeared during the oil crisis of the early1970s when it was used by automobile executives to describe the movetoward the design of smaller, gas-efficient automobiles.6 By the 1990s, theword has come to describe the shrinkage of vast categories of well-paid,highly-skilled jobs as large corporations cut their costs and improve theirefficiency by reducing the number of workers employed.In the corporate-speak of the 1990s, employees are downsized,displaced, severed and unassigned. They are told that their jobs "are notmoving forward." The word "downsize" has thus come to signify thediminished expectations of workers who find themselves moving fromrelatively high-paid, skilled jobs to relatively low-paid, unskilled jobs; theproverbial hamburger-flipping jobs in the service sector are where most jobsare found these days.Unquestionably, forty or fifty years ago when labor unions were strongand labor law was interpreted to support collective bargaining, there was aninternal restraint on what employers could do in dealing with workers. 7Unions and collective bargaining agreements restrained the ability ofemployers to compete on the basis of labor costs. Today, however, only tenpercent of private sector American workers are unionized-down from thirty-three percent fifty years ago. To counter downsizing and restructuringdecisions today, unions must make concessions and give back benefits wonin the past. In many, many cases, unions have been forced to acceptdownsizing and restructuring as an inevitable fate of global and technologicalcompetition. Workers, both union and non-union, are having a difficult timeaccepting their fate in an ever decreasing non-union environment in thedownsizing era.Consider, for example, the plight of Steven Holthausen, a fifty-something bank loan officer turned tourist guide, whose story was reportedlast year in the New York Times series The Downsizing of America.8 Mr.Holthausen (a middle-class, non-union, white collar worker) was "severed"(i.e., fired, or as corporate labor relations officers might say, "downsized")from the bank in August 1990 and has since been unable to obtain a job asa loan officer. For nearly a year, he barely scraped by on severance pay,unemployment insurance, and meager commissions earned as a freelancemortgage broker. He only recently obtained a job as a tourist guide for theNew Jersey Interstate. Meanwhile, a 22-year-old performs Mr. Holthausen'sformer duties as a loan officer at a fraction of his former salary. 9Mr. Holthausen, recently divorced and living alone in his brother'shumble apartment, seeks support from a self-help group of people forty andover who have been recently fired and have been unable to find comparable6. See Downsizing of America, supra note 1, at 17.7. See PAUL C. WEILER, GOVERNING THE WORKPLACE 7-13 (1990).8. See Downsizing of America, supra note 1, at 21-7.9. Id. at 21.[Vol. 332California Western Law Review, Vol. 33 [1996], No. 2, Art. 6https://scholarlycommons.law.cwsl.edu/cwlr/vol33/iss2/619971 DEMOCRATIC PLURALISM IN THE ERA OF DOWNSIZING 181employment."0  He is reported to have said, "tihe anger that I feel rightnow is that I lost both my family and my job. [This] is not where I wantedto be at this point in my life."" Like that of other downsized workers, Mr.Holthausen's story is a depressing account of the vulnerable position of late-career aging workers in America. In fact, Holthausen's plight is but one ofmany stories from the deep trenches of downsized America, where agingcareer workers have been dumped.Many on the Political Left might have some initial difficulty inidentifying with the plight of Mr. Holthausen and other once well-to-doWhite middle-class workers like him. After all, Mr. Holthausen probablyrepresents the political base that brought Reagan and Bush to the WhiteHouse and in turn solidified the popular consciousness articulated by thePolitical Right in this country. For that matter, I wonder whether Mr.Holthausen and other downsized workers like him now have antagonismtoward the Reagan-Bush policies that established the economic policies andconditions responsible for their unemployment.And yet I am reasonably certain that Mr. Holthausen sees himself as avictim of the very policies that Reagan-Bush and the Republican Rightpursued for much of the 1980s and early 1990s. Presumably Mr. Holthausenunderstands his social position in relation to the production factors that havebecome obsolete in the high-tech world of global competition. In otherwords, Mr. Holthausen probably constructs his own subjectivity on the basisof the social reality created by the post-industrial market economy glorifiedby the conservative Right. To put it in Chantal Mouffe's terms, Mr.Holthausen's particular subject position has become infused with a freemarket ideology constructed by the Political Right and made popular bysuccessful politicians like Reagan and Bush.However, Mouffe reminds us that "every social agent is a locus of manysubject positions and [no individual] can be reduced to only one." 2 Thus,there are other social positions which could describe Mr. Holthausen'sposition that do not relate to the subject position defined by the PoliticalRight. And yet, in today's political environment, Mr. Holthausen and otherworkers like him seem to have internalized the subject position inscribed bythe Political Right. Stuart Hall's analysis of Thatcherism, as discussed inChantal Mouffe's essay, comes to mind here. 3According to Mouffe, Hall enables us to understand "the way popularconsciousness can be articulated by the Right." As Mouffe put it:10. Id. at 22.11. Id.12. Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and New Political Subjects: Toward a New Concept inDemocracy, in MARXISM AND THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURE 89, 89-90 (Cary Nelson &Lawrence Grossberg eds., 1988).13. Id. at 96.3Minda: Democratic Pluralism in the Era of DownsizingPublished by CWSL Scholarly Commons, 1996CALIFORNIA WESTERN LAW REVIEWA worker who loses his or her job is in a situation ... in which, havingbeen defined on the basis of the right to have a job, he or she now findsthat right denied. This can be the locus of an antagonism, although there areways of reacting to unemployment that do not lead to any kind of struggle.The worker can commit suicide, drink enormously, or batter his or herspouse; there are many ways people react against that negation of theirsubjectivity. But consider now the more political forms that reaction cantake. There is no reason to believe the unemployed person is going toconstruct an antagonism in which Thatcherism or capitalism is the enemy.In England, for example, the discourse of Thatcherism says, "You have lostyour job because women are taking men's jobs." It constructs an antago-nism in which feminism is the enemy. Or it can say, "You have lost our jobbecause all those immigrants are taking the jobs of good English workers."Or it can say, "You have lost your job because the trade unions maintainsuch high wages that there are not enough jobs for the working class." Inall these cases, democratic antagonism is articulated to the right rather thangiving birth to democratic struggle. 4I imagine that Mr. Holthausen has probably considered that he lost hisjob because younger workers are taking away late-career jobs; that technolog-ical innovation in the banking industry is to blame; or maybe that forces ofglobal competition are what ultimately did him in. Downsized workers likehim are probably encouraged to blame themselves for their own fate. Theyare told that they are too old, too expensive, or not trained in the right skillsto be kept on the job. They are encouraged to internalize their antagonismand turn it on themselves. In other words, they are encouraged to view theirfate as the inevitable and natural consequence of good-old American freemarket capitalism.Mouffe encourages us, however, to understand how this form ofantagonism in the political discourse has denied the potential for truedemocratic struggle and real democratic pluralism. For those of us on the Leftwho are interested in developing a real democratic pluralism with realequality and full participation, the distinction between antagonism andstruggle is crucial. As Mouffe explained: "Only if the struggle of theunemployed is articulated with the struggle of blacks, of women, of all theoppressed, can we speak of the creation of a democratic struggle."" To dothis we must give up the idea of a "privileged revolutionary subject" whoseidentity has heretofore defined the Left's position in social relations andaligned the Left with certain working people, but not others. In other words,we must push identity politics and enlarge its scope so that we might see howa political struggle involves the whole of social relations. As Mouffe put it:"This opens the possibility of a war for position at all levels of society, whichmay, therefore, open up the way for a radical transformation."' 6In the downsizing era, we need to better understand how the relation ofworkers and capitalists has been articulated by the Right to justify and14. Id.15. Id.16. Mouffe, supra note 12, at 98.[V/ol. 334California Western Law Review, Vol. 33 [1996], No. 2, Art. 6https://scholarlycommons.law.cwsl.edu/cwlr/vol33/iss2/61997] DEMOCRATIC PLURALISM IN THE ERA OF DOWNSIZING 183perpetuate an ever increasing level of unemployment and underemployment.We need to struggle against this discourse and learn how downsizing mightbe transformed so that new forms of antagonism can be redeployed to bringthe norm of economic equality and job security back into the political realm.We need to see how the Mr. Holthausens of the world are very much in thesame economic position as the grape and fruit pickers in the fields ofCalifornia or Florida. In other words, we should open the possibility of a warfor the subject position at all levels in which we work and live.It does no good to simply look upon corporate power and public opinionas something we can not change. Instead, we should learn from Reagan andBush. We should study how the Right was successful in articulatingantagonism against the modern welfare state during much of the 1980s. Itwas the effective use of political power that transformed the way people thinktoday about social relations and economic changes. We need to learn fromthat experience and then put that learning to use in transforming the currentpolitical discourse by actively moving it back towards the Left.The political power of the Right has heretofore gone lairgely unmatchedby the Left. To survive, the labor movement must match the effectivenessof corporate interests in delivering its message to the public and the politicalprocess. To be effective, the labor movement must learn how to wage a newstruggle for the subject position of democratic pluralism and economicequality. Labor's best hope is that a new democratic struggle based on thecruel fate of downsizing and unemployment may work to transform thecurrent conservative political regime. We can make an important contributionby waging our own war for the position of new democratic and economicequality.5Minda: Democratic Pluralism in the Era of DownsizingPublished by CWSL Scholarly Commons, 19966California Western Law Review, Vol. 33 [1996], No. 2, Art. 6https://scholarlycommons.law.cwsl.edu/cwlr/vol33/iss2/6

Democratic Pluralism in the Era of Downsizing

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Democratic Pluralism in the Era of Downsizing

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