Good liberal wars

Decentists and other ex-lefties
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In the middle of a good review of two rightwing revisionist books about the War on Vietnam, Rick Perlstein says something profound but obvious:

And yet, in his own confused way, Moyar is also onto something. Americans, even “neoconservative” ones, are prone to liberal sentimentalizing about the possibility of “good” wars. But war is not good. War is the attempt of one group to violently impose its will on another. Fields of blood and fire are no kind of workshop for Jeffersonian democracy.

Yet nonetheless quite a few people who would say of themselves that they are of the left, and I’m not just talking about Decentists, have this illusion that it is possible to wage war for democracy, or human rights. Hence Kosovo, Afghanistan and, to a certain extent, Iraq. In all cases war supporting leftists were not the ones who made these wars possible, but helped legitimise them by providing non-official (and non-binding!) motivations for supporting them.

Kettle chips: not as wholesome as you think

Life under Capitalism, Unions
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It’s an old story. A supposedly wholesome company which takes good care of its workers and which takes pride in presenting a benign image to its customers, is less than happy when its workers want to unionise. This time it’s the people behind Kettle chips who object:

It says it has had to seek advice from “a number of sources” to fight what it considers are union experts in organising recognition campaigns. It did not comment directly on employing Omega Training, part of the Burke Group. The company does not want to recognise a union. It said: “We are very proud of our workforce and continue to believe passionately that direct engagement with employees in the spirit of mutuality is in the best interests of our employees and shareholders.”

A spokesman added: “All our employees enjoy a secure salary (the lowest of which is 25% above the minimum wage); we have a 38-hour week with 25 days’ paid holiday per annum increasing with service, and we offer a blue-chip benefits package that includes 100% sick pay … and a profit-sharing bonus that is open to all employees. We’re not sure what Unite the union wish to do for our employees.”

The union is baffled why the company is so determined to block recognition. Miles Hubbard, Unite’s eastern region organiser, said: “They are a good company with a decent record so we cannot understand why they are being so aggressive about union activity. We were called in by the workers when they did not receive annualised payments for overtime.”

What both sides in this dispute talk around is the simple fact that with an union, the workers at Kettle chips no longer have to depend on the company’s goodwill to be treated right, but have a powerful weapon to force management to do the right thing. At the moment, “direct engagement with employees in the spirit of mutuality” may be “in the best interests of our employees and shareholders”, but what if the interest of employees and shareholders clash? Without an union, the workers at Kettle chips would be at the mercy of the company. Unions are like insurance: you may not need them now, but it pays to have it for when you do need it.

If Kettle chips or its parent company were really as benign as they say they are, they would not be threatened by this unionising attempt. But like many a patriarchal company before them(Remember Whole Foods?), they want to be generous to their employees on their terms, on bended knees and dependent on the company.

Hattip: Avedon

xkcd

Comix
Published on

I know that as I saw this xkcd strip last Friday, it would be received well in some quarters. It looks like I was right.

For me, xkcd has become the new, more intelligent User Friendly, in that almost every geek of any persuasion I know seems to know and like it. Not undeservedly, as Randall Munroe is the best stick figure cartoonist I’ve seen since Matt Feazle, able to put a lot of nuance in just a tilt of a stick figure’s head.

Polish builders are human too: FT columnist angered

Life under Capitalism
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It looks like Sarah Sands’ breezy little interlude in her FT column (found through the Yorkshire Ranter)…

So, my Polish builder first worked on my house only a year ago. Seven days a week, 14 hours a day with his crack team. Barely spoke a word in English. Refused tea or coffee, just smoked and consumed Coca-Cola and chocolate biscuits. I was so swelled up with pride at my good fortune that, last December, I recommended him to a liberally inclined film director. I waited for grateful e-mails but none came. I grew a little uneasy.

Then a few months ago, I commissioned my Pole to do a bathroom. He returned without his team. Where were they? He was a little vague; they had disbanded/gone back to Poland/were busy elsewhere, but I should not worry about that.

I didn’t, until it became clear that he was arriving at 10 and knocking off at five. The driven gang was gone. Now he had a baby-faced apprentice who spilt his fizzy drinks on the carpets and broke the window. Every couple of hours they would down amateurish tools for a break. Finally my tight-lipped resentment spilt over.

“What on earth has happened to you?” I cried. “Why don’t you work any more?”

…perfectly encapsulates the attitude behind the changes described in this article (found through The Sideshow):

Dautel’s decision to backtrack now puts him in good company. Many thousands of German companies joined the march to Eastern Europe and China during the past 15 years, hoping to reduce production costs there. But recently many have been returning, disillusioned. Smaller companies in particular are finding they overestimated the apparent advantages of low labor costs or more advantageous tax laws.

When businesses make dubious decisions to outsource or offshore production because it’s supposed to be faster and cheaper while maintaining the same quality, it’s always easy for them to hide their internal reasoning on why to do this behind the usual m.b.a. claptrap, but with people like Sarah Sands it’s easier to see the real motivations. For Sarah, her Polish builders were not people in their own right, with their own economic motivations, but a magical panacea that would get her a cheap, good quality bathroom fast with none of the downsides of hiring English builders. It’s presented as a crime against nature when that turns out not to be the case. It’s as if the natural order should be that there are those who should get paid well for their work (Sarah, those German firms) and there are those that need to work hard for little (Polish workers, countries you outsource to).

There’s a large dose of racism and classicism involved in this. What Sarah left unspoken is that “her” Polish builders started to act like English ones, when they were supposed to remain forever cheap and hardworking. A lot of talk about migrant workers and outsourcing deals in this sort of cliches, in which the domestic, English or German worker is contrasted unfavourably with the hardworking for a penny a day Indian or Polish worker and how the former better learn how to be more like the latter or they will take all their jobs. There’s a great deal of middle class resentment build into this propaganda when it’s aimed at obviously working class professions like builders, as if these are finally receiving their comeuppance after years of unfairly demanding an actual living wage for their work and childish insistance on taking breaks and not working overtime to finish some media type’s kitchen.

I bet the same sort of attitude, only less articulated, is also present behind many decisions to outsource to countries like India. What such decisions fail to take into account is that workers in Indian aren’t working cheaper and harder by choice, but because they have to and once they no longer have to, they will stop, just like workers here. Smart companies realise that, which is why they both try and make sure workers here also have to work hard and cheap by dismantling social safetynets and are always looking for countries where workers still are fast and cheap. That a lot of this also means sacrifising quality is alright, as long as the market can be persuaded to be content with cheap crap…

Companies that cannot afford to lose quality however are out of luck; they should’ve known not to outsource vital processes.

Saturday comics festival

Comix
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Two interesting comix related articles for you to enjoy this Saturday morning, as a break from all that heavy political stuff. First up is Jog at Savage Critics remembering that old Elaine Lee & Michael Kaluta series Starstruck. That’s was one of those odd series that thrived in the newly unleashed freedom the direct market in the eighties offered to American comics, when creators no longer had to appeal to random buyers at newsstand, but to a well informed comic loving audience buying from shops staffed with people who work there purely out of their love for comics. A science fictional comic with strong human interests, Jog sums up the charms of the series quite well, but not before ruining everybody’s day with this little meditation on how fleeting fame can be:

I’m going to guess that a bunch of you haven’t even heard of Elaine Lee, who wrote the comic; maybe the name’s rattling around in the back of your head, but nothing of use is cohering. Hey, I don’t blame you. Just about every comic she ever wrote is out of print, after all. While I’ll take a little room there to equivocate — she does have a story floating around out there in Charles Vess’ The Book of Ballads collection — I do believe all her bigger works are pure longbox fodder. Most of the smaller ones too.

It’s something nobody likes to think about, really. Someone’s entire body of comics work sinking down, left to the funnybook subculture of bin divers, no one piece able to latch on to a famed or renowned predecessor/successor by the same person. Down, down into the bog. It’s almost as unpleasant a thought as somebody working on a comics project for over a decade, only to see it fade from view. Unlucky, without embrace, and forlorn.

But the former has apparently happened to Elaine Lee, and the latter certainly happened to Starstruck. That’s too bad, because Lee’s writing on that comic was intriguing and ambitious; Starstruck is just the type of comic that some today would possibly be considering a classic of the form, had its full, 500+ page length ever been published. But pages came out in various forms, at various times, often taking on an individual character that seemed to match their then-current environment. In other words, there was a Starstruck of 1984 that was very different from the Starstruck of 1991. Maybe inevitable, considering the long path a comic of its go-for-baroque type was bound to follow back in the day.

Too depressing that; let’s quickly take a look at something much more cheery. Shaenon K. Garrity’s explenation of the appeal of What’s Michael, perhaps the best cat based manga in existence:

What’s Michael? doesn’t have much of a continuing storyline, just a set of running gags, so you can start reading at any volume. Each chapter is a short, self-contained vignette, usually a breezy six pages long. Very roughly, it’s the story of Michael, a typical orange tabby cat, and his typical middle-class family. But Kobayashi frequently breaks from even this vague premise, giving Michael different owners, transporting the cast to more exotic settings (a cop show, a samurai drama, a running parody of “The Fugitive” featuring a veterinarian on the run), writing himself into the story (something he also does in Club 9, where he frequently pops up as a lecherous bar patron), or envisioning a world of anthropomorphic cats and dogs.

An example, taken from Shaenon’s post:

example of What's Michael

Cute, and oh so recognisable.