After rereading Benner Monday night, I admit to having misread him a couple of times. The structure of the guilds is clearly a pre-union organizing structure that can evolve into a union, and logical given industry circumstances. The key shift in consciousness is to begin to question the mythical "right to manage"--Schot's article in Modernity and technology is valuable for its discussion of that shift among the Rotterdam dock workers of the early 20th century.
Should be pointed out that the artificial ambiguity in the classification of workers as supervisory that was introduced by Taft-Hartley and recently widened by Bush's NLRB is one of the main incentives to employers to make the management cohort as large as possible. This is why Wal-Mart calls its employees "associates."
On Sampson and Wu, the question might be where the now-redundant dock workers and sailors disappeared to in terms of employment in the technological evolution of shipping?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment