Workers are not Things

To jump to the principal post, click here.

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

Carlos Ingram Lopez, R.I.P.

Today the New York Times blared front-page news of yet another police killing of a minority person while in custody. In this case, the victim was a Latino man, Carlos Ingram Lopez. Held naked and bound by a mesh spit guard, he complained repeatedly that he couldn’t breathe and needed water. His grandmother also appealed for mercy. But the cops kept grinding Lopez into the floor on his belly—a posture known to risk death by asphyxiation. In a cruel irony, the grandma herself had called police because her grandson was having a mental health crisis, apparently while under the influence of cocaine. She called for help but instead got her grandson’s murder. In an equally cruel irony, Lopez lived in Tucson, AZ, whose population is 43% Latino. It’s supposed to have a “progressive” police department, which had banned chokeholds some time ago. This killing didn’t happen despite the vast national awakening after the murder of George Floyd. It happened two months ago. The Tucson police had withheld the appalling video until recently, ostensibly to insure a fair investigation. I’ve pledged to contribute, until the November election, an additional $100 each to five progressive causes for every non-white person killed by police while in custody. I consider Lopez’ killing one of those atrocities. Like trees falling in the forest that no one hears, these horrors can’t be known and protested until reported. The media and those who supervise police thus have a responsibility to the public. My five causes were: (1) Joe Biden’s Victory Fund, (2) Amy McGrath’s push to unseat Mitch McConnell, (3) Black Voters Matter, (4) Stacey Abrams’ Fair Fight Action, and (5) Nse Ufot’s New Georgia Project. At the moment, Charles Booker is leading McGrath in the Democratic primary race to challenge Mitch McConnell, and we won’t know the outcome until at least June 30. If Booker wins, I will switch my support to him, as I hope McGrath’s campaign will do also. My last three causes are all voter-empowerment organizations. They seek to convince eligible citizens—especially those who vote rarely or who have never voted before—to vote as a way to improve their lives and gain power in society. All three of these organizations are run by and mainly for African-Americans. So I’m now looking to add a sixth and maybe a seventh donee, which focus on empowering Latino voters, especially in the Southwest. After all, I live about half-time in New Mexico. I would be grateful to any commenter who could suggest organizations that do for Latinos what Black Voters Matter, Fair Fight Action, and the New Georgia Project are doing so well for African-Americans. Trump’s abysmally corrupt misrule, our catastrophic failure to arrest the pandemic, the popular awakening against systemic racism, and our nascent economic depression—all are combining in a “perfect storm” of moral resurgence. Together they give us a unique chance to take our country back at the polls. But it’s only a chance. To take it, progressive whites like me and every minority must unite to throw the bums out and put good people in. If we work together, we can do that this fall. But the clock is ticking. I fear that Latinos, who are so numerous and prominent throughout the Southwest, but who still have so little real power, are behind in their organizing efforts. So I’d like to help as much as I can. Joe Arpaio is finally out, but Ted Cruz and others like him remain. It’s long past time to throw them all out and replace them with pols more sympathetic to their constituencies and to the difficulties of newcomers to America. For newcomers are what have always made us thrive.

The principal post follows:

“[A]lthough we criticized Japan for an inflexible labor market, there are some benefits to this system.” — Naohiko Baba, chief Japan economist at Goldman Sachs.

We Americans don’t think much about Japan. If we think about it at all, we see it as a fierce but defeated enemy, now a vital ally—in short, a helpful vassal state. We give it a close look when its allegiance falters, when we need its help in international affairs, or when (as in the eighties) its high-quality, highly productive industries threaten the fading global predominance of our own.

But Japan is an extraordinary society. In a world flattened by the Internet, globalism, the tyranny of international capital—and now the pandemic—Japan is unique. In its culture, human relations, language and customs, Japan is like no other nation on Earth. It deserves study, respect and even emulation, and not just because its allegiance is the linchpin of a now-waning American hegemony in Asia.

Before focusing on labor, the subject of this post, let me briefly recount a few points of Japan’s uniqueness. First, it borrowed most of its written language—its kanji characters—from the Chinese. But it also has two alphabets unique to Japan: one (hirgana) for writing Japanese words phonetically, which children learn before they learn kanji, and the other (katakana) for writing foreign words phonetically. Can you think of any other nation that has its own special alphabet just for writing foreign words? I can’t.

Today’s Japan has an outward-looking and accepting culture that strikes you when you ride its world-class modern subways. Computer monitors in every car show the last station, the upcoming station, and the next station in four languages: Japanese, Chinese, Korean and English. We Americans sometimes display both English and Spanish, and the Canadians English and French. But four languages, three foreign? Without speaking a word of Japanese, people from Japan’s closest neighbors, and anyone who can read humanity’s favorite second language, can get around Tokyo, Osaka and Japan’s other major cities with nothing more than a subway map.

When you walk Japan’s crowded city streets, you find something else extraordinary. There’s none of that jockeying for position that you feel in the West. Nobody pretends not to see you so you’ll get out of the way first. Japan’s pedestrians get out of your way, reliably and instinctively, without even thinking about it. You could be blind and deaf—or blind drunk—stumbling along a crowded sidewalk, and Japan’s vast and intimidating flow of pedestrian traffic would part for you like the Red Sea for Moses.

Once you get used to this surprising custom, you begin to conform to it, too. It only takes a day or two to ken that things go better when people look out for each other, instead of looking away.

That’s one reason why Japan, despite a relatively slow start on tracing and lockdown, is doing far better than the United States in containing Covid-19. Like most Asians, Japanese have the custom of wearing masks whenever they feel the slightest bit ill, not to protect themselves, but to protect others. “Freedom,” in Japan, does not include the “right” to put others at risk, at least not when it’s so easy to avoid doing so.

I could write about a fellow passenger on a shinkansen, who emerged from our car briefly just to hand me my dropped wallet, after I had already left the car and just noticed its loss. I could laud the hotel employee who, having broken my thermos trying to help me get some ice in, insisted that I wait while he literally ran across the street to a department store to buy me a brand-new and better one. I could recall a small-store proprietor explaining to me, in good English, that all those colorful, fringed envelopes that you see in Japan are for sending large amounts of cash though the mail, so postal workers will notice and take special care of them.

I could write about my Japanese law-professor colleagues, whom Japan’s government (MITI) hired to evaluate trade-secret laws after the US pressured Japan to adopt one. They went on months-long hegiras around the world, collecting copies of relevant laws from Europe, the US, Asia and Latin America. Then they filled their small offices with boxes of foreign documents, reviewed them in translation and wrote comprehensive reports, from which the Ministry of Trade and Industry prepared draft laws for the Diet’s consideration.

By now, you get the idea. There is much, much more to Japan than a fierce wartime foe, vanquished with nuclear fire, now become a staunch ally in Asia.

And so we come to the main subject of this post: labor. From the time in the eighties when I began studying Japan as a professor of law in Hawaii, I learned that Japan has its unique style there, too.

At that time, Japan’s consumer-electronics and car companies were beginning to conquer global markets and threaten American supremacy. Partly in recognition of Japan’s importance as a market, and partly to “redress” a negative balance of payments, we were pushing the Japanese to accept our “big-box” stores and make their distribution systems more “efficient.” But the Japanese were having none of it.

Everyone who knew Japan understood why. Japan had, and still has, a unique system for distributing consumer goods. It’s as different from our Walmart and Amazon.com as you could imagine.

When you walk out the door of your abode in a Japanese city, you are never more than fifty meters from a small place to eat. You are seldom more than a quarter mile from a convenience store, stationery store, sundries store, gift store and/or liquor and (unfortunately) tobacco store. All these stores are built to human scale, and most are run by families. They are Japan’s equivalent to our “mom and pop” stores, but Japan has many, many more than we do.

Live in a neighborhood for a while, and the proprietors and employees will get to know you. They’ll greet you by name, anticipate your needs, and treat you with kindness. They do this even with foreigners that they know they’ll never see again. One shopkeeper spent ten minutes, during a busy day, helping me select just the right adapter for Japan’s electrical plugs.

This is Japan’s distribution “system.” It consists of tens of thousands of mom-and-pop stores, which get to know you and treat you like family. They make life pleasant and human and employ many people in productive, enjoyable jobs.

But they have a price. Distribution of small things in Japan is less “efficient” than in the US, and so retail prices are higher. There are few Walmarts and Amazon.com warehouses to convert independent people selling directly to the public into regimented minimum-wage cashiers, shelf-stockers and worker bees in warehouses.

The Japanese have been willing to pay the higher prices that their far more human distribution system requires. Apparently they still are. They value “people” and “human relations” (ningen kankei) over faceless and indifferent economic “efficiency.”

And so it is with “labor” generally. Back in the fifties and early sixties, the great industrial corporations worked pretty much the same way in Japan and the US. They offered workers lifetime employment in secure jobs, with a secure retirement and corporate pensions, in exchange for loyalty and no job hopping. That system still exists in Japan today, although it’s now faltering under the pressure of American-influenced “globalization.”

But here in America, that secure-employment system has virtually vanished. Large corporations have broken their pension promises, quite legally, in corporate bankruptcy. They’ve replaced (at a discount) what workers bargained for over decades with obligations of the government’s Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation. We now have a “wild-west” market in “labor,” with nearly a million “gig” workers having no pension, no health benefits and no recourse but unemployment in any economic reversal, whether due to bad corporate planning, a financial panic like the Crash of 2008, or the present pandemic.

Our system is quite resilient—for corporations and their investors. They can shed “redundant” or unneeded employees just as airplanes in trouble dump their excess fuel. But the results are rampant employment insecurity, rampant “food insecurity” (aka “hunger”), and rampant dissatisfaction and unrest among workers, especially in hard times like the present.

These stark differences between Japan and the United States just got notice in the New York Times. In the US, post-pandemic unemployment peaked at 15% and recently dropped to 13.3%, as compared to 3.5% in February. In Japan, unemployment has risen only a fifth of a point, from 2.4% in February to 2.6% today. The difference is that most Japanese workers made “redundant” by the pandemic have been merely “furloughed,” not fired or laid off. Japanese law requires them to be paid 60% of their normal wages.

Nothing about these stark differences has anything to do with the false dichotomy between “capitalism” and “socialism.” Japan has been resolutely capitalist since before Admiral Perry and his gunships opened it up to Western exploitation in the late nineteenth century. Unlike China and Russia, Japan has never flirted with socialism (let alone Communism) or any other top-down abstract recipe for organizing an economy.

Japan focuses on the group, rather than individuals. Its foundational myth is worlds away from the individual heroism of Hector, Achilles, Odysseus and John Paul Jones. Instead, the Japanese revere the “Tales of Genji,” which tout advancement of and loyalty to the group and its success. Even in Hawaii—a US state permeated with Japanese culture—a common proverb asserts, “The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.”

The modesty and politesse of Mr. Baba’s assertion in the headpiece exemplifies the diplomacy characteristic of Japanese culture. Obama himself could not have better understated the relevant truth.

After all the last century’s Sturm und Drang, “Capitalism” today is just a bumper-sticker. There are many different kinds. There was the laissez-faire “capitalism” of the 19th century, against whose atrocious treatment of workers Marx and Engels rightly inveighed, although they failed to provide a practical or durable solution. There was the highly regulated and constrained “capitalism” of FDR’s New Deal. It helped create the most egalitarian consumer society in human history, prioritizing collective bargaining, economic equality, and social justice.

Then there is today’s version of winner-take-all “capitalism.” Under it, Facebook and Twitter are duopolizing and controlling the media, and Walmart and Amazon retail sales, while the 1% grow ever richer and most workers suffer.

The fact that these three systems and their consequences for workers were so starkly different, as are the US’ and Japan’s “capitalism” today, shows just how useless and superfluous, for both analysis and policy, is the abstract term itself. In the final analysis, the “contrast” between “capitalism” and “socialism” is just another way for demagogues to keep the money flowing to the 1% and the workers squeezed, sometimes literally to death, as in this pandemic.

The right way to evaluate economic systems is how they treat people. Unfortunately, today’s so-called economists focus on the inanimate. They obsess about abstractions like GDP, profit, prices, and costs, or on abstract “inputs” to production like land, labor, and capital. But of all these things, only one stands out as different. Only “labor” means living people.

Under the influence, if not the spell, of our mechanistic economists, we treat workers as disposable commodities, at best as an abstract economic variable. Japan treats them as people, worthy of dignity, respect and good treatment even in buying or selling a trifle. That just about sums up our national differences.

In so doing, the Japanese have created an economy that deserves and receives worldwide respect. Its products are world class. It cities are world class, crowded yet remarkably liveable, even to people, like me, who normally live in our least-populated and most rural states. Because of its focus on people and the group, Japan has fought off the pandemic more successfully and is proving more resilient to it than we.

That this is so ought to teach us something. Maybe workers, as people, are not mere things or an inanimate abstraction after all. Maybe if we treat them as people, with all the complexity and empathy thus implied, things would get better for all of us. Maybe this dismal time will allow that treatment to evolve naturally, without revolution, if only we just let all workers vote.

Permalink to this post