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A Tip for Joe the Machinist: Watch Your Back
A Labor Day reflection: Corporate America no longer even pays lip service to the importance of encouraging hard work and skill.
You work hard. You do good work. You loyally stick with your employer through good times and bad. Do you have a right to a paycheck that rises over time?
On any Labor Day over the last 50 years, the answer — from labor and management alike — would be obvious: Of course!
But that answer doesn't seem to hold any more. Earlier this year, a trio of top business consultants openly challenged the notion that good employees doing valuable work deserve to see their paychecks steadily increase. This past July, the Harvard Business School circulated their challenge throughout corporate America's upper echelons.
This remarkably brazen assault on core American workplace values originated at Booz & Co., one of the nation's most prestigious corporate consulting firms. America's corporations, Booz analysts advised earlier this year, need to start attacking the "exorbitant" paychecks now going to their most prized, "steady and reliable" veteran workers.
The Booz analysts offer an example of the "significantly overpaid" worker they have in mind. They call him Joe the machinist, "a stellar employee who knows the ins and outs of the organization, the result of his many years on the job."
Joe's "wealth of institutional knowledge" has become a valued corporate asset. But Joe, after over two decades on the job, is making a lot more than he used to make, especially "compared with co-workers who have been doing the same job for just two years."
Corporate America, the Booz & Co. advice continues, now needs to "address these kinds of wage disparities." Companies need to start "retooling labor costs" to narrow "the gap between high wages and market value."
This retooling, the Booz analysts gush, could net U.S. corporations "labor savings of 15 to 20 percent." Of course, the analysts acknowledge, Joe the machinist "might have to take pay cuts" along the way.
But what a payoff these pay cuts would produce! Firms that seriously retool, the Booz consultants promise, "will end up with larger and more sustainable improvements in their [profit] margins."
Some business leaders are already cheering the Booz analysis.
"We infantilize workers like Joe," a former Bank of America executive charges at a Harvard Business School online discussion site, "by insulating them from the harsh economic realities by paying above market wages."
Corporate America, in fact, has been doing precious little "insulating" over recent years. Corporations have been depressing wages to fatten profit margins for decades now, and the pace of that depressing has only accelerated since the Great Recession hit, as new research from Northeastern University's Center for Labor Market Studies details.
Corporate profits from mid-2009 through 2011's first quarter, this research notes, increased 39.6 percent. Over that same span, typical full-time U.S. workers have watched their paychecks drop 1 percent.
The Booz analysts want America's Joe the machinists to swallow ever lower paychecks to help their U.S. corporate employers "keep up with intense competition" from elsewhere in the world. Yet they demand no similar sacrifice from U.S. corporate executives.
That makes no sense, particularly for analysts who are arguing we must "narrow the gap" between exorbitant pay and actual "market value." U.S. CEOs currently take home far more than the global "market" rate for executive talent.
CEOs at companies with over $10 billion in annual revenue, The Wall Street Journal reported back in 2008, make twice as much in the United States as they do in Europe — and nine times more in the United States than they do in Japan.
Corporate America, in other words, needs some serious "labor cost retooling" at the top — before gutting pay for its most experienced and skilled workers at the bottom.
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Show All""We infantilize workers like Joe," a former Bank of America executive charges at a Harvard Business School online discussion site, "by insulating them from the harsh economic realities by paying above market wages.,,,,,,,,
CEOs at companies with over $10 billion in annual revenue, The Wall Street Journal reported back in 2008, make twice as much in the United States as they do in Europe — and nine times more in the United States than they do in Japan.
Corporate America, in other words, needs some serious "labor cost retooling" at the top — before gutting pay for its most experienced and skilled workers at the bottom."
Couldn't agree more.
The USG is funded by forcing contributions, withholding taxes, by taxing labor which USG returns to the wealthy & corporations, WELFARE KINGS, either in like kind or benefits such as the Pentagon protections racket scheme which protects the worldwide assets of the WELFARE KINGS many of which pay little or no taxes including the multinational corporations which aren't located in this country. This is unethical gangsterism, protecting those that don't pay for it. Al Capone was an ethical gangster, Al only protected those that paid for it. Also, as labor contracts as a component of the GDP, the funding of the USG will decrease as well because there will be less labor to tax.This is/has/will be compensated for by increasing the Federal debt.
Did I hear right...Joe who has been a loyal employee, who has skill and expertise, who has contributed to the company's growth and profit, who knows the organisation well, is deemed to be earning 'too much' and should take a cut!
But young Brad in the red tie who paticiapted in the Wall Street debacle costing us billions upon billions CAN'T have his pay cut BECAUSE, since he was involved in the debacle he is the only one who can unravel it. If this isn't the clearest indication that the rich will protect and help advance each other at the expense of the rest of I don't know what is. They have their own union, these Corp types and they pay their dues to politicos.
Sounds like a real good reason NOT to buy ANYTHING from an American corporation, regardless of where it is made. If most of what I spend is just going to go to useless American CEO's, then who cares.
Well, DUH, that's what labor unions are for. I bet Joe the machinist doesn't belong to a union because he thinks unions are "socialism." Well, let him eat sawdust. Americans fight and die for capitalism all over the world, but they have no clue as to what it really is. Dumbest country in the world. Capitalism is concentrated corporate power. If you're not in a strong union, you're toast.
Know any machinists? I do. A machinist with, say, thirty years experience, is a BETTER machinist than the young guy with two years experience.He knows all the tricks of the trade, and there are many, because it is a complicated one. A better machinst deserves to be paid more.Pretty simple, really. Not that there aren't some older dud machinists, and some young geniuses, but I'm talking averages here.Sadly, there are fewer and fewer machinists, as the country deindustrializes.
I agree. Generally speaking the old machinest is more productive than the young one. Increased productivity merits more pay. NOTHING of value is created except by LABOR. The capitalist needs labor more than labor needs the capitalist. When profits are up by 39%, labor is DUE, is OWED, some of that increased profit because it is due to increased productivity. But wages are remaining stagnant, or decreasing, as profits soar. STRIKE !!!!
True (capitalist needing labor more than labor needing capitalist). That's what FDR's New Deal was dangerously close to proving, Hence the wallstreet/cityoflondon-hatched WWII to burn all this government productivity in the flames of war. It's what Lincoln ALSO proved with his issuance of Greenbacks (which lead to his financier cartel-sponsored assassination). That's the dirty secret the banksters always desperately try to hide. We don't NEED them, they are essentially superfluous. It's the scientific & technological knowledge that counts, AND an ever-changing list of material resources to which said knowledge is applied. Money-changers have precious little to do with THAT process.
Banks and bankers are leeches whom have perpetrated the biggest fraud ever upon humanity. ALL money is issued as debt that must be repaid with interest. Where does that interest money come from? From wages paid to them with OTHER borrowed money. This is completely unnecessary. There is nothing of value backing all of this issued debt. If a government issues money directly for the construction of infrastructure, then the resulting value of that infrastructure is backing the money issued, which then of course recirculates continuously throughout the economy. Even money directly issued to retirees, and even welfare cases, STILL recirculates throughout the economy. Shakespeare once wrote, "First we kill all the lawyers", but Shakespeare had that wrong, if you get my drift. Fractional reserve banking. What a joke if it wasn't so ruinous.
Thrice true. It's also WHY a well-regulated, totally fiat, government-issued currency is the way to go, it's value being backed by the resulting, extremely useful, valuable infrastructure, (assuming it is well planned/designed/engineered).
Elephants don't build bridges.
In some parts of the world they do. They also work cooperatively together to complete tasks and protect each other from harm. Their loyalty is unquestionable and like the human beings they work with, can be and are exploited.
Great comment. Do you have a link for further reading on elephant society?
Thank you. I think any activity that builds and strengthens our connection with the
natural world is beneficial. I don't really have a link, more just observation over time.
The Jane Goodall site is pretty amazing as an example.
So pay the rank and file workers on the shop floor piece work with a guarantee of the federal minimum wage over each two-week pay period. If someone could figure out how to measure the productivity of the executives, I would say pay them piece work too, again with a guarantee of federal minimum wage over their contract. Straight commission salesmen already work piece work with no guarantee.
Agreed.
The hubris of the bosses has reached stunning levels, as Verizon's hyper-arrogant recent full-page newspaper ads attacking the CWA and IBEW workers show.
But all too many workers are to blame for falling for the the propaganda system which has bred at least a couple generations of, capitalist boss-ass-kissing, Mr. Block scabs. Most now are for all practical purposes, submissive serfs. Young workers these days don't have a clue what their work is worth and how much is robbed from them while they exhaust themsleves just to eat and pay the rent, while cheap addictive electronic gadgets have replaced religion as the opium of the people.
We even witness the spectacle of foreign students put to work at the Hershey plant immediately going on an unorganized wildcat strike over the pay and working conditions, while their USAn co-workers doing the same work for even less pay just scratch their heads and look on, confused.
Sadly, we can see the end-stage of this model - just go to El Slvador or Honduras - except it will be worse, because there will be no place to the north to seek better wages and send the money back home.
At the most optimistic, I see future generations having to re-fight the same bloody struggles of 1870 to 1932 all over again. But, I expect the bloodshed will be much worse this time.
"...I see future generations having to re-fight the same bloody struggles of 1870 to 1932 all over again. But, I expect the bloodshed will be much worse this time."
EXACTLY.
I was about to type something else, but I stopped...
could it be that the electronic gadgets you mention have made the bloody struggles irrelevant?
I'm afraid people are developing the habit of looking 'down' at these devices, and won't look up again until they're being led into a jail cell by a nice person in a uniform...
as long as these devices are charged, and operating, all is well, even if one is unemployed and it is raining hot particles from Fukushima outside...like one's computer: flood, or earthquake, or fire...all interesting, but not crucial, as long as the web is coming through, and we can post...
is jail still jail if one can go online 24/7?
even if fighting for jobs does occur, we are actually fighting for a much larger, and more important, prize: a viable planet...
the planet we have no longer offers what it once did, which was our way of life...
the heyday of industry has brought us to our collective knees...any attempt to revitalize such will be the bullet to our collective head...
The fight then, and now, is not about "jobs", it is about selling one's labor to a powerful capitalist master, weilding stupendous power, borther against brother, in a race for the cheapest price for one's sweat, in a state of virtual slavery.
This may be hard for someone in comfortable bourgeois circumstances to understand.
Of course the environment is improtant, but that is another topic.
As far as your "heyday of industry" stuff; sorry, I'm not an anarcho-primitivist.
anarcho-primitivist...interesting...I can identify with much of that position...
wonder how much planet will be left following the sweat-selling panic-race...
comfortable bourgeois circumstances?
I inhale the breath and drink the spittle of the Water Dragons of Fukushima...
While things are worrisome in Japan, you're probably inhaling more radionuclides (radon and daughter products) from the cracks in your floor.
As I suspected, it seems that you never had to face the choice of selling your labor for whatver the pittance boss demands, or starving and freezing. Are you a trust-fund baby?
I'm a normal, everyday, currently-employed computer technician with a retirement I'll be lucky to ever see, and a bank account I manage to keep around a couple of paychecks ahead, but no more...
I work a regular 40-hour week, and am evaluated regularly to ensure my work is competitive...
why do you feel the need to attack my vocation, especially given you and I know each other not? do I personally threaten you, in some way?
I look at my job as a compromise, rather than an achievement...
is this what bothers you? you challenge my working as proof my beliefs are invalid? I cannot help but comply with certain economic realities, as liberty is at stake, even as I advocate others...is this impossible for you to understand?
how do you resolve the obvious ecological conflict between human industry and living planetary systems, such as the Gulf, or Arctic? if industry not only kills itself, as it has done, and will continue to do, for fishing in the Gulf, but also kills the ability for humans to survive, as fish, for example, are not just a product, but also a viable edible, susceptible to extinction, what's the point of working?
funny, if I lose my position, my best bet will be as a musician, as I'm quite good...does this further exacerbate? make me even less in your mind?
I'm even still sexy, even approaching middle age, knock on wood...
What this really means, Donna, is that corporations would like to pay Joe the Machinist what they pay a Chinese machinist in an overseas plant. And they can do that, unless we regain control of our economy.
We do that by adding costs to everything shipped in. We add tariffs or taxes to those costs so that there's no advantage for a corporation to buy or manufacture something overseas. Indeed, we may decide it's necessary to add more to those costs so that industry finds it profitable to employ Americans again.
Corporations will scream at the idea of a 'trade war'. Let them. We're already losing the war. Really, what do we have to lose? The US economy is slowly being changed from one of manufacturing goods to one where service jobs rule. Can I supersize that? So long as the corporate elites can simply move their operations to wherever labor is cheapest, and sell the goods with no economic penalty for foreign production, they won't have to deal with labor unions. Or with Joe. They have Chang the Machinist instead, at half the cost, and few worries about OSHA or retirement benefits.
Actually I think the US has already changed to a low value service economy for most of the working class, and if you exclude military production, not that much is made in the USA.
Candidate Obama was going to change that but it's not happening. His green jobs are mostly greenwash for his otherwise horrendous record of mountian top destruction, oil spill negligence and coal & nuke promotion.
Labor lost badly when Clinton pushed through NAFTA and permanent normalization (ie free trade-no or low tariffs) of trade relations with China. Obama will do nothing to reverse any of this, as he is in complete support of corporate globalist agenda.
But hey, Joe the Mechinist lost his job to Chen the Mechinist and now Joe is Joe the Burgerflipper.
I am forced to use stuff that Chen the Machinist has worked on, and I regret to say, it's crap that generally has to be bought three times (three's a charm, even if it's cheap each time), or needs to be rebuilt.Chen is probably a perfectly good machinist-he just has trouble staying awake, because he's worked so hard.
As someone involved with a small US firm developing electric vehicles (motor scooters) on a small budget, I can vouch for the utter shoddiness of both electronic and mechanical products from China. Every motor comes from from the Chinese plant with a winding defect. The first batch of battery chargers work well, then all the rest of the charger shipments blow their rectifiers and other components after a few cycles of use. They hired a Chinese electrical engineer, and when this engineer confronted the supplier about the motor defects, the supplier said, in Mandarin, thinking he was safe from the ears of the stupid western hairy barbarians, said "they are not supposed to know about the defects"!
Worse are the idealistic entrepenuers, who want do do something positive to address global warming, import fully assembled electric scooters from China - only to find that every scooter breaks down shortly after being sold. Some customers (like me) end up redesigning and rebuilding the scootes to a relaible condition, but the great majority of the customers angrily attack the hapless businessperson. More than one has faced ruin at the hands of the Chinese this way.
And beware of Chinese condensors.Not long ago,I spent the better part of a day (I'm semi-retired), trying to find a new multi-meter not made in China. I had replaced my American made one, which lasted twenty-five years, with a Chinese item which ceased to function in less than a year.I also looked for an American one (out of the question), a Japanese one, and even a Taiwanese product, but to no avail. My American-made bench grinder, built in 1926, is still going strong. If it should die, I'll have to replace with one of the travesties you're talking about. But I think it's immortal.I read an article recently in the Guardian UK that claimed that some manufacturing was coming back to Britain because of quality control problems in, er, China, And cost, as well. It has occured to some brighter lights that even if you pay more money up front for something that is well made, it is actually cost effective in the long term.I hope the Guardian article reflects an actual trend, and not just wishful thinking. The Brits are pretty quick on their feet.
The second thing the Chinese have that we do not is rare earth that goes in the electronic gadgets, phone etc.
You've hit on something that often sneaks by. With all this cheep chinese crap, there is an opportunity for a good product. eg: a year ago I researched making shoes. The information on the net was not profuse but there was a lot. Last week I renewed my search and found only about four posibilities and expensive. More than the times are changin.
There is opportunity here in the US of A but while we allow the disparities of class and worker/management, little are the clues for growth. And we need a workable plan to deal with sociopathy, psychopathy. How do the do it in Norway? (the most desirable place to live)
fluke meters rule. the best most accurate and rugged i have seen and used. i have an 88 model that is 15 years old. usa made in everett wa.
yea but all those top corporate executives are "worth every penny" and how can we attract "top talent" if we have limitations on pay
""We infantilize workers like Joe," a former Bank of America executive charges
then the bank of american executive admits he is a complete dick, and has no conscience whatsoever
A Bank of America executive pontificating, BofA is on life support systems because of the forced contributions, withholding taxes, by taxing labor and transfered by the USG to bail out the banksters because of their incompetence, mismanagement and criminal acclivities such as laundering drug money. There is a proverb, "never hire a Harvard MBA". Wall st., Wash., DC is the Axis of Evil, a criminal conspiracy. Using the forced contributions, taxing labor, to bailout mismanaged, incompetent, wealthy & corporations engaged in criminal conduct is not a strategy for success and the banksters will continue doing their criminal activities, incompetently mismanaged because the banksters bribe the politicians to subsidize their failures.
Where is Madame Defarge when we need her?
This is happening because Americans allowed themselves to become so dumbed-down, intellectually lazy and brainwashed that they let the upper-middle- and upper-classes first de-link wages from productivity for 40 years and then, over the last 17 years, they even more stupidly let "free trade" de-link the upper-middle- and upper-classes from their reliance on American labor for most of their stock dividend wealth--completely severing the social contract from the management/ownership point of view. They don't give a shit about us because they no longer HAVE TO. Their big growth markets are in China, India and Brazil. Their next big resource plunder is in Africa.
Now their stock dividends are overwhelmingly generated by foreign labor that American labor will never be able to compete with wage-wise, no matter how many wage and benefit cuts US labor tries to withstand. "Free trade" was a losing proposition for unions, working-class and middle-class Americans from the git-go and anyone who took a more than cursory glance at it before 1994 (the passage of NAFTA) knew it. Americans couldn't be bothered to think about it--even though both Ross Perot and Ralph Nader tried desperately to warn them.
Now look at the wreckage of this once great country THAT HAS BARELY EVEN BEGUN TO COLLAPSE.
Metal, your metaphor 'of a once great country that has barely even begun to collapse," brings to my mind the picture of the Twin Towers milliseconds before the first plane hit. (for those who don't buy this scenario, it is just a metaphor, not an investigation). At 8:30 a.m., the buildings were just fine. But a couple hours later, no buildings.
Similar Analogy to the 1994 NAFTA/GATT Treaties-Pre 94' Plenty of American middle class jobs, but then A few years later, no jobs....
Ditto! ;)
So this is "retooling", hmm?
These CEOs are missing a golden opportunity. He's been in service 20 yrs, his joints are going, his heart isn't pumping as well, his eyesight is probably not as acute.
As their "tool" ages, they should be taking a depreciation deduction on Old Joe.
The evil corporate motherfuckers will use ANY EXCUSE TO SCREW THE WORKERS!!!!! SOLIDARITY, BABY! UNIONIZE EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE!!! Businessmen CANNOT BE TRUSTED. THERE IS NO FUCKING HONOR AMONG THIEVES.
Keeping the U.S. unemployment rate high means plenty of recruits for the corporate imperial war machine and enough competition for jobs that workers have no viable bargaining power even if they are exceptional and are making a profitable contribution.
These vermin are digging their own graves deeper and deeper with every "idea' they have. Do they REALLY think there will be NO repercussions from this? When all we have left is torches and clubs, WE WILL use them against those who have stolen everything.
This is not going to end until there is violence, I'm afraid. They will not stop until we are driven to kill a few CEOs and torch their homes in anger and frustration. Those at the top need to have this fight brought to THEIR front doors. They need to have THEIR lives impacted by this and impacted HARD.
Booz and Co needs to have their HOMES picketed. They need to have THEIR lives made into a permanent hell just like they propose to do to those who DID the job. What the HELL do THESE vermin do? Nothing but try and screw those who PRODUCE.
Scum like this need to be shown that there ARE consequences to their actions. And I hope it happens SOON. This is HORSE SHIT.
And THESE are the great republican and right wing "ideas" I keep hearing about for how to make this a BETTER place? To hell with profits, to hell with corporations, to hell with CEOS and Boards of directors. THIS is where the REAL problems of this country come from. They will NEVER be the place where answers come from. And THIS is who should be getting more tax breaks? SCREW THAT NOISE! 90% rate with NO LOOPHOLES.
Damn, this pisses me off. Sorry for the language, but there are sometimes when that is absolutely REQUIRED to express reality.
I'll probably get flagged and banned for this, but someone needs to go out and demonstrate in a high-profile way that the wealthy are as mortal as any man.
Only this time, they guy better not botch the job like the anarchist Berkmann did in Pittsburgh in 1892.
Come to think of it, why do the deaths of rich powerful people never get the publicity that movie stars and politicians get? Maybe they want us to really think they are immortal.
Why do you think they sponsored explorers in the 16th century to find "the fountain of youth"? They also used their ill-gotten wealth to hire alchemists to find "the philosopher's stone" which conferred immortality upon one (alchemy is real. Cold fusion/transmutation is one practical result from it). Why do we hear the urban legends about dark rites and blood sacrifices (ie. stealing the lifeforce of innocents) amongst some of the "high & mighty"? These vampiric em effers may have achieved "unnaturally long life", and they would certainly want to keep THAT quiet. Since "you can't take it with you" when you die, maybe they found a way to put off dying (one small problem; their heinous crimes have earned them a "purification bath" in Helheimr. They now fear death, and don't know how to stop what they started).
Well said and I completely agree.
And this proves my idea that white collar believes they are better than blue collar and they expect to have a better life.
As far as I am concerned, most white collar workers don't do shit everyday.
I am blue collar, and I have to actually WORK everyday. I just can't just show up and hang out.
Finally, the utter arrogance to actually publicize these ideas completely baffles me. They don't respect us...
Welcome to Room 101.
The Orwellian State ha truly arrived.
The Corporations put workers in a box, so that they do not have to pay for experience. A worker can be the most educated and skilled person going in, but will be limited by the manager to what they can do. Workers can actually have less skills after leaving than going in. Another way the company makes money is to use an educated persons expensive schooling to teach lower educated workers for free, then let the teacher go and pay less to the retained worker. There is no respect for hard earned and expensive education gained by workers when the bottom line is all that counts. Anyway the stock holders would sell the whole company if they could make a profit, and they do.
---"Workers can actually have less skills after leaving than going in..."---
So true!
And, this doesn't just apply to craftsmen and industrial trades; it happens to so-called "professionals" too. I regularly see civil engineers reduced to incompetence due to budgets from their rich real-estate developer clients far too small to actually do the sort of analysis and design work they learned in school. Only in the public sector, or consulting for the public sector, (DOT's, Corps of Engineers) do USAn engineers remain competent to practice at all.
I suspect this de-skilling phenomena is the same with physicians and nurses, under the thumb of big insurance and hospital monopolies these days.
A few related points, pt 1:
- Quality of Chinese production: do not, for a moment, believe that the quality of their production doesn't and won't increase. This is absolutely false and visible in a lot of areas. Reputable German and Swiss companies whose experience is not just "decades" but almost "centuries" find it hard, in a lot of areas, to compete with Chinese products of nearly the same quality and half the price (often much lower). And of course just think back to the originally "shoddy" Japanese competition (or the changing opinion on the quality of American products in the other direction). Basically, it is not true in any way that quality can not be imitated. It's self-serving bullshit. Forget it. It can and it will get better, there are quite a few examples of it happening, and not just because the Chinese are willing to work, a lot, for cheap, but mainly because of the next point:
- Knowledge and experience is not labour and it can be separated from it. Current corporate "business" leaders realise this and strive to do it. They basically want to enclose all of Joe the Machinist's incredible knowledge into a piece of software, process manuals, custom made production tools and processes - and eventually turn this formalised knowledge into "intellectual property" in the form of patents (on the most absurd and trivial things imaginable) and copyrights mainly so that Joe the Machinist doesn't even have the right to practice his work independently. This is something capitalism actively strives for and it's imo the single most important reason of labour's loss of power. Experienced, intelligent, understanding (of the production process) labour is needed less and less. The main reason for this is of course because your actual real control and influence over the decisions concerning the production process is what decides your actual real wages (or profits or whatever you get out of the production process). There is no basic right and noone "owes" anything to anyone - your share of the output and its form depends on your power over the process. While workers could influence rates of production (by soldiering for example), they were a lot more in power and could keep bouncing back even in the face of violence. Once this is gone, labour is fucked, because temps can't form unions or fight back in any way.
Of course, contrary to the capitalist image of humans, people can have enough stuff, and there are more important things in life than accumulation of wealth and power for most normal people, so once things got a little better (after WW2 in the golden age of capitalism), workers became kind of "lazy" (sorry about this) and kind of stopped conscious class war - unlike capitalists, who mounted a number of downright evil propaganda and other types of campaigns (legislative, technological etc.) to counter this . Capitalism realised this and engineering (especially information technology) has been striving to solve this "problem" ever since - and it mostly did it. A lot of "low level" (not really, just according to the „intelligentsia”) intellectual work, the type of work you could get better and better at and that had actual use you could understand, the work that allowed for some (often pretty awesome) degree of personal fulfillment, development and a connection to an immediate economic environment and reality, has been eliminated, and more and more of this type of work will be eliminated. (This is of course a complex issue and it's not going quite as well as it could be, but it's still going pretty fucking well sadly.) You will not need machinists any more. A high school diploma and a month's training will do, especially because you will not be required or allowed to become better at and acquire a deeper knowledge of your work, as you'll just be repositioned (or sacked, it's easier) anyway in a few months. (This idea of a fully technologised "flexible labour market" is the ideal state of affairs for the really fucked up shits like Greenspan and the rest of the people who would put conformance to a fucking retarded ideology above actual human reality.) The production of this knowledge will be (is being) centralised in elite development companies or research labs of corporations, and of course people working here will have some degree of freedom and control over their work, which may be a compromise capitalism has to make, but maybe not.
(And of course it’s not just factory work, but agriculture and services also, and not just labour, but education, and not just public issues, but private and family level, like even housekeeping, child rearing, and even social connections – this process encompasses every aspect of life. Everything will be turned into a market, where you won’t need to do anything yourself but pick and choose and put together your entire life from „specialist” services, in exchange for your extremely specialised and deskilled work, which will be worth nothing outside the corporate capitalist structure...but it does, of course, make sense to prohibit or make it really difficult for people to work outside this system, eg. for independent subsistence).
"I can hire one half of the working-class to kill the other half."
- Jay Gould, Gilded Age rail tycoon and land speculator
What you are describing to my understanding is, for the "extremely specialized and deskilled" worker, an inexorable law of diminishing returns. If the emphasis is on low pay because of the very specialized and de-skilled nature of corporatist systematized work, then how is such a worker ever going to possibly be able to pay for all the specialized services you suggest will encompass every aspect of that worker's life? The same goes for all those "service wage" service workers ostensibly providing this plethora of services. How will they be able to afford to partake of this compartmentalized, fully societally privatized, toll-based multi-service splendor?
I suggest to you that they will not be able to afford it; that their inability to afford it and their resentments about that are already viewed by neo-liberal capitalists as "manageable externalities," and that their goal with respect to labor is to reduce it as much as possible to an asymptotic line infinitely approaching abject slavery. To reinforce and maintain that asymptotic relationship will require a massive, internally and externally propagandized Orwellian police state--such as the one that has been in formation since the presidency of Bush Sr., and rapidly accelerated under his son and Obama.
The vast public and private police and military of that State WILL have to be paid sufficiently to motivate them and their progeny to continue for generations to brutally repress their fellow men, women and children for no other reason than to preserve their only somewhat superior position within the specialized income hierarchy. A police state apparatus on that scale will be increasingly expensive (as it already is). So there is ultimately an inverse relationship between the cost of labor and the cost of repression and oppression of labor.
But the supreme contemporary folly of pluto-libertarianism (of the Koch variety) as opposed to neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism is that the pluto-libertarians would even lay waste to police forces because they are a public expenditure for which they must be taxed. The more that especially toxic form of scorched-earth capitalism infects already virulent neo-liberal neo-conservatism, the more we are likely to see the proliferation of specialized mercenary armies that are trained to repress and/or oppress specific demographic groups within society based on race, religion and other cultural affinities.
This conforms with your ideas about the overall compartmentalization of labor as applied to the police state "knowledge base" such that individual specialized "police workers" will have little idea how to operate and maintain the overall police state, but will be better controlled and confined to their role in it the more limited and specialized their "repression/oppression task" is--provided they are adequately paid.
The wiggle room as I see it is that pluto-libertarians will hypocritically rely on "big government" neo-liberals and neo-conservatives to subsidize the public portion of the police state (and provide corporate welfare for mercenaries to the degree the pluto-libertarians can get a way with it). So maybe we SHOULD vote for Tea Partiers only, because if enough of them get elected sufficient to oust "big government" neo-lib/neo-con DLC Democrats and Republicans, then the pluto-libs will, in true schizophrenic form, lay waste to both the public portion of the police state and public subsidies for their private mercenary armies. This will more swiftly tempt massive rebellion and/or revolution than the present neo-lib/neo-con abetted pluto-libertarian assault on the public sector at the State level now sweeping the country while the neo-libs and neo-cons grow and enhance the publicly subsidized Police State. God, I've got a headache...
What a world the Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers are leaving behind them...