The People Who Brought You the Weekend
Earlier in the month I spoke with Newsweek.com reporter Dan Brillman about self-help culture, and last week that interview ran. Dan and I had an incredibly interesting conversation that lasted more than an hour, so I didn't envy him the task of distilling it to a 1,000 word Q & A.
One of the things that didn't make it into the Newsweek.com article was our discussion of how the rise of self-improvement culture also parallels the decline in the strength of organized labor. Entrepreneurial up-from-under striving becomes an appealing idea when more collective and community-based solutions are absent or in decline.
We talked about how a revitalized labor movement that takes its model from Hollywood's guilds could help Americans re-engage with their colleagues in the interest of mutual aid and support. We talked about the Freelancer's Union, and its importance in promoting the idea of portable benefits.
People feel that they have to think of themselves as the CEOs of Me, Inc. when there is no social safety net: no health insurance for 46 million Americans, evaporating pension funds for workers who still think they even have pensions (reported in The New York Times Magazine, 10/30/05), ongoing attacks on social security, and a minimum wage that won't support a single person, let alone a family.
It's not surprising that Americans have embraced a culture of entrepreneurial uplift and fantasies of rags-to-riches, but a revitalized labor movement would offer a more sturdy solution. Remember, as the bumper sticker says: these are the people who brought you the weekend.
One of the things that didn't make it into the Newsweek.com article was our discussion of how the rise of self-improvement culture also parallels the decline in the strength of organized labor. Entrepreneurial up-from-under striving becomes an appealing idea when more collective and community-based solutions are absent or in decline.
We talked about how a revitalized labor movement that takes its model from Hollywood's guilds could help Americans re-engage with their colleagues in the interest of mutual aid and support. We talked about the Freelancer's Union, and its importance in promoting the idea of portable benefits.
People feel that they have to think of themselves as the CEOs of Me, Inc. when there is no social safety net: no health insurance for 46 million Americans, evaporating pension funds for workers who still think they even have pensions (reported in The New York Times Magazine, 10/30/05), ongoing attacks on social security, and a minimum wage that won't support a single person, let alone a family.
It's not surprising that Americans have embraced a culture of entrepreneurial uplift and fantasies of rags-to-riches, but a revitalized labor movement would offer a more sturdy solution. Remember, as the bumper sticker says: these are the people who brought you the weekend.
posted by Micki McGee at 9:43 PM
1 Comments:
Does this bug you? A teaser on the cover of Co-Op America Quarterly: "You can help the world's poor lift themselves out of poverty with community investments."
Articles on microcredit (which I think is a grea thing) forever talk about people lifting themselves out of poverty. Seems like people used to be a bit more sensitive about using the bootstraps metaphor, at least at the Co-Op America end of the spectrum.
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