monday sociologist: Nancy Folbre

Nancy Folbre is my new favorite sociologist! For this week anyway, and to clarify, she is actually an economist, but many sociology readers and courses include her writing.

One key concept attached to Folbre is that of the Invisible Heart, an economic analysis of non-market work, the counter to the Invisible Hand, a la Adam Smith. That is, over 50% of work performed in the U.S. is actually non-market work, which must be guided by something. It is not work that is counted into the GDP, nor is it included in most social policy. Yet it is necessary work for either the GDP or social policies to ever make sense. In fact, it should be included as a factor in order for more accurate measuring of our society. The Invisible Heart explains how we organize, heal, educate, and clean up after that percent of work that is considered in the market.

CorporNation
In the meantime, many corporations today are not only ingoring the Invisible Heart, but they are deliberately excluding it, counting this caring work as a burden to the profit motive. Consider Folbre’s imaginary island nation, CorporNation:

Imaginary scenario: A multinational corporation, tired of the frustrations of negotiating over taxation and regulation with host governments, buys a small, uninhabited Caribbean island. Perhaps it is a guano island, previouisly used only for collecting bird poop for fertilizer. Its new owners write a constitution and announce the formation of a country called CorporNation. Anyone who is a citizen fo the new country will automatically receive a highly paid job (minimum salary $50,000 per year). The following restrictions apply to citizenship: Individuals must have advanced educational credentials, be physically and emotionally healthy, have no children, and be under the age of fifty. They need not physically emigrate, but can work from the home country over the Internet. However, they will instantly lose CorporNation citizenship and their job hould they requre retraining, become ill, acquire dependents, or reach the age of fifty.

In short, CorporNation takes advantage of the human capabilities of its citzens/workers without paying for their production of their maintenance when they become ill or old. … In the long run, however, the new corporate states will run into problems similar to those created by slash-and-burn farming or overfishing. They are exploiting a natural resource without replenishing it. Their strategy is not sustainable.

- Folbre, The Invisible Heart

Unrealistic, you say? But what happens when Maquiladoras close in Mexico every time a unionization effort for health care takes place? Or how do we explain the diminishing U.S. manufacturing sector, in the interest of reducing the cost of labor power?

In paying workers less, we are not just reducing a wage. We are extracting labor from people without providing training skills, health care, child/elder care, or sometimes even days off. Yet all of these things have to happen somewhere – I mean we all get sick, old, tired, and need to rest, don’t we?

Not according to CorporNation. And, as it turns out, not according to Walmart either. Check this out, from today’s Times:

Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest private employer, is pushing to create a cheaper, more flexible work force by capping wages, using more part-time workers and scheduling more workers on nights and weekends…

These moves have been unfolding in the year since Wal-Mart’s top human resources official sent the company’s board a confidential memo stating, with evident concern, that experienced employees were paid considerably more than workers with just one year on the job, while being no more productive. The memo, disclosed by The New York Times in October 2005, also recommended hiring healthier workers and more part-time workers because they were less likely to enroll in Wal-Mart’s health plan.

CorporNation, anyone? Whatever happened to “Give me your tired, your poor,” where are the “wretched refuse” now? I guess our nation now is into the business of collecting only the strong and unburdened (read: happy-go-lucky) poor.

More on Walmart: Living Wages in Chicago, Or Maybe Not
monday sociologist series: Dorothy Smith, C. Wright Mills, W.E.B. Du Bois, Raya Dunayevskaya, Eric Schlosser, Barbara Ehrenreich