Eric Hoffer's labor pains

Around the time Ronald Reagan broke the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization in 1981, I noticed that some service and blue-collar businesses began to call their workers “associates,” at least in public.

Much more recently, a Starbucks in Philadelphia posted a notice that it was looking for “partners.” Since I doubt that Starbucks was offering a financial stake and a voice in running the company, at the very least the company was indulging in creative redefinition of partner.

What would Eric Hoffer have thought of this verbal trickery, if he took the words seriously? Here's another bit from The Ordeal of Change:

“Any doctrine which preaches the oneness of management and labor—whether it stresses their unity in a party, class, race, nation, or even religion—can be used to turn the worker into a compliant instrument in the hands of management.”

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

The Ordeal of Change

While I think about my next crime post, here's a quotation from Eric Hoffer, the longshoreman/philosopher, whom I discovered through the good offices of Seana Graham.

Any number of passages from Hoffer's 1963 book The Ordeal of Change are relevant to world history, and all are delivered with a plain-spokenness one might expect from a longshoreman (and migrant crop picker)/ philosopher, but I chose the following for its special relevance to, oh, just about everything.

"The simple fact that we can never be fit and ready for that which is wholly new has some peculiar results. It means that a population undergoing drastic change is a population of misfits, and misfits live and breathe in an atmosphere of passion."

— Eric Hoffer, The Ordeal of Change

© Peter Rozovsky 2012