“Capitalists Will Always Be Capitalists" + Neoliberalism and the Incarceration Bonanza + Gregg Shotwell

There was an interesting story yesterday, "Plying Social Media, Chinese Workers Grow Bolder in Exerting Clout," about a partially successful strike in a Taiwanese factory, Yue Yuen, in the Chinese city of Dongguan. Partially successful because:

While Yue Yuen agreed to reimburse pension contributions and increase a monthly living subsidy by $37, the outcome is something of a Pyrrhic victory for its workers. In order to claim the past benefits, employees must pay matching funds, which for many amounts to years of savings they do not have.

“Worker wages are barely enough to feed their families now,” said Wang Kongxia, 38, who has worked at Yue Yuen for 19 years. “A lot of people feel quite helpless.” 

Despite those misgivings, workers say, Chinese authorities and Yue Yuen used subterfuge to force employees back to the assembly lines. According to Ms. Wang, factory management removed the time clocks for four days this week, requiring employees to sign in every two hours or be fired. Supervisors were also asked to photograph each employee. “We didn’t do it,” she said. 

Yue Yuen did not respond to repeated phone calls requesting comment. 

Zhen Fanfei, 35, has gone back to making Adidas midsoles, but he doubts the company will be more respectful of workers’ demands without a major change in the government’s attitude. 

“Capitalists will always be capitalists,” he said.

Eduardo Porter had another good Business Page column this past Wednesday, "In the U.S., Punishment Comes Before the Crimes." The dawn of neoliberal age in the middle 1970s was also the beginning of the incarceration bonanza  in the United States. Prior to this, the U.S. and other industrialized nations had similar rates of incarceration:

Scholars don’t have a great handle on why crime fighting in the United States veered so decidedly toward mass incarceration. But the pivotal moment seems to have occurred four decades ago. 

In 1974, the criminologist Robert Martinson published “What Works? Questions and Answers About Prison Reform.” Efforts at rehabilitation, it concluded, were a waste of time. 

“With few and isolated exceptions, the rehabilitative efforts that have been reported so far have had no appreciable effect on recidivism,” he wrote. Standard rehabilitation strategies, he suggested, “cannot overcome, or even appreciably reduce, the powerful tendency for offenders to continue in criminal behavior.” 

Crime was rising in the 1960s and 1970s, alarming the public and increasing the risk to politicians of appearing “soft” on crime. 

The decline in manufacturing employment, once the backbone of many urban economies, wasn’t helping. Later, in the 1980s and ’90s, crack cocaine became a scourge of the nation’s inner cities. 

But as Steven Raphael of the University of California, Berkeley, and Michael A. Stoll of the University of California, Los Angeles, note in their book “Why Are So Many Americans in Prison?,” what drove up imprisonment rates was not crime but policy. 

If rehabilitation was out of reach, the thinking went, all that was left was to remove criminals from society and, through harsh sentencing, deter future crime. From 1975 through 2002, all 50 states adopted mandatory sentencing laws, specifying minimum sentences. Many also adopted “three strikes” laws to punish recidivists. Judges lost the power to offer shorter sentences. 

And the prison population surged. Four decades ago, the correctional population in the United States was not that dissimilar from the rest of the developed world. Less than 0.2 percent of the American population was in a correctional institution. By 2012, however, the share of Americans behind bars of one sort or another had more than tripled to 0.7 percent. 

Bruce Western of Harvard suggests a specific American motivation, which sprang to some degree from the victories of the civil rights movement. 

“The crime debate was racialized to an important degree,” Professor Western told me. “The anxieties white voters felt were not just about crime but about fundamental social changes going on in American society.”

Today, a little under half the state and federal prison population is black. The Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates that a black boy born in 2001 had a 32.2 percent chance of doing time behind bars. 

Growing inequality, too, appears to have played a role. As Devah Pager of Harvard told me: “There is something to the idea that the more distant the rich become to the poor, the easier it is to impose policies that are more punitive than others.” 

Professor Raphael is wary of linking incarceration with income dynamics. Still, he agrees the trends are suspiciously similar. “In the 1970s, something changes,” he told me. “The increasing concentration of income at the top follows the incarceration rate almost perfectly.”

And a final reference for your Sunday, be sure to check out Gregg Shotwell's absolutely essential "A Practical Solution to an Urgent Need," which appeared in last month's Monthly Review. American organized labor started buckling at the same time as the mass incarceration boom.

Chomsky has that line, "excess of democracy," from one of his books about a Trilateral Commission report on the social upheaval of the 1960s. The report's conclusion was that the world was suffering from an "excess of democracy."