The Old New Economy
by Clay Risen

It's been said by more than one economic pundit that the recent layoffs by Internet-related firms are just a part of the maturing process every tech-heavy industry goes through. First an industry expands rapidly; then, as reality sets in and the irrational exuberance wears off, it cuts back and tightens its belt. Just like the early computer industry did, or the early television and radio manufacturing industries.

Perhaps, but there's one thing that has set the recent fiscal dieting apart from those in other sectors (this is, after all, the New Economy). The 50,000 workers who have come to work over the last year only to find their desks cleared out have had little or no say in their termination, no negotiating position, no legal support. They have had to submit to being ham-fisted by their previous employers into signing agreements not to sue just to get a few weeks extra pay, with little or no recourse. Recourse that, in the past, has always been provided by unions.

Indeed, over the past ten years, the high-tech industries have been an exceedingly difficult nut for unions such as the Communication Workers of America to crack, particularly in non-manufacturing and service related jobs like programming. And even when it comes to organizing warehouse workers and consumer service representatives, there has yet to be a successful union drive, despite continued efforts at outfits like Amazon and Etown.

And it's not for a lack of effort. The Washington Alliance of Technology Workers (also known as WashTech), a project of the CWA, has failed three times to bring unionization to a vote at Amazon. According to WashTech representatives, Amazon has been brash in its anti-union efforts, but the blame also lies partly in the hands of workers who have refused to stand up to their employers.

In Oakland, Calif., Teamsters Local 70 and The United Food and Commercial Workers Locals 120 and 870 tried to get workers at Webvan to vote on unionization; the vote took place but workers overwhelmingly rejected it. The key: workers' fear that were they to unionize, the company would go under. In short, despite claims of unfairness on the part of Webvan management, employees agreed with company spokesman Bud Grebey when he said "we can't fight against each other. United we stand, divided we fall."

Meanwhile, of course, the cuts go on. And among the majority of Internet startups, most of the recent terminations have targeted not manufacturing and service jobs but programmers and designers. The very people who, just a year ago, were claiming to have put the Old Economy behind them, the Young Turks, the "Dot-Communists" who belittled the supposed conformism and hierarchies of unions in favor of flexibility and stock options. Theirs was a new world, a new, non-hierarchical relationship with management. Working with, not working for. Out with the blue-collar/white-collar dichotomy, they said — how about no collar?

So now the question is, why have workers — blue and white collar — been so reluctant to stand up for their rights in the face of slash-and-burn management? As it's become increasingly obvious that the promises of the New Economy were not all that they were made out to be, why are employees still so bedazzled with it?

The answer lies in the subtext that runs between the smarmy call of Webvan's Grebey for management/employee solidarity and the dot-communist faith in the post-hierarchical ideology of Silicon Valley — namely, that the Internet represented not just a new industry, but a new culture. That, suddenly, the American worker was just too smart, too hip for something as old-school as a union.

That this claim of a cultural turn has been promoted more by those who run the New Economy than by those who work within it seems to have been lost on Internet employees. In a recent report on unions in the high-tech world, Capital Research went so far as to claim that Internet employees represent a new type of worker, a savvy go-getter who has no need for unionization: "The entire culture of the high-tech world is inimical to unionization. Despite grueling hours and demanding managers, high-tech workers are independent, entrepreneurial types who are well-compensated, enjoy excellent medical benefits, work flexible hours and generally love what they do."

As if workers in unionized industries were all non-starters, lazy and unintelligent sloths who needed a conforming structure to back them up. As if there were something about giving out stock options that prevented a company from shafting its employees when times got rough. In the end, the only thing all this talk meant was that management could get up and, like Grebey, call on its workers to "take one for the team." The much-vaunted New Economy culture, it seems, is just one more tool to skewer the little guy.

So, oddly, the economic pundits have it right, for once. The New Economy industries have more in common with old-line sectors than one might think. But even they don't see the extent to which they're right. WashTech organizer Marcus Courtney put it best in an interview with Cnet: "This isn't an industry based on some kind of new value system. That's what's so much being promoted — that this economy is all about new values and respecting the individual, empowering the individual: Why would they ever want a voice when they have stock options?"

E-mail Clay Risen at risenc@yahoo.com.