Thread by @doctorow

The 10,000 workers striking @JohnDeere represent the tension between Stein's Law ("trends that can't continue won't") and Keynes's "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."

Deere has been a cursed hot mess for years, but somehow trundled on.

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Until it stopped.

From Deere's management's perspective, this must come as a hell of a shock. They've relentlessly hollowed out their company, shafted their workers, and screwed farmers and the profits just kept piling up. What's not to love?

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The reality is that Deere was accumulating the kinds of non-monetary debts that mount in secret and default in public - like slowly eroding foundations beneath a glass-and-steel office tower that rot in secret until the whole thing pitches over.

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Today on @nakedcapitalism, @yvessmith catalogs those debts:

* Just-in-time management

* Technologically micromanaged workers

* Unrealistic timetables

* Reduced staffing and demanding workers take up the slack

nakedcapitalism.com/2021/10/the-jo…

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Or, as commenter TroyIA put it: "Everything John Deere did to increase its stock price is now a liability."

* Squeezing workers means it's no longer paying a competitive wage

* Outsourcing everything put them at the mercy of suppliers and supply-chain disruptions

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* Lean manufacturing eliminated any hope of adapting to changing circumstances, with extra floorspace considered "inefficient" so there's no room for new machinery

nakedcapitalism.com/2021/10/10-000…

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Deere has used every trick in the book to squeeze its workers, but the tricks stop working eventually ("trends that can't continue won't"). Take the company's tow-tier pensions.

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Like many large employers, Deere drove a wedge in its workforce by keeping senior workers' pensions intact while whittling away younger workers pension plans - if you were hired after 1997, Deere claws back 2/3 of your pension. If you were hired last year, you get no pension.

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The problem for Deere is that it has loyal workers, and many of the young employees getting fucked on their pensions are the children of those older workers whose pensions were preserved in order to turn the workers against each other.

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For those older workers, divide-and-rule doesn't work - maybe they'd throw hypothetical strangers who haven't been hired yet under the tractor, but they're not going to sacrifice their own children.

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Deere's other trickery left it vulnerable to strikers: its outsourcing mania means that if Deere shuts down, its suppliers are going to have to start laying off their workers (as will its customers), creating anti-Deere constituencies who'll urge a settlement.

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Deere management is very good at preserving its bezzle ("the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it").

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Arguably, it's their core competency. They managed to convince legislators that farmers shouldn't be able to fix their own tools - a tradition that goes back at least to the invention of the plow.

vice.com/en/article/88n…

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And they convinced the @WashingtonPost to credulously repeat the lie that it pays its employees $60k/year:

washingtonpost.com/business/2021/…

In reality, it's $40k:

jalopnik.com/john-deere-is-…

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But "trends that can't continue won't" and every bezzle finally breaks, all debts come due, and Deere is royally fucked.

And it's not just Deere. This is #Striketober, and the country is experiencing an "unofficial #GeneralStrike":

theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

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Hence all the talk about the changing nature of labor markets, or as Smith puts it, "The press has been agog with spectacle of supposedly all-powerful employers no longer holding the whip hand."

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An appreciable slice of corporate America is in this boat, because 40 years of neoliberal hollowing out ("staying irrational") has finally reached its breaking point ("can't continue - won't").

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Consider @VioletWanderers spectacular thread on labor shortages in food production. They describe how the over-optimization (that is, hollowing out) of their employer and its supply chain have hamstrung them.

https://twitter.com/VioletWanderers/status/1448786440138153985

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Their over-optimized factories can't get more machines, and have nowhere to put them, so workers have to run mandatory overtime, driving them to quit, putting more pressure on the remaining workers, who then quit.

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The decision to only keep a couple days' stock around ("lean manufacturing") means that small disruptions snowball to catastrophe. Not having spare machines or parts means that a broken machine can't be fixed until supply chains get moving - six months from now.

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As Smith writes, this isn't going to be easy to fix: "It isn’t simply that the perceived profit requirements argue against it. It would require multiple coordinated operational changes.

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"It’s unlikely that current management could execute them successfully even if they bought into their necessity. And screwing up on an exercise like that could be a death sentence for the operation."

eof/

ETA - If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2021/10/18/lab…