The Other Undocumented Workforce
Volunteer labor and its effects and a short history of Maine legislation during the LePage administration
I am becoming increasingly aware of how the working classes are regarded by the State and its private partners, consisting of all institutions where wealth is concentrated, including universities. non-profits. and large private corporations, including AirBnB, which, in a recent article published in the Boothbay Register, is reported to be telling the government how it will report the taxes it collects and not the other way around, due to a contractual agreement between AirBnB and state governments.
There is a commonly shared idea that what is called “the workforce” in some places and “manpower” in others, can be paid a bare minimum while generosity is extended to leadership who often shares in institutional profits, or in the case of the University of Maine, owns all the patents. Volunteer labor is an exacerbating factor.
Volunteer labor has viable reasons for being but seeds the attitude among the holders of concentrated wealth that workers don’t need to be paid. The volunteer workforce is hidden, uncredited, and largely undocumented. Public, private, and non-profit corporations save money on labor by using volunteers, allowing corporations to invest the money saved in capital assets. including land and buildings establishing themselves as the new landowner class. This happens by exploiting people who are motivated by varying degrees of goodwill and self-interest.
I contribute as a volunteer for the exchange value of what I learn when I review papers For HSSC. In addition, as I often find I am of people who are the subject of the papers, I have a rare opportunity to be the voice for the subjects targeted by the papers I review.
HSSC is not a non-profit organization. HSSC is part of Springer Nature. Headquarters are located in Germany. The main shareholders are Holtzbrinck Publishing Group and BC Partners. There is a standing invitation to apply for the editorial board but every editor listed has either a university or government position. I wonder how many reviewers are from outside the university and government system. Are there many or am I an anomaly? There is very little information to be found about volunteer workers. They are the other class of undocumented workers.
The subject of the paper that I just reviewed is the capitalization of informationalization in the university system. Informalization is the building of the new information infrastructure, similar to the building of the industrial infrastructure during the Industrial Revolution. In building this new infrastructure, some will make the decisions about what information to include and by the same token what to exclude. As an unpaid and hidden workforce, it is relevant to include volunteer workers in the informationalization infrastructure, but unlikely to be included by a system in which volunteer workers are a large undocumented workforce. And so volunteer workers must include themselves through alternate information resources and build another informalization infrastructure.
The terms of being a reviewer require confidentiality:
Editors, authors and reviewers are required to keep confidential all details of the editorial and peer review process on submitted manuscripts. Unless otherwise declared as a part of open peer review, the peer review process is confidential and conducted anonymously; identities of reviewers are not released. Reviewers must maintain confidentiality of manuscripts
…….Nature Portfolio reserves the right to contact funders, regulatory bodies, journals and the authors’ institutions in cases of suspected research or publishing misconduct. source
Regarding the latter statement, none of that impacts me, for as an individual I am excluded from those worlds. I try to abide by the policy but the parameters of said policy are up for interpretation, so I wrote to Nature.com and asked for clarification. It’s been a week now and I have not received an acknowledgment of my inquiry.
Little does the institutional mind understand the minds and motivations of workers. Not being paid is one thing that I have accepted on my own terms but not receiving a response to my inquiry has a deeply felt impact. I think volunteer workers deserve at least to have their correspondence acknowledged and can easily relate to how the military must feel in regard to remarks made by its former commander-in-chief. I am an unpaid reviewer of papers about how to get the workers to invest their psycap in the service of institutions, and the institutions haven’t figured out that treating the workers respectfully is a factor.
I am accustomed to receiving no response from most institutions. Ignoring one’s correspondence is the standard as if only certain thoughts are permitted to be part of the dialogue and only certain categories of persons are allowed to participate in the conversation. In Maine, the permitted category is an organization. Individuals are excluded. Individuals are hidden in the mists along with the volunteer workforces.
The documentation of volunteer labor happens only as needed for serving institutions. Governor Paul LePage’s Work For Welfare Law should require some documentation. Do laws such as this explain why there is information about how to request documentation of volunteer work, but no information that I have been able to find requiring that volunteer workers to be otherwise documented?
The Work for Welfare Law:
- Reinstated work requirements for able-bodied, childless adults on Food Stamps, reducing welfare dependency by over 80%. They must now work 20 hours per week, volunteer or pursue job training to receive benefits.
- Limited on the number of replacement EBT cards that may be issued, preventing the trafficking of EBT cards for drugs.
- Strengthened DHHS’s welfare fraud unit, increasing its investigation referrals to prosecutors by ten-fold.
- Removed Maine’s status as a “Sanctuary State.”Work For Welfare Law
What a boon for the non-profits, the state, and its private partners, but this program must have required some documentation of nonprofit labor forces. The quote as written suggests that able-bodied, childless adults account for 80% of food stamp recipients but I find that unbelievable. Twenty hours a week represents 50% of a standard paycheck. A reason why such a law might reduce the redistribution of wealth going to this most basic living expense for the less fortunate is because it is such a bad deal! It transforms the welfare recipient into a slave. Providing food for slaves is property maintenance. Mandating an exchange of “volunteer work” for food stamps is self-contradicting. This is another example of fluid boundaries in a government-run by public-private-for-profit non-profit relationships. All functions and definitions are interchangeable in the partnership.
In a wealth redistribution government, food stamps are the safety net for the bottom of the economy for anyone whose income has been compromised for any reason. The way the LePage administration promoted the law is similar to the way immigrants are denigrated by the far right, reflecting a derogatory social attitude toward those in need and a plan to punish for or deprive them of owning assets beyond the bare minimum:
Implemented an “asset test” for welfare, prohibiting those with boats, RVs, ATVs, jet skis, or other non-essential assets worth over $5,000 from receiving benefits.
There is no support for those at the bottom of the economy for life’s transitions by the wealth redistribution economy but the rules are entirely different for the top where access to corporate welfare increases with the concentration of capital assets and wealth.
Workforce training is not a bad thing but mandating it on such terms is, especially considering that the state and it private partners are repurposing our public school systems as their own workforce training facilities, which begins with The Industrial Partnerships Act in 2013
(6) Support initiatives to develop industry-recognized credentials and new programs providing academic credits, especially in occupations critical to targeted industry clusters (special interests) ; The Industrial Partnerships Act (emphasis and added comment mine)
There is no comparable work or other exchange required for corporate welfare since in Maine, all the corporation must do is provide X number of jobs at higher than average wages (personal income tax revenue for the state). The jobs are already a cost of doing business for the corporations so all the corporation gives up is control over their workforce size and compensation, whereas the workers who get the jobs have to work, or at least show up on the job, to get paid. The policy of transferring workforce decisions to the state for purposes that are not based on the business’s work needs might account for stories heard of workers hired to do nothing all day long.
In 2017, Paul LePage enacted The Major Business Headquarters Expansion Act, written by IDEXX for IDEXX, requiring the Maine taxpayers to subsidize jobs created anywhere in the world. It’s a good thing he went after the lowest people on the totem pole, transforming that person into a food stamp slave to save the taxpayer’s money so they can subsidize corporate jobs around the globe! What a dear leader!
In 2017, Lepage signed the ill-considered contractual agreement with AirBnB. which is the subject of the Boothbay Register article where I commented about a potential conflict of interest between the State Constitution and terms of agreement rumored to be the AirBnB contractual agreements that prohibit the company from being regulated by zoning ordinances in exchange for the company collecting state sales taxes. This creates a conflict of interest for Home Rule states where municipalities are supposed to be in control of “matters local and municipal in character” Can the agreement be declared constitutionally void in Maine? How can a corporation be deciding zoning laws across the globe? Even governments can’t do that.
Being that I did not receive a response to a letter in which I stated my interpretation of the meaning of the confidentiality parameters, I will take the non-response as an affirmation of my interpretation.
I interpret the definitive meaning as “do not disclose the title of the papers, quote directly from them, or identify any persons involved”, but the terms “peer review process” and “confidentiality of the manuscript” is a matter of interpretation. This is what I asked HSSC to clarify after stating my interpretation.
My proposed grant project is an “informationalization” project for an alternative culture that has been left out of the dialogue for far too long but today is seeing new workers. As a not-yet-formed entity, the project relies on volunteer collaboration if it is ever to establish roots. That is a viable use of volunteer labor but at a certain point when an organization becomes very large and well-funded perhaps there should be some regulations. I haven’t researched in this area, but an initial Google search on documenting volunteer labor places the initiative on the individual volunteer to obtain documentation from the organization. A new search specifying the institutional requirements produced this article titled Can Nonprofit Employees Volunteer for Their Employer? This article provides some information, but missing is any requirement that the quantity of volunteer labor must be documented.
Reviewing papers for HSSC provides an inside look at how things work within the dominant institutional culture.
For several papers, the unifying theme was how to get the workforce to use its innovative abilities for the benefit of the enterprise which is usually a publicly traded corporation. The workers do not share in ownership and the shareholders are not involved in the work which requires innovative talent. Academia produces many papers about how to get workers to use their innovative talents for the benefit of the institution and its shareholders. Identifying with ownership is the favored key to the alchemy of transforming the workforce into gold, but ironically at the same time, the workforce is being excluded from ownership and in the process becoming the owned, whose life is controlled by the institution. As I’m reading these papers I have a stroke of genius! Here is the elixir! Pay the worker enough to participate in ownership, at least of their own home! Thank You! Thank you! Thank You! I‘m taking my bows now!
Psychological ownership was the first concept I encountered. At first I do not say forthrightly what I am thinking. It wasn’t until after I had reviewed the same paper several times that I finally said that the term “psychological ownership” is the problem. From my perspective, the words represent a delusional state of mind targeted by the institutions to be encouraged among the workforce. The goal is to cause the workers to share in the feeling of ownership of a company owned by remote shareholders who have no participation in the work process. Once I said that the term was the problem, the term was swapped with “psycap” meaning psychological capital that the workers own. The company wants the workers to implement their psychological capital into the work process and there is a great deal written in academia about how to make that happen. I didn’t believe that the paper’s author understood the shift in ownership and the identification of capital that occurred with the change of language terms but I did!
After reviewing several papers on that subject I was given a paper on capitalization of informationalization in the University system which made the case that capital had to be invested in human resources, not only capital resources such as hardware and software.
After deconstructing and reconstructing the paper I identified a flaw in its logic that is found universally throughout the wealth concentration industrial complex. There was a sector not included in capitalization. That sector goes by the name of the workforce in the western world. The focus of this paper, where the subject shifts to the distribution of capital resources, is on leadership, while the workers whom the leaders lead come across as mere components of the mechanism of the machine. In the other papers, it was clear that the subjects who needed to be motivated to contribute their psycap are the workforces, but leadership takes credit and ownership of everything the workers produce, so it is leadership that should share in the capital resources.
It is hereby agreed that: For the first $100,000 of cumulative net income the default minimum distribution shall be as follows:
50% to the faculty creator / inventor 50% to the University
For cumulative net income in excess of $100,000 the default minimum distribution shall be as follows: 50% to the faculty creator / inventor 50% to the University
There has been a long and incremental societal transformation underway since centrally managed economies rose to dominance in the seventies. Let’s not beat around the bush! Call it feudalization. The working classes are positioned as a permanent caste that stays in its place and does not rise, making it easier for the public-private state to use the workforce as trading pawns. Housing is fundamentally instrumental in acheiving social reorganization.
Housing became inaccessible to the corporate working classes and around the same time, covid happened. Out of that emerged the remote workers movement.
It’s time for home businesses and workers to be acknowledged. If unelected private partners of the state can write our laws, then the people should be allowed to submit proposals for equal consideration.
As I am reviewing the paper about capitalizing informationalization in the public school system, it occurs to me that my project does for the home-working communities as the entire Maine public educational system does for large corporate culture by repurposing public education as workforce training for state-owned and privately owned corporations (targeted industries).
Those who try to sell the “demolish and replace” plan to the Boothbay Peninsula to claim the location of our midcentury High school for their designs, speak frequently about “making spaces” that are never shown. Being that the proponents of the demolition plan used the need for repairs as their primary talking point, and nothing has been done to address repairs of the high school since the public voted their plan down, it is reasonable to presume that they have not given up on asserting their will over the community. The cost of repairing both schools was known before the November vote and while a repeat of the referendum for the secondary and middle school was run a few months later, the voter has never been given a chance to vote on repairs, only, for both schools so the high school is still in need of repairs and the school boards are ignoring it.
The geographic Informational System that my project will use if funding is provided can map where all the small entrepreneurial making spaces are in a region. The geographical information system is the information infrastructure and cyber campus of the home workers and small business community- the “untargeted and undocumented sector”.
I will be able to submit my inquiry for a grant on time but without references, it is unlikely that my inquiry will be accepted.
The process of working on the grant application has helped to develop the concept. Its not easy to break the ties with the security-based paradigm but creating a new paradigm can allow room for growth and opportunity that the old paradigm has been incrementally oppressing and there are no signs that the institutions are listening to what is taking place outside their own walls.
