From the Scottish Socialist Voice, here’s a note about how far Glacier Metal Company has fallen from the structures created through years of hard work by so many people during Wilfred Brown’s tenure as CEO of the company.

Let’s note how ill-thought this was on management’s part. Even if they worked only 5 days per week, at “£200,000-a-day” this 7-week strike cost them £7 million (>US$10M at the time), plus legal and administrative costs of fighting the strike. And they lost not only the strike but their former stronger position against the union.

Here’s an exquisite example of why Brown’s ideas about Works Councils and the unanimous vote make management stronger, not weaker. Had Turner & Newall had the guts to restore this strong institution — instead of the cowardice of underhanded union-busting — they would have been in a stronger position overall in their discussion with the union.
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I ran across a quotation from Leda Cosmides about the idea that a person can be shaped into anything, that all minds have the same potential. This idea, still dominant in social sciences and even HR, is a reaction against the racist psychologies so fully realized by the National Socialists in Germany. (But let’s be frank: they are popular everywhere, and my own countrymen created some of the important works.)

Radical behaviorism — so well debunked by then grad student Martin Seligman — took the message even farther so that one of them could cry that given any child, he could make any type of work desired by simply changing the environment, regardless of the child’s natural inclinations. Odd, of course, that so many twins separated by birth have such similar jobs. Given a choice, we will gravitate to work that fits our natural selves.

I have no problem with the postmodernist goal of understanding how ideologies and power relations affect discourse in a society – indeed, I think evolutionary psychology has a lot to contribute to this. Nor do I have a problem with the idea that certain concepts are “socially constructed”. By understanding our evolved cognitive programs, we can understand how this is possible, which information is filled in by others, and which information is generated by evolved inferences that go beyond the information given by the cultural environment.

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