The past two decades have seen an explosive growth in the presence of both police and security guards in the daily lives of working Americans. The decade of the 1980s and early 1990s saw the almost routine use of company-paid goons, uniformed and armed, in labor struggles. On the job too the worker is subject to the dictates of the owner, for all practical purposes the lord and master of his commercial fiefdom. Security is omnipresent. Computer programs oversee workers' productivity.
Employers track office workers' Internet usage.
In practice employees have little recourse against arbitrary or unfair dismissal. The unions, where they exist, have long since ceased to be instruments of workers' democracy, even in the most limited sense. They have embraced the corporate doctrine of union-management partnership and become little more than appendages of the employers. In reality, swift and sudden death in an apparently peaceful, even prosperous suburban mall says something essential about present-day conditions in America. The class struggle, though largely hidden and, from the side of the working class, politically unfocused and disorganized, nevertheless seethes just below the surface of everyday life.