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Everyday forms of popular resistance
Monthly Review, Nov, 1988 by Don Nonini
Much as in the case of the underground economy, employee theft represents a set of practices by which working people successfully retain some control over the division of the social product and prevent its maximal appropriation by capitalists. And I want to emphasize how successful it is: employee theft, or what is called "property deviance" by conservative social scientists, amounted to somewhere between $5 billion and $10 billion in 1975, and is no doubt greater at present." Estimates vary as to what percentage of workers are involved in such creative appropriation: they vary between a quarter to a half of the typical workforce within any specific business. My own belief is that this is a considerable underestimate arising from the difficulties social scientists have in establishing levels of participation in this activity.
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A valuable way of looking at employee theft is that whenonly one employee or a few within a company steal, it is probable that most workers disapprove of such appropriation (as, needless to say, their employers always do), but when a majority of workers take tools, supplies, raw materials, finished goods, etc. that "do not belong" to them, as the evidence strongly suggests happens very frequently, then what is defined as "stealing" becomes radically transformed. Employees come to feel, given the oppressive, poorly paid and stultifying conditions under which they work, that they have a right to the goods they take, at least "within reason."
What can be called a "moral economy" of theft and pilferage develops. Studies of employee theft describe a bimodal distribution for this behavior: a large proportion of employees who each steal a rather small amount of goods (by value), and a small number each of whom steals a large amount. This can be interpreted as evidence for a moral economy in which most employees take a few goods because it is culturally approved (i.e., "within reason") , while a few transgress cultural values to a degree that a majority of employees would not approve. 7 Note here that those employees who engage in excessive theft indirectly practice a beggar-thy-neighbor strategy, for the outcomes of what they do-when discovered by managementwill predictably threaten the local moral economy and jeopardize the jobs and livelihoods of other employees participating in it.
This moral economy should be viewed as a basis for everyday struggle between classes which occurs within the American workplace. Capitalists and their managers view employee theft with the utmost seriousness and have recently instituted extremely repressive measures against it, such as periodic polygraph tests required of all employees. Those of us on the Left should at the very least recognize employee theft for what it often is, take it at least as seriously, and not dismiss it out of hand as merely or always individualistic or selfish. Popular Opposition to U.S. Military Intervention
