The unemployed reserve army disciplines employed workers into accepting overwork.

Evidence

With the threat of unemployment, workers are pitted against one another and are willing to accept higher levels of exploitation, allowing companies to sell their products at lower prices through wage suppression and maintain their competitive advantage. Marx captured this dynamic: “The over-work of the employed part of the working class swells the ranks of its reserve, while, conversely, the greater pressure that the reserve by its competition exerts on the employed workers forces them to submit to over-work and subjects them to the dictates of capital.” — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 258

Categorization

• XREF: Direct statement of the feedback loop whereby overwork swells unemployment which disciplines workers — the mechanism underlying Mattei’s whole thesis. — connects to: Technological abundance produces mass unemployment treated as reserve army material.; U.S. officials viewed unemployment as a deliberate worker-discipline tool. — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 18; Abandoning full employment creates an assisted liminal population as manpower reserve. — Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at…, 1083 (+1 more)