Unemployment functions as a deliberate worker-discipline device

Evidence

Similarly, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen wrote in a memo to then Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan in 1996 that unemployment “serves as a worker-discipline device because the prospect of a costly unemployment spell produces sufficient fear of job loss to motivate workers to perform well without constant, costly supervision.” — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 18

Categorization

• DEFINE: Names the mechanism at the heart of the reader’s whole project: unemployment as explicit disciplining tool, stated by a future Treasury Secretary.
• XREF: This is the exact ‘invisible order’ move — a mainstream economist candidly stating the class function of unemployment in a private memo. — connects to: Mass unemployment isolates families and weakens parental authority — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 438; U.S. officials viewed unemployment as a deliberate worker-discipline tool. — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 18; Poverty and unemployment function as deliberate system solutions, not failures — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 159 (+9 more)
• CANDY: A quotable smoking-gun: Yellen to Greenspan, 1996, calling unemployment a ‘worker-discipline device.’