The triumph of the captains of industry over the administrative unionism

It is known that the capitalists from all around the world have sought new ways to limit the power of protest of workers. In southeast Asia, it was achieved with outright repression; in the USSR, there was no need to repress “because we were all equal” (yeah, right); in the U.S. through Fordism and the disqualification of jobs, and in Argentina by declaring bankruptcy and moving the factory to the south of Brazil or Uruguay.
However, all these strategies were used in initial stages of the development of the capitalist era. Once these tricks were defeated by years and years of union struggle, which made those bureaucrats in Washington more receptive to the protests of the communists unions than to the feelings of true Americans, the choices of our business friends to get great profits overnight were reduced sharply. That's when they had to start racking their brains.

For a time, they resorted to increasing workers´ productivity, improving working conditions, adding some technological innovation here and there, allowing shareholding or loosening on the sexual harassment. But soon all this stopped working and, to make matters worse, came the oil crises of the '70s, Latin American debt issues in the '80s and other stuff. When the world seemed to be about to die, the computers appeared and the '90s were the decade where a new era was born. However, in the late '90-early '00, the thrust of this technology revolution was running out. There for, it appeared the necessity to introduce something that would increase productivity so as to squeeze a little more that dollar. Then, it makes its appearance the optical mouse.
You, clever and hard-to-cheat reader, will say that the change in a mouse cannot increase productivity that much. That is right. However, you are not as sharp as you think because you haven´t paid much attention to what I've said a couple of paragraphs above about the behavior of international business. Should you have paid attention, you would have noticed that captains of industry, the true captains of industry, enjoy their position not for the money they make but for the power they hold to exploit its employees. To be able to do so, they have to limit their bargaining and protest power. The real captain of industry is not that who sits down and obeys the "law" and "negotiates" with its "employees". The real captain of industry only knows "the law" he writes for his factory, that doesn´t "negotiates" but imposes conditions, and that deals not with "employees" but with slaves to whom is better to pay a wage and let them go home instead of giving them board and lodging to him and all of his offspring. However, they remain their slaves because he has the power to fired them overnight.

This successful entrepreneur is someone who knows nothing of the pleasures of life. He is an angry and bitter being that, due to continuous failures in his personal life, devoted all his energy to create a company with the sole purpose of having hundreds of humans dancing in the palm of his hand. He is constantly threatening them to destroy their bourgeois life.

The optical mouse comes into play to limit the form of protest that proliferated the most during the '90s, namely, stealing balls of mechanical mouse. Due to the tiny size of this element and the ease with which they could remove it, any communist pig infiltrated in a company could steal 3 or 4 balls from the mouse of their peers and bring down the productivity of the entire company by a percentage equal to the proportion that 3 or 4 represents in the total workforce of the company. In fact, it is estimated that the most skillful saboteur, Johnny "ball stealer" Johnson [1], could steal the abysmal figure of 113 balls in one day. Imagine that multiplied by millions of people dissatisfied with their jobs ... The inevitable overcome was the absolute paralysis of the economy of any country in which their workers would be disappointed.

We must add the damage caused by the balls left "accidentally" in the office carpet. For one of those unfortunate situations in history, the balls were light gray and, therefor, they were camouflaged in the commonly used gray or white carpets. This caused more than a good employee, who did not stop working while going to the bathroom and moved through the aisles with their eyes on a balance shit, to slipped and fell to the floor, getting disabled for life. Well, not for life, but for a few weeks perhaps, which, in the capitalist battlefield, may represent the birth, growth, maturity and death of a company. The damage was directly proportional to how good employee you were: if you were a saboteur, you were aware of the balls and you would avoid the mined aisle; if you were a bum average employee who went to the bathroom without a balance sheet in the hand, you could see the ball and lift it because you're not as good employee so as to bend unnecessarily; if you were a good employee the overcome was the one first described, with a broken hip as a result; if you were a very good employee, and you walked with the balance sheet in one hand and a pencil in the other, in order to not waste even a second, the result was both a broken hip and an eye less because the pen almost certainly would end in the center of your pupil; if you were an excellent employed, the only difference was that the pencil would be sharpen as far as the laws of physics allows, making it possible for the pencil to reach the brain and cause a damage which extensiveness would have to be determined in each case.

You, clever and hard to cheat reader, will say that the possibility of sabotage had always been present, but I will say “no”. Rockefeller was not a millionaire because he was a clever businessman, but because there was no way that an employee could take a barrel of 500 liters filled with oil in his pocket. Yes there was the possibility of overthrowing the oil on the floor and make slipped more than one fellow employee, as shown in several episodes of Scooby Doo. However, oil is black and stands out easily.

However, if wanted, any Microsoft employee could take 500 balls in a bag. How did Bill Gates make his company a successful one, is something I do not understand, but I take my hat off to him. And speaking of hats, imagine how things would have been if the saboteurs had been able to hide more balls under a hat... Clearly the computers wouldn´t had been able to progress. We are grateful to the fashion industry and the extermination of the reign of the hat [2].
In short, when Bush found out they were going to knock down the towers, the war with Iraq and the anger of the population by the poor results on it, sent to investigate a system that would prevent the collapse of the U.S. economy. Well, actually it was Clinton. This explains the good performance of the U.S. economy during the '90s. The combine effects of the purchase of new mouse and investment in research to invent the optical mouse accounts for 15% of GDP of those years, making unnecessary wars to revive the economy. That is why the U.S. military conflicts were so few in the ´90s. Those who took place were caused to keep the warrior spirit in the population (they are not fools, they knew that the boom of the mouse balls was not eternal).

As it can clearly be seen, the invention of optical mouse was due to reasons quite different from those normally mentioned. It was not to improve productivity by preventing employees from stopping work to clean their mouse. Nooo! It was to eliminate a trade union practice, questionable but effective, nonetheless. With this development, thousands of office workers were left totally helpless when they wanted to protest. Sad but true.

[1] Johnny "ball stealer" Johnson was controlled by awarding him the world record of mouse balls removed in one minute. This allowed him to earn millions, which he wrongly invested in the mechanical mouse division of Genius. When this was replaced by the optical mouse, he lost everything he had earned and committed suicide by swallowing 43 balls of mouse withdrawn from circulation by the toxicity of its parts, especially the balls.

[2] On another occasion I will write about the real reasons why the hat was knocked out from the fashion world.