A Post-Labor Society, Part II

Over at his place, Kevin Drum continues exploring the consequences of the destruction of private-sector labor unions in the U.S. (Note to German readers: many of the observations Drum makes may seem obvious and non-controversial to you, whatever your political stripe. Yet, in the U.S., making even these fairly anodyne points places you on the left of the political spectrum!):

I am, fundamentally, old fashioned about this stuff: I think of the world as largely a set of competing power centers. Economics matters, but power matters at least as much, and I think that students of political economy these days spend way too much time on the economy and way too little time on the political. This explains, for example, why I regret the demise of private sector labor unions. It's not because I don't recognize their many pathologies, or even the fact that sometimes they stand in the way of economic efficiency. I'm all in favor of trying to regulate the worst aspects of this. But large corporations have their pathologies too, and those pathologies are far worse because there's no longer any effective countervailing power to fight them. Unions used to provide that power. Today nobody does.

So when Tim Lee writes that "Competitive labor markets have steadily displaced top-down collective bargaining," I just have to shake my head. Competitive for whom? For the upper middle class, labor markets are fairly competitive, but then, they always have been. They never needed collective bargaining to begin with. For everyone else, though, employers have been steadily gaining at their expense for decades. Your average middle class worker has very little real bargaining power anymore, and this isn't due to chance or to fundamental changes in the economy. (You can organize the service sector just as effectively as the manufacturing sector as long as the law gives you the power to organize effectively in the first place.) Rather, it's due to a long series of deliberate policy choices that we've made over the past 40 years.

It's worth noting, by the way, that corporations and the rich know this perfectly well, even if lots of liberals have forgotten it. They know exactly what the biggest threat to their wealth is, and it's not high tax rates. This is why the steady erosion of labor rights has been, by far, their single biggest obsession since the end of World War II. Not taxes, unions. If, right now, you were to offer corporations and the rich a choice between (a) passage of [a law that makes it easier to unionize] or (b) a return to Clinton-era tax rates on high incomes, they wouldn't even blink. If you put a gun to their head and they had to choose between one or the other, they'd pay the higher taxes without a peep. That's because, on the level of raw power, they know how the world works.

Comments

[CFD Trading]

This is a good explanation of the kind of economy we are having right now. I have to say that we really cannot control factor in the economy. There are still a lot of things that w have to consider. The recession, the inflation rate and sort of. But what we have to learn is that we can make a change out of it.

[noribori]

On the level of raw power offshoring is a mighty sword where unions might not have an appropriate answer. In the end the money goes to a few spots, creates bubbles and all sorts of negative aspects, but huge profits for the financiers.

David Harvey doesn't know the answers, but his presentation is striking.