<!doctype html public "-//w3c//dtd html 4.0 transitional//en"> <html> For the big industrial unions like the Steelworkers, which is a pretty diverse if not the most diverse union, the losses in jobs resulting from <b>downsizing, globalization etc</b>. have been particularly cruel to our Black membership. Because they and their children will never see union protected jobs again in the so-called brownfields areas. Good jobs to which they have had easy access. <p>Black men, Black women and women in general have suffered proportionately to their numbers, and in our case those numbers are pretty healthy in ratio to the general population. <p>The whole question is where do you draw the line on globalization, and how do you combat globalization? <p>Your email pal, <p>Tom L. <br> <p>Jim Devine wrote: <blockquote TYPE=CITE>>Thomas Kruse wrote: <br>>>Employment may be steady, unemployment low, but these kind of numbers <br>>>suggest a lot of turn over. I know that when I have to hustle up work, <br>>>living on year-to-year contracts as I do, it is very stressful. Sennett's <br>>>recent book illustrates how such hustling makes life pretty miserable. <br>>> <br>>>Is turnover/instability something you economists study as part of "standard <br>>>of living"? <p>Doug writes: <br>>Most studies of turnover/instability/tenure I've seen for the U.S. show no <br>>significant increase from the 1970s. I know this is counterintuitive, and <br>>it pisses people off when I say it sometimes, but it seems to be true. What <br>>may have happened is that some instability has crept up the social ladder, <br>>making middle managers vulnerable to the instability that blue/pink collar <br>>workers have long known, which attracts more attention than in the past. <br>>Also, behind the flattish average tenure figures, men are falling but women <br>>are rising. <p>This disaggregation is crucial: I read what's happening as the gradual end <br>(and sometimes rapid demise) of the primary labor market jobs, which <br>offered some job security, and the spread of secondary labor market type <br>jobs, which don't. Because middle-aged white males hogged the primary-type <br>jobs that existed in the core and unionized sectors of the US economy, they <br>(or rather, people of their demographic category) are the ones who have <br>suffered the most from increased instability of job tenure. Women and <br>"minorities" traditionally had secondary-type jobs and typically had little <br>in the way of security. Thus, there's been a convergence of job experience <br>between the old insiders and the old outsiders in the labor-power market. <p>If we're talking about the bargaining power of the US working class, the <br>fact that increased instability has hit the types of workers who had the <br>most bargaining power in the 1950s and 1960s seems very relevant. <p>It might be useful to calculate measures of job instability holding <br>demographics constant, in order to see the effects of changes in the <br>demographic mix of the US labor force on aggregate stats. <p>Even though it's always useful to pay attention to statistics, we should <br>always be careful with them. This issue reminds me of an article that Bill <br>Lazonick published in the RRPE 25 years ago, on the issue of enclosures in <br>England in the 17th and 18th centuries. He argued against an author who <br>pointed to the stability of workers' physical location after enclosures, <br>which suggested that Marx was wrong to rail against enclosures as <br>disrupting workers' lives, etc. Lazonick argued that despite the author's <br>stats, social relations had changed radically, i.e., that workers had been <br>proletarianized. What's been happening in the US is a smaller version of <br>this: even though actual job tenure may not have fallen much (especially <br>for aggregates), the ability of bosses to threaten their employees with job <br>loss has increased. The partial deproletarianization that many white male <br>workers enjoyed in the 1950s and 1960s has been largely reversed. <p>>See <<a href="http://www.mijcf.org/pub03/pub03_workingpapers6.html">http://www.mijcf.org/pub03/pub03_workingpapers6.html</a>> for a review of <br>>the literature. It's not full text, just an abstrat, but you can order the <br>>print version for free. Yes, it's from the Milken Institute, but it's a lit <br>>review, and one of the authors, Stefanie Schmidt, is a fairly liberal <br>>feminist. <p>Just because something comes from the Milken Institute doesn't mean it's <br>bad. But recently, they seem to have focused more on puff pieces and <br>journalism, pulling back from serious research. <p>>... Extreme turbulence is capitalism's norm. <p>But during the "golden Age" of US capitalism in the 1950s and 1960s, some <br>of this turbulence had been moderated. <p>Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & <br><a href="http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/JDevine.html">http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/JDevine.html</a> <br>Bombing DESTROYS human rights. US/NATO out of Serbia now!</blockquote> </html>
