From: D S Byrne <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: Multiple recipients of list <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Concealed unemployment in US? Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Both the OECD and various postmodernist European leftists (their politics are respectable left - I'm thinking of Claus Offe etc) argue that advanced industrial economies have a permanent surplus population which is no longer required even as a reserve army of labour. The origins of this account lie in a parallel drawn between productivity gains in agriculture since the late 1700s and recent productivity gains in manufacturing productivity. When challenged by the reality of 'the great American jobs machine' and the existence of virtual full employment in the US, albeit with a base of low pay, they argue that this is concealed unemployment and represents no more than workfare. I think this is wrong and that what we are seeing is a process of the internalization of combined and uneven development, what Goran Therborn has called 'the Brazilianization of advanced capitalism'. A key empirical demonstration of this latter argument depends on the rates of profit obtained from low wage sectors. My understanding is that rates of profit in low paying sectors in the US economy are very high - I know this is true for Health although of course this is a sector with internal divisions (although - am I right here - only Physicians have high pay within it). Any info and / or views on this matter ? Note that European economies generally have much higher rates of formal unemployment than the US, although, with the exception of the UK which seems to have the worst of both systems, this is associated with good job protection and high rates of wage substitution benefits for those with citizenship status. David Byrne Dept of Sociology and Social Policy University of Durham Elvet Riverside New Elvet Durham DH1 3JT 0191-374-2319 0191-0374-4743 fax David Byrne wrote: >Both the OECD and various postmodernist European leftists (their politics >are respectable left - I'm thinking of Claus Offe etc) argue that advanced >industrial economies have a permanent surplus population which is no >longer required even as a reserve army of labour. The origins of this >account lie in a parallel drawn between productivity gains in agriculture >since the late 1700s and recent productivity gains in manufacturing >productivity. When challenged by the reality of 'the great American jobs >machine' and the existence of virtual full employment in the US, albeit >with a base of low pay, they argue that this is concealed unemployment and >represents no more than workfare. I think this is wrong and that what we >are seeing is a process of the internalization of combined and uneven >development, what Goran Therborn has called 'the Brazilianization of >advanced capitalism'. I don't think that the low paying jobs in the US can be seen as concealed unemployment - this is a fantasy. These people are working although most European would not consider this employment a job, given the conditions under which most Americans work (lack of security, lack of inusrance, lack of vacations, etc). The Brazilianization thesis is new to me but I don't think that is is apporpriate either. Instead, I believe that we are seeing the so-to-speak downside of the development of post-industrial society. (I can't go into all the details here but my observations are based on an exmaination of data and discussions of wage trends in the US) This downside is the displacement of of low skilled or unskilled (non-college educated) workers and even some college educated workers (more specifically, the lower tiers of mental and the upper tiers of manual hieraching in manufacturing) from industry - with high median wage and less extreme polarization of wages - to services, with a low median wage and a far more extreme polarization of wages. This displacement has many sources/causes. Two which I feel are of partricualr importance are the newest forms of computer based automation and offshore manufacturing. Whatever the causes, the result is an attack on middle income groups in the United States (the disappearance of the middle class thesis runs through much of the literature on wages, etc). But, this raises a problem - if the middle class is shrinking/disappearing , who will provide the mass consumption to complete the Regulationist's 'virtuous ciricle", i.e. the linking of mass production and mass consumption. My sense is that this linking may be becoming increasing unnecssary as we move away from mass production (or Fordist) models of industrial organization to post-Fordist models of customized production and what Kenney and Florida call "micro-mass" consumption where producers can still generate substantial profits on far lower volumes. (I am referring to Kenney and Florida's tenative outline of what they call Fujitsuism, as an alternative to the Fordist regulation, at the end of their book BEYOND MASS PRODUCTION - unfortunately, I can't lay my hands on the book at this time but I believe this was the discussion in the last chapter). Hence, post-industrial societies may, in fact, have a far greater ploarization than industrial societies as middle class jobs are eliminated through automation and export and mass consumption becomes far less important in sustaining industry. I am still in the process of thinking through these things but my sense is that industrial society may in fact, be a brief historical interlude where the mass of society was able to experience rising levels of consumption and post-industrial society may more closely resemble an agricultural society (even under conditions of capitalist agriculture) where there was, albeit for different reasons, a fairly small middle income group A key empirical demonstration of this latter >argument depends on the rates of profit obtained from low wage sectors. My >understanding is that rates of profit in low paying sectors in the US >economy are very high - I know this is true for Health although of course >this is a sector with internal divisions (although - am I right here - >only Physicians have high pay within it). Any info and / or views on this >matter ? Unfortunately, as attractive as rates of profit are as a way of analyzing sectors of the economy, I don't really think they tell us much about the actual performance becuase profit is only a small portion of surplus and there is simply no way to measure surplus. Carl Dassbach --------------------------- Carl H.A. Dassbach [EMAIL PROTECTED] Dept. of Social Sciences (906)487-2115 - Phone Michigan Technological Univ. (906)487-2468 - Fax Houghton, MI 49931 (906)482-8405 - Private
