How does this relate to the problem discussed years ago that there was a coming labor glut due to robotics and automation? They predicted a 40% unemployment at the time as I remember. I noted that because, automation hit our town on the reservation and cut it by one third and robotics almost eliminated the mines as a user of citizen labor. I do remember that 40% number because the productivity lag with all Arts Organizations is 40% as well. An accident or a parallel? Might this simply be a way that the market adjusts itself to lower expectations through outsourcing and over speculation so that America will not rebel at a two tier society? Is Canada next? I still question whether this version of a market is really efficient. Are the Chinese the future with their communist committees of technocrats? Are Europeans epigenetically equipped to deal with the entrainment that the average Chinese accepts as normal and good?
REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Robert Stennett Sent: Wednesday, November 24, 2010 1:29 PM To: EDUCATION RE-DESIGNING WORK INCOME DISTRIBUTION Subject: [Futurework] declining incomes.... Two articles came to me today from different sources. Taken together, they paint a bleak future for working-class and middle-class people for the foreseeable future. Comments? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-l-borosage/americas-confidence-defic_b_ 787987.html?utm_source=DailyBrief <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-l-borosage/americas-confidence-defic_b _787987.html?utm_source=DailyBrief&utm_campaign=112410&utm_medium=email&utm_ content=FeatureTitle&utm_term=Daily+Brief> &utm_campaign=112410&utm_medium=email&utm_content=FeatureTitle&utm_term=Dail y+Brief "The furious debate over how best to cut the deficit illustrates the point. The debate is about how we best enforce austerity.....This is a debate about who takes the hit. It is likely to turn ugly. There are progressive answers and regressive ones; some that make more sense, and some that make less.....it is possible to balance the budget by taking more from the Pentagon, hiking corporate taxes, and preserving Social Security....This debate rises from what has become a bipartisan elite consensus, reinforced by a multimillion dollar public relations campaign seeded by Pete Peterson, a Wall Street billionaire, who has been rousing alarms about deficits for decades, and is intent on using the current crisis to enforce the turn to austerity. But if there is one thing we should have learned over the years, it is that Americans should be particularly wary about bipartisan elite consensus...." http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/11/24-2 The outlines of a massive new structural downshift in wages are emerging more and more clearly. The <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/14/.../14income.html> largest wage-cutting wave since the Great Depression has already been sweeping the United States for the last couple years in response to the Great Recession. At small firms, many of these pay cuts have been viewed as a temporary means of reducing costs until the recession is fully ended. The pervasiveness of this trend undoubtedly leads much of the public to assume large corporations are merely seeking the same temporary relief as small firms when they demand concessions in high-profile negotiations. The workers' pay will surely rise back to previous levels when the situation improves for the company, as occurred during the 1980s, right? Not this time around.The recession camouflages a far more insidious and long-lasting corporate strategy: Instead of temporary pay cuts to get through a few tough months, major corporations have something very, very different in mind. As NY Times economics reporter and The Disposable American author Louis Uchitelle wrote on Sunday, major firms are on the verge of consolidating a long-sought goal with a two-tier wage system: The managers of some marquee companies are aiming to make this concession permanent. If they are successful, their contracts could become blueprints for other companies in other cities, extending a wage system that would be a <http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/people/u/loui%20%20s _uchitelle/index.html> startling retreat for labor.
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