At 01:13 PM 01/13/2001 -0600, you wrote:
>I would like to just add two dimensions to this thread.
>1. During the last 5-6 years, wages in the bottom 3/5 of US workers
>finally rose at slightly ahead of the rate of inflation for the first time
>in decades. (During the 80s expansion, virtually all income gains went to
>the top fifth of earners.) I think that the wage gains were due in part
>to strong increases in productivity, but also due to consistent employment
>for groups traditionally unemployed at higher rates (i.e. black
>men). Now that the economy is showing some sign of slow down, and
>acknowledging that unionization is at an extreme low, do you think that
>these wage gains will disappear?
Unless Say's Law miraculously starts working, increases in (labor)
productivity don't cause rises in wages. Rather, it's either due to
increases in the organizational strength of the working class, which allows
them to be more effective in their struggle (in which case, rising
productivity growth allows real wage increases without automatically
squeezing profits) _or_ due to increases in aggregate demand. Forgive me if
I'm a pessimist about the US labor movement, but in general, I'd say that
the latter is more apt for recent US history: the rise in consumer and
corporate debt, financed by increased borrowing from outside the US. Until
recently, the rate of profit rose steeply (though not enough to attain the
previous high of the 1960s) due to wages lagging behind labor productivity
and a greater efficiency of the use of fixed capital, which helped spark
the boom of consumer demand (through stock-market effects) and corporate
investment, which was then supplemented by the familiar dynamics of a
bubble economy.
The slowdown in demand (due to the stock-market's downshifting and perhaps
as consumers hit their credit-card limits and those of common sense) is
squeezing profits, along with recent increases in wages. More importantly
in the short run, falling capacity utilization discourages real investment
and corporate spending in general. Given the relatively high degree of
worker insecurity (compared to that of the 1960s, say), employment and
wages will fall steeply. So the answer is yes.
>2. The problem I have in general with the nominal vs. real wage gain/cuts
>models and theories are that they all assume a common trend for the
>working class. I really think this is false. Minority men have fared
>very poorly since the late 70s in relation to wher they began (including
>recent small gains) while white women have done relatively well, and
>minority women have seen wages increase dramatically in relation to where
>they began in the late 70s (dating all this from when title VII began to
>actually take effect). Are any of these theories adaptable to this idea
>of a working wage which moves in different directions depending on the
>part of the working class we are talking about. (Matt has introduced the
>term segmented workforce and while I admit to its usefulness, I have too
>many problems with its original conceptualization).
I think that the idea of segmented labor-power markets makes a lot of
sense, though the trend since the 1960s has been for the secondary labor
markets to grow relative to the primary ("good job") labor markets.
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine
