At 20:39 15.07.2011, Doug Henwood wrote:

>On Jul 15, 2011, at 2:33 PM, Hinrich Kuhls wrote:
>
> > In the last decade, the most important structural change has been the
> > shift away from regular employment towards precarious employment.
> >
> > This shift is not reflected in the different figures of unemployment
> > and employment/population ratio - just as Spence ignores this
> > structural change when he states: "In Germany, the post-2000 reforms
> > that reset the economy's productivity, flexibility, and
> > competitiveness have proved crucial to the country's current economic
> > strength and resilience."
> >
> > Structure of employees in Germany 2010
> >
> > Total wage earners                      100.0
> > Public servants (incl. armed forces)    5.0
> > regular employment                      61.1
> > precarious employment           34.0
> >
> > I assume that the respective figures show a similar picture for the
> > society of the United States, now even more detoriated since "Selling
> > women short" was written.
>
>Not sure about that. Part-time workers are about 19% of the total 
>now, not all that much higher than from 1970-2000, when they were 
>about 16-17% of the total. Temp workers account for a smaller share 
>of total employment than they did in 2000, which was the tightest 
>U.S. job market in a generation.

I stand corrected for the fact that the crucial shift to high 
precarious employment in the US was put into action before 2000.

But this does not lever out the conclusion: The tendency to destruct 
wage as a social relation within advanced bourgeois societies is a 
rather recent challenge, which has to be analyzed theoretically and - 
more important - which has to be solved politically.

Or do you think the stagnation of high precarious 
employment  indicates already a change into the direction to 
re-regulate the labor market or to improve the conditions for 
defending wage as a social relation - despite the high unemployment, 
and despite the low influence of unions? 

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