The underlying pathology is not hard to describe: employers (enabled by the Fed which has since the 1980s been only too wiling to provide for higher levels of unemployment so as to curb labor bargaining power to keep inflation tame) have succeeded in eliminating labor bargaining power. That program has been aided and abetted by the popularization of libertarian ideologies, which encourage many to see themselves as more in charge of their destiny than they are and thus see success and failure as the result of talent and work, as opposed to circumstance.…More on precarity and the Anne Case and Angus Deaton study, too.
Naked Capitalism
Martin Wolf on the Low Labor Participation as the Result of the Crapification of Jobs
Yves Smith
2 comments:
All my favorite economic dogmas:
We don't want those kinds of manual labor unskilled jobs anyway;
There aren't anyone to do those kinds of jobs;
The low skill jobs aren't ever coming back;
They had better go and get another degree;
There is no alternative to our current trade policy;
Imports are a benefit, exports a cost.
That they were born poor, stupid, lazy or unlucky isn't our problem.
And that folks, is orthodoxy in a nutshell.
"We don't want those kinds of manual labor unskilled jobs anyway; "
We don't want them in the profit sector for sure, otherwise there is little incentive to automate. And therefore little incentive to improve productivity in that area.
Hand car washes and Coffe Baristas are a sign of failure, not success.
If we were doing this properly there should be little or no living wage jobs in the profit sector - since it should always be cheaper to use capital and automate.
That is the supposed benefit of capitalism - that they deploy capital to make processes more efficient and reduce costs.
Post a Comment