The Prince of Neoliberal Globalization
Adam Smith Comes Roaring Back
In the face of polls showing that
voters ranked the economy as the number-one issue in the presidential election
campaign, in April 2004 John Kerry issued a report that changed the Bush
administration with plunging the federal government into more than $6.5
trillion in debt. The lion’s share of new spending, according to the report,
was on “entitlements” such as the Medicare prescription-drug program. According
to report, entitlements would cost $4.9 trillion. On April 6, Kerry said that
if elected he would make the “hard choices” of cutting social programs, if
necessary, to redress the budget imbalance. But he also promised to create ten million
jobs by, among other measures, instituting cuts of 90 percent of taxpayers.
But after more than a year of
campaigning, none of the leading Democratic candidates had proposed addressing
the nearly intractable structural unemployment of at least ten million people in
the labor force by direct job creation. The best the Democrats were able to
manage was to try to include a modest rise in the minimum wage in the
welfare-reauthorization bill, a strategy designed to embarrass the Republicans
and to appease their own base.
The point of this story is not to
emphasize the evils of outsourcing. Instead I want to call attention to ways in
which, in the wake of stagnant computer sales in the first three years of the
new century, corporations have managed to sustain their profitability. While
the stock markets respond positively to any cost-cutting measures that buttress
the price of shares, workers have been left behind. In addition to suffering
job destruction and outsourcing, U.S. workers, intellectual as well
as manual, are experiencing a long-term assault on their living standards: wage
have lagged behind even the modest inflation rate of about 2.5 percent a year.
For the first quarter of 2004, which economists judge as a period of buoyant
“recovery” (at least for some profits ), total wages rose by 0.6 percent, or an
annual rate of 2 percent.
The concept of mass strikes for public goods, a practice
that is all but routine in some European countries, especially in Italy and France, is so far from the
conversation in union circles that to raise the question is tantamount to
speaking a foreign language. In this respect, collective-bargaining agreements
are not an unvarnished good for workers.
Since the
Cold War era, which began around 1947-1948 when the labor movement purged its
ranks of the most militant rank-and-file activists and entered into a very
public three-way partnership with capital and the state, U.S. unions have
surrendered their political and ideological independence.
Surely, since 1995, organizing has become a legitimate
priority for a handful of unions who are willing to devote the necessary
resources. Some, like the Hotel Employees and Service Employees union, have
made impressive inroads in their respective sectors, recruiting tens of
thousands of new members in the past decade. But the argument that unions
cannot exercise mass power until they have restored their membership strength
flies in the face of experiences elsewhere in the world.
Unions have
always been at the cutting edge of labor’s long struggle to achieve a measure
of protection against the vicissitudes of an unstable job market and an
oppressive workplace.
