Al Campbell on Neoliberalism as an Attack on Labor

Izmir University Department of Economics Workshop on “The Great Meltdown of 2008: Systemic, Conjunctural or Policy-created?"

NYU Grad Students Secure Right To Unionize

After a battle spanning nearly a decade between students, the National Labor Relations Board and the administration of NYU, graduate students who also work as employees — most of them as teaching assistants — will be the first private university students allowed to join a national union and collectively bargain with their employer.

But unlike most unionized workers, NYU’s students won’t be covered under NLRB labor law. That's because, in a last-minute decision, the students decided to ditch their petition to be recognized by the board, and instead worked out an agreement with the school itself to allow unionization without governmental recognition.

Read the rest here.

Paul Davidson and the good old days for workers

Letter from Paul published in The Economist edition of November 2nd.

* SIR – “Labour pains” (November 2nd) pointed out that the share of wages in national income has fallen after being nearly constant for decades after the second world war. During the post-war decades the middle class prospered because of the full-employment policies started by Franklin Roosevelt and continued by both Democratic and Republican presidents and Conservative and Labour governments in Britain.

In this period the growth of union power, enshrined in legislation and policies, pursued the sharing of monopoly rents and profits of corporations with their workers. By the 1970s, however, the seeds were sown for the beginning of the end of middle-class prosperity. The anti-union policies of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher made it socially and politically popular to see unions as the villains in the economy. This was quickly supplemented by firms outsourcing to foreign countries where an hour’s worth of labour was paid a much lower real wage.

But now, a new threat is growing that will further hollow out the middle class and make even more significant differences in the distribution between the top 1-2% and the rest of society. This threat is automation. You correctly indicate that policymakers should think about broadening capital ownership as a way of boosting income to workers and restoring a prosperous middle class.

For a creative approach to restoring middle-class prosperity, I recommend the work of Professor Robert Ashford in the forthcoming issue of the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics called “Beyond Austerity and Stimulus: Democratising Capital Acquisition With the Earnings of Capital As a Means of Sustainable Growth”. Professor Ashford proposes a capital-ownership broadening policy that big companies adopt to produce enhanced earnings for their employees, customers, and other poor and middle class people; enhanced corporate profit and growth; reduced need for welfare dependence; and enhanced sovereign creditworthiness.

Paul Davidson
Editor
Journal of Post Keynesian Economics
Boynton, Florida

You can see this letter and others here.

The Legislative Attack on American Wages and Labor Standards, 2011–2012

 

 By Gordon Lafer

This report provides a broad overview of the attack on wages, labor standards, and workplace protections as it has been advanced in state legislatures across the country. Specifically, the report seeks to illuminate the agenda to undermine wages and labor standards being advanced for non-union Americans in order to understand how this fits with the far better-publicized assaults on the rights of unionized employees. By documenting the similarities in how analogous bills have been advanced in multiple states, the report establishes the extent to which legislation emanates not from state officials responding to local economic conditions, but from an economic and policy agenda fueled by national corporate lobbies that aim to lower wages and labor standards across the country.

 See rest here

 

Implications of Financial Capitalism for Employment Relations Research

New paper by Eileen Appelbaum, Rose Batt and Ian Clark of CEPR

Increasing share of the economy is organized around financial capitalism, where capital market actors actively manage their claims on wealth creation and distribution to maximize shareholder value. Drawing on four case studies of private equity buyouts, this article published in the British Journal of Industrial Relations challenges agency theory interpretations that they are ‘welfare neutral’ and show that an alternative source of shareholder value is breach of trust and implicit contracts. It also shows why management and employment relations scholars need to investigate the mechanisms of financial capitalism to provide a more accurate analysis of the emergence of new forms of class relations and to help us move beyond the limits of the varieties of capitalism approach to comparative institutional analysis.

See here (subscription required).