I would add that falling raw material prices and (due to the high dollar) cheaper imports help the US avoid inflation, which is the immediate cause of concern for the rentiers, who don't worry much about industrial discipline.
Further, as Barry Bluestone and Steve Rose argue in a recent Levy Institute working paper, working class insecurity has increased the effective supply of labor-power, so that the 4.5 percent official unemployment rate we had for a few months had the effect of a significantly higher U rate in terms of maintaining industrial discipline. The U rate has more "oomph" than it used to have. For example, until recently, the duration of unemployment spells was much higher than expected given the official U rate.
When I was reading the passages that Doug posted by Kalecki, it made me think of the situation in the US during WW2, when the U rate was _very_ low. In broad strokes, the US instituted (temporary) fascism in order to fight Naziism. Some of that fascistic system continued after WW2 in the form of Truman-McCarthyism.
However, I don't think Kalecki's analysis deals very well with the social-democratic type "deal" that Sweden had for many years. Of course, that kind of deal is impossible in the US unless the working class gets much significantly more organized and class-conscious and capital becomes more centralized and much less mobile internationally.
Jim Devine jdevine at popmail.lmu.edu & http://clawww.lmu.edu/Departments/ECON/jdevine.html