I think in MBA lingo this is called attaching an atmosphere or experience to the purchased commodity/service: you not only get a good meal but treated like royalty by those who are into this kind of perversion. Could it be that Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class is still relevant? In what depts/courses do people read that book anwyays? English--American Lit? Rhetoric?
>In contrast,
>immigrants in the 1890-1913 period were disproportionately employed
>in manufacturing, and their prescence probably dampened real wage
>increases and delayed the introduction of labor-saving equipment. The
>'big 22 wave' period of rapid productivity growth coincides roughly
>with the shutting off of mass immigration in the 1920s and the slow
>labor-force growth of 1930-65."
I don't get it: if tight labor market =>then faster growth of c in relation to v, i.e., adoption of labor saving technique=>then industrial reserve army of labor grows anew, leading to downward pressure on the real wage, i.e., a loose labor market. How does Gordon expect to preserve a tight labor market if its main effect is the assimilation of labor saving equipment? Is he confused? It is possible that the service sector cannot be so rationalised, thus a higher real wage cannot induce the adoption of the very technique by which the labor market is again loosened. But this is not what he is saying; moreover a tight labor market may throw more people into the service sector (even on the assumption of no immigration) if higher real wages induce rationalisation or relocation in mfg.
Moreover, the recreation of the industrial reserve of labor by assimilatin of such technique may or may enable the raising of the rate of exploitation sufficiently to beat off the profit rate decline from upward pressure on the OCC implied by productivity growth. If not, then a general crisis ensues due to the shortage of surplus value, and the level of unemployment grows to catastrophic heights, thus not only making real wage gains unlikely but depressions in the real wage an imminent possibility (and this seems to be what indeed happened in less than a decade after the immigration restrictions). Unemployment or the industrial reserve army of labor is thus created cyclically and secularly by the very productivity gains that a tight labor market is supposed to induce.
A tight labor market in which real wage gains can be secured cannot be created in the long term by shutting out immigrants or by lower birth rates (as counseled by JS Mill).
Moreover, it is not low wages from loose labor markets created by immigrants but the wage form itself that creates a barrier to implementation of labor saving technique. Since capital always only pays for labor power, not labor, it may at all times not implement otherwise overall labor saving technique--this is Marx's critique of Babbage in Capital I and amended by Engels in Capital III (see also Rosdolsky's critique of Bauer in The Making of Marx's Capital.) For example, globalisation in the form of relocation of mass production, generally consumer good industries is not necessarily technical progress; in some sense there may indeed be regress since labor power is so cheap, more labor intensive technique may again become profitable. It could be in the present situation that immigration restrictions would so tighten the labor market to accelerate the relocation of industries reverting to more labor intensive technique. The effect would then be the opposite of the productivity improvements that Gordon seems to think likely from a tight labor market.
yours, rnb