>>Would protective tariffs be an example? Tarrifs in the US were designed
to shield the new American industrial sector from foreign (eg British)
competition -- "fostering infant industries," in List's words.<<
tariffs in australia were quite substantial prior to the 'eighties. but the distinction between nurturing 'local' and foreign' capital never really applied. ie., the tariffs functioned in the main to entice TNC's to establish local production sites to leap over the tarrif barrier: Ford, GM being the most prominent examples.
> >maintained to "protect the wages of the American worker," -- or at
least that became the publicly stated rationale. Now, I'm sure no one
really believes that the American capitalist class was interested in
protecting the wages of American workers from European competition, but the
fact is that
US wages WERE higher, and that protective tariffs enjoyed popular
support.<<
it might do us good to think through a little bit more this line of tariffs protecting wage levels, especially in that (as you say) it provided the means to forge a political bond between workers (figured in nationalist terms) and capitalists (likewise). were wages higher because of tariffs? this is the question that needs to be asked, and i've never found explanations based on tariffs convincing, not least because the period i think you might be referring to (post-WWII) contained many other elements which were made it particularly crucial (from the perspective of capital's stability) for maintaining a particular section of the world's workers (in the US, here, Britain...) in relatively better conditions. i'd look for explanations of higher wages in the post-war period as founded more on things like the US's role in the global arms industry and as armed guarantor of global capitalist stability, the rapid industrialisation (and cheapening) of the production of consumption goods (which in effect made possible an expansion first and foremost of surplus value relative to wages) and, not least, the enormous flows of a global surplus to the US. US workers have yet to thank (or even acknowledge) workers in the rest of America, for instance, for their relatively higher wages.
in any event, i can't see any significant connection between production and nation, especially in terms of the global character of production lines from start to finish. and, hasn't it been like this for a very long time?
doug wrote:
>A lot of U.S. trade discourse tacitly assumes the autoworker to be
the modal worker, but only about 1% of U.S. workers work in the auto
industry. Two-thirds work in private services. There's a tendency on
the left to romanticize factory work in itself; to me it seems
dangerous and mentally numbing. What's "good" about factory jobs is
that they sometimes come with high wages and good benefits. I think
more attention should be paid to making service jobs more like that.<
Henry Ford was forced to offer relatively higher wages, with certain decisive conditions attached: workers had to stay on the job for longer than six months and only take a minimum number of days off work, for instance. the problem encountered in the early days of the assembly line was a 100% annual turnover rate, and a massively high rate of abstenteeism. and why not: assembly-line work is excruciatingly mind-numbing and painfully boring. the trade-off, as holloway remarks somewhere, was for a compliance with the rigours and pace of the assembly-line in return for a relatively more comfortable lesiure time. of course, this is also the first time i think that free time -- ie., time spent outside the factory and work -- was connected up to work time and the requirements of production.
the only thing that might entail creating similar conditions in other sectors is a similar level of disruption to that work by recalcitrant workers. and the issue then becomes of making that disruption more likely: ie., welfare reforms, unionisation of what i suspect is there (as here) a particularly disorganised sector, etc.
Angela _________