class composition

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

At 11:55 PM -0700 8/19/02, billbartlett at dodo.com.au wrote:
>>Tahir: What if capital decided somehow to remunerate housework and 
>>cut the remuneration of the (male) worker accordingly? Isn't this 
>>where the wages for housework movement might lead?
>
>This is already happening. In Australia there are universal family 
>benefits paid to mothers of dependent children, see the wbsite of 
>the federal payment agency at:
>http://www.centrelink.gov.au/internet/internet.nsf/individuals/pg_payments.htm 
>for full details.
>
>As for wages, they have already been reduced. Until a couple of 
>decades ago, the level of male adult wages were arbitrated according 
>to the male breadwinner concept. The legal doctrine was that male 
>adult wages should be sufficient to support a husband and wife with 
>two dependent children. That has gone out the window now, unless 
>they have dependent children women are expected to work and expect 
>equal pay for equal work. Wages are commensurately lower for both 
>men and women, with one adult wage no longer sufficient to support a 
>family - however some of the cost of raising children is being 
>socialised, through government benefits.
>
>Perhaps that hasn't happened in the US (you are a backward lot) but 
>it seems a common phenomenon in the advanced capitalist countries 
>that have shed the anachronistic feudal notions of dependency. Its 
>more efficient the modern way of course.

*****   NYT  March 26, 2002

Europe Versus United States in Steel War

By EDMUND L. ANDREWS

...European executives also tend to agree with American steel 
executives on an important point: the biggest hindrance to 
consolidation in the United States is the huge burden of paying 
pension and health benefits for retirees.

American steel companies lobbied unsuccessfully last year for the 
federal government to assume those liabilities, which would have 
allowed them to merge more freely because, with their costs lower, 
they would have been more desirable takeover candidates.

The European companies do not have that problem. In most countries, 
pension and health care benefits are government responsibilities. On 
top of that, the European Commission carried out a sweeping plan in 
the 1970's and 1980's to help finance early retirement for companies 
that reduced their capacity.

"We had government assistance on retirement and health benefits, I 
admit that," Mr. Dollé said....

<http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/26/business/26STEE.html>   *****

To the extent that maintenance of the old, the young, the disabled, 
etc. remains un-socialized by the government, unions seek to gain 
pension, health insurance, etc. through company-wide or at most 
industry-wide collective bargaining; and if unions are successful in 
doing so, they make production costs higher, and companies and even 
industries can be beaten by competitors from nations that have 
already socialized such costs (although Euro steel competitiveness 
also comes from economy of scale gained by mergers, radical reduction 
of steel employment ["from nearly 800,000 workers in 1980 to fewer 
than 280,000 today," 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/26/business/26STEE.html>], etc.). 
Some degree of social democracy makes economic sense, but the US 
power elite have preferred class power to efficient production, and 
the weak, fragmented, and politically backward US labor movement has 
never put much efforts into creating and maintaining social programs 
that go beyond serving already existing union members.  As Jenny 
Brown says, the American model of capital-labor relations has placed 
huge burdens on women.
-- 
Yoshie

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