[lbo-talk] good news! more job declines coming!!

[Jacob Conrad]

I am too young to have experienced "the sixties," but definitely caught 
the afterglow.  All of that shut down with remarkable speed in the 
subsequent decade, with the "oil shock" of 1973, the collapse of the 
manufacturing economy in the US, and the "stagflation" of the late 70s.  
People in the US were scared shitless in the 70s because of the end of 
the post-WWII boom (Hobsbawm's "golden age"), and I have always felt 
that this had a great deal to do with creating the cultural/political 
atmosphere of the Reagan era, which we are in many ways still living in 
today.  I think Doug is on to something about low unemployment 
contributing to "Seattle"--"Ah, for the late 90s," as someone said.  
Remember in this connection the big labor victories at UPS and Verizon.  
About Seattle, though, weren't there some important local factors that 
contributed too?  I'm thinking of the labor strife at Kaiser Aluminum 
and the fight over logging the old-growth forests, two issues with the 
same villain--thus "Teamsters and Turtles."  Put those local issues 
together with the years of work around trade and the WTO coming to 
fruition, against a backdrop of tight labor markets and a general sense 
of prosperity, and you have the "conjuncture" (in other words, plain 
dumb luck) that created "Seattle."

Jacob Conrad

Carrol Cox wrote:


>Doug Henwood wrote:
>  
>
>>[clip]
>>That sounds right to me. I'm curious where'd you'd classify the late
>>90s - I think (though Chuck0 hates me for it) that low unemployment
>>contributed to "Seattle."
>>
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>
>I was thinking of that as I wrote the post, and I don't know. I don't
>have any real sense of what made the movement to Seattle tick, since I
>was not an active part of it. Were the '90s as a whole a fairly upbeat
>period for those who made up the bulk of Seattle protestors? And could
>the moderate level of success achieved reflect the middling length of
>the uptick as a whole? In 1965 almost everyone had been finding things
>better and better for about 20 years. And the leisure that university
>students could achieve was growing rather than shrinking. Wages went up
>in the late '90s, but leisure did not, for anyone.
>
>And of course "living standards" and "leisure" are both relative, not
>absolute. Anyone conditioned to a 70 hour week who gains 5 hours each
>Sunday will feel an immense relief. And someone who never or rarely gets
>meat will feel one meat meal a week is luxury.
>
>Carrol
>
> 
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>
>>Doug
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