For the last couple-three decades, however, companies prefer and take advantage of a far more flexible labor scenario:
"Now, by contrast, it looks as though firms think that their workers are much more disposable—that it's their brands or their machines or their procedures and organizations that are key assets.
....Hence the start of the recovery is a business' last moment to slim down its labor force and become more efficient and profitable in the coming boom."
This claim is mind-boggling: not because it is so wrong, but because it is such a minor and fractured accounting of what a mountain of economic thinkers have known for years. This wondrous change? It's called "post-Fordism," or "flexible accumulation" or "the casualization of the labor market" or a host of other names describing different facets of the economic shift that takes place around the mid-Seventies. It involves, well, a shift away from fixed full-time employment and toward a labor force retained on temporary and flexible terms: a labor force whose stability, strength, and magnitude continue to wane in ratio to the increase in constant capital ("their brands or their machines or their procedures and organizations" in DeLong's phrasing that conceals more than it shows about the actual operation). This change is called the rising organic composition of capital, and is a driver of crisis; the crisis around 1973 was exactly the occasion for this new labor arrangement that took only a decade to reveal itself in employment cycles, and only 35 years to come to Brad DeLong's attention.
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http://janedark.com/2009/07/annals_of_economics.html