[lbo-talk] UAW wage conessions/correct url

[Somebody Somebody]

Marvin: The German and other European trade unions have frequently acknowledged that these new labour markets have seriously eroded their bargaining power. Even where production or services haven't been relocated, the threat to close down factories and offices has often been sufficient to coerce workers into making concessions. The reduced power of the unions has also emboldened employers and governments to more generally assault labour rights and benefits, most (in)famously the Hartz laws in Germany and the attacks on pensions and hours of work in France. These all predate the financial crisis, but the crisis has served to greatly intensify the pressure on both the US and European working class. If the strength of European unions and government policy at one time provided "more safeguards against…threats to move production elsewhere" than in the US, these safeguards have not been apparent for some time.

Somebody: Marvin, you vastly overstate your case here. If we supposed it was all a matter of Chinese and Eastern Bloc workers joining the global capitalist economy, we would expect to see a convergence of U.S. and European levels of inequality and wages. We would expect European welfare states to increase in equality more rapidly than the U.S. since their comparative wage disadvantage would be even greater than in America. This is not occurring.

The GINI index of disposable income in France, a country of 64 million people, is basically flat. In fact, if anything, the trend has been downwards in France in the period since the 70's. So much for the end of the Golden Age. The Netherlands has also had a roughly constant level of inequality in disposable income for the past four decades. Even Germany, if we focus on the Western part of the country, has not seen anything remotely like U.S. or U.K. levels of increase in equality - not even by a long-shot. 

In fact, the U.S. is basically pulling away from all other Western nations - including even Great Britain since the 1990's.

We can't expect German trade unionists (or German political activists on this list) to recognize the vastly more precarious position of American workers. No more than we can expect Russian democracy advocates to realize how much freer they are than democracy activists in real dictatorships. It's up to Marxists and other radicals to be able to look dispassionately at international data in a non-parochial manner.

On income data in the U.S. and European Union:
<http://www.fondazionebasso.it/site/_files/Scuola_per_la_buona_politica/2008/Materiali_laboratori/OECD%20Countries.PDF>