RE your point 1. I think you are overestimating this shift. A lot of of that shift is a result of firms spinning off support services. For example, if a manufacturing firm farms out its accounting or janitorial services the accountants and janitors that used to be a part of the manufacturing sector now count as the service sector. Ursula Huws makes that point in her chapter in _Capital and its discontents_ . But more importantly, there is nothing about services that intrinsically disadvantages the worker. if it happens it has more to to do with power relations than with economics.
RE your point 2. As a matter of fact, European workers are better insulated from market forces than American workers - just look at the amount of social welfare spending in OECD countries http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?datasetcode=SOCX_AGG. This translates to a lot of things that affect the quality of life of the working class - health care, unemployment, old age protection, transportation, education, housing etc. I am surprised that I have to even repeat this.
Wojtek
On Fri, Jan 6, 2012 at 12:49 PM, Marv Gandall <marvgand at gmail.com> wrote:
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> On 2012-01-06, at 12:21 PM, Somebody Somebody wrote:
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>> 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.
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> 1. It's not all a matter of new labour markets. Or even mostly. The shift from an industrial to a service economy and computerization have arguably played as much or more of a role in weakening the power of the old trade union movement.
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> 2. The subject wasn't the relative levels of inequality in the US and Europe. It is whether the European workers, by virtue of a their presumed social compact with their employers and governments, are better insulated from attacks on their rights and benefits than those in the "Anglo-Saxon" countries. Read Woj's post again if you want examples of overstatement. Better yet, wave your GINI coefficients at Greek, Spanish, Irish, and other workers currently bearing the brunt of the austerity drive to show them how much better off they are than their American counterparts and how much they owe to their "European model" of industrial relations.
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