Women's Rights Employment Law Blog

Workers’ share of the economy has fallen in 4 of the Group of 7 industrialized nations. And that’s not even half of the untold saga of capitalism. All the industrialized countries put together, the average wages and benefits’ share of GDP in the industrialized countries between 2000 and 2005 shows a decline percentage of -14.5!

Whereas Britain and France muster up together with just 1 point increase, the rest of all major capitalist countries have a -15.5 change in percentage points.

What does this entail? Of course the corporate media may not yet declare it as the beginning of end of the global monopolists, but trends suggests workers’ discontent is so high amidst the prevailing contradictions that things to take shape may be equally unpredictable.

Academic cluelessness:
A New York Times report runs an extensive story about the reasons why such a change might have come about, and has reached about nowhere. Of course, the economists from Princeton and MIT are quoted as having failed to understand the decline even as the steady fall in workers share has characterized market economy since as many as four decades now!

The report claims that factors such as immigration, job exports, and arrival of new technologies have caused the mismatch. And that’s what the economists are thinking, according to the report, to be “eating into the workers’ share of the pie”.

Failed observations:
Amidst the disbeliefs and shocks at the apparent decline in workers’ share, attacking the symptoms rather than the cause seems to be a fatalistic observation. Trade unions have lost all their bargaining power today as opposed to during 1929, when workers enjoyed almost half of the economic pie: That’s true. Also true are the apprehensions around new technologies, immigration and job exports. But the main question that the acclaimed economists of the industrialized countries seem to be deliberately evading is centered around their own fallacious alignment with an economic system that is supposed to produce exactly what it is producing today. In fact, modern capitalism thrives on curbing workers’ rights (and hence they even buy off the labor unions), on encouraging cheap labor imports to the country (which is why immigrants work at inhuman wages to do the kinds of jobs they are called for), and through establishing sweatshops in underdeveloped countries so that the companies back in the industrialized countries can maximize their profits (which is basically the canon of capitalism) by any means.

To discount the question of economic imperialism as an advanced stage of modern capitalism is a deliberate omission in the zeal to advocate “free market” philosophy that only works towards disempowering workers world over as seen from recent experiences of American hegemony in Latin America (through monstrous anti-farmers measures by NAFTA), in Africa (through the IMF domination in forcing the resource-rich continent to remain poverty-stricken for centuries), and in Asia (through free-trade of cheap imports and sweatshops).

The Group of 7 countries have been notorious in their own domestic front in terms of treatment of workers, which is why they extend the trait of global capital to reinforce the “cheap call centers” in India and “cheap imports” from China. It is not enough to condemn the third world countries for the economic mess in the industrialized world. In fact, the case demands for quite the contrary standpoint.

Will the economic analysts ever shun their comfortable alignment with the monopolists and think outside the box, at least now? If not, the time for atonement may be on the way, considering that workers have historically not held up for too long, or far too much.

(Following is the map of workers’ share, courtesy NYT)