Feeling discomfort, fellow citizens? Do you have a mild pain in the Congress and bloating in the White House? Does globalization cause belching, nausea or heartburn? Here’s something with a very low risk of side effects.”
So the pharmaceutical industry might try to sell Robert Reich’s new book, albeit with the disclaimer that the economist and Clinton administration secretary of labor is brilliant at diagnosis and at offering medicine that is not mere placebo. But, be forewarned: it may take a change in attitude to ingest his pill.
Reich takes up the familiar U.S. socioeconomic challenges of the 21st century—job off-shoring, mass layoffs, the stagnation of household middle- and low- incomes accompanied by explosive gains among the very, very rich—and refuses to serve commonplace assumptions on silver platitudes. Neither corporate conspiracies, nor Ronald Reagan, nor neocon social Darwinism—in brief, none of the usual suspects are to blame for what fundamentally has been happening to the U.S. economy even during the booming 1990s.
It all began long ago with the end of what he calls the “Not So Golden Age,” the period from 1945 to 1973, in which wages doubled in a generation and productivity soared. The major labor-management pacts of the late 1940s and ’50s, coupled with the National Labor Relations Act, the New Deal regulatory agencies and quiet arrangements among major corporations to avoid price wars created what was once described by Catholic news reporter Arthur Jones, originally a financial journalist, as the “mildly heroic” era of American capitalism.
This was the era of the auto industry’s “little Swedens” of womb-to-tomb employment and social protections that allowed a generation of blue-collar workers’ children to go to college and shed manual labor. The late Msgr. George G. Higgins fought so valiantly, yet with modest success, to expand this to the migrant workers for whom he negotiated.
In September, the United Auto Workers pact with General Motors, allowing the carmaker to relieve itself of pension obligations in exchange for relatively modest assurances of job security, sounded the final death knell of that era. That is if you weren’t watching, Reich explains.
The oil crisis of the early 1970s and Carter administration-era deregulation of major industries, leading to the breakup of even the telephone monopoly, set the stage for the rough-and-tumble competitive environment of today, in which corporations have to move plants to countries where workers will work for pennies of the U.S. wage dollar—or face bankruptcy. All that was needed was an end to the cold war and the start-up of enabling technologies that would make competition possible from all over the globe.
In reading This article appears in January 7 2008.
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