In the last decade, the most important structural change has been the shift away from regular employment towards precarious employment.
This shift is not reflected in the different figures of unemployment and employment/population ratio - just as Spence ignores this structural change when he states: "In Germany, the post-2000 reforms that reset the economy's productivity, flexibility, and competitiveness have proved crucial to the country's current economic strength and resilience." Structure of employees in Germany 2010 Total wage earners 100.0 Public servants (incl. armed forces) 5.0 regular employment 61.1 precarious employment 34.0 I assume that the respective figures show a similar picture for the society of the United States, now even more detoriated since "Selling women short" was written. Although this structural change is a very strong signal, it has often been overlooked - not only by Marxists. The tendency to destruct wage as a social relation within advanced bourgeois societies is a rather recent challenge, which has to be analyzed theoretically and - more important - which has to be solved politically. Doug Henwood wrote: >On Jul 14, 2011, at 4:50 PM, Jim Devine wrote: > > > there may not be a contradiction: in the 2007-09 recession, > > joblessness rose faster than people would expect given the fall in GDP > > (which is one reason why Obama's stmulus package was too small). It's > > possible that the extremely anemic recovery of real GDP is causing a > > similarly disproportionately large fall in joblessness. > >True in a statistical sense - but the drop in unemployment is more >the result of labor force withdrawal than job creation. Since the >recession officially ended in June 2009, the unemployment rate has >fallen by 0.4 point (0.3 if you look just at the number rounded to >one place), but the participation rate has fallen by 1.6 points, and >the employment/pop ratio is off by 1.2 points. > >Doug _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
