Caz închis

Nu ştiu de ce îmi mai pierd timpul atrăgând atenţia asupra consecinţelor deciziilor pe care le-a luat puterea asta de căcat, imbecilă, fără viziune, fără şcoală, care este trasă de aţă de nişte fanatici ai pieţei, care cred că totul se poate rezolva prin  "dereglementare", prin "retragerea statului din economie", prin "punerea la muncă a leneşilor". Poate sunt masochist, şi nu conştientizez asta...

Nişte americani au publicat recent un studiu despre stagnarea veniturilor americanilor, cu începere din anii 80 ai secolului trecut, când un actor cretin de mâna a doua, care se credea trimisul lui Dumnezeu pe pământ, a început să atace moştenirea New Dealului. Din punctul meu de vedere ăla a fost momentul în care a început sfârşitul SUA, ca lider global. Pentru că "American Dream" este produsul New Dealului, şi el a reprezentat acea "soft power" care a distrus comunismul, nu muntele de bani vârât în tot felul de aventuri tehnologice şi militare, de genul scutului anti-rachetă.

Am să citez câteva lucruri din introducerea studiului, unde se vorbeşte de nevoia definirii unui nou Contract Social. Sigur, în România, când Ion Iliescu a vorbit recent despre acest lucru, şi despre un nou Cotract Social, l-au înjurat toţi analfabeţii din presă, care sunt mai degrabă specializaţi în plastie vaginală, sau în pupat curul Iubitului Conducător. Evident că pentru dobitoci Thomas Hobbes a fost un comunist odios, la fel ca şi Jean Jacques Rousseau.

"In the three decades after World War II, a central feature of the American economy was a mass upward mobility in which each generation lived better than the last, and workers experienced earnings gains through much of their careers. In short, the American Dream was alive and well. The central drivers of mass upward mobility were real wages for most workers that grew in line with overall labor productivity. Because of rising real wages a 40-year-old male blue-collar worker earned more in the late 1960s than most managers had earned in the late 1940s.

The alignment of wage growth and productivity growth resulted from two main factors: labor markets for most groups of workers in which demand matched supply, and the post-World War II Social Compact that emerged from the Great Depression helped to propogate wage norms throughout the economy, norms that were enforced in part through collective bargaining and professional personnel/human resource management practices.

By the 1980s, both of these factors had reversed. Labor demand increasingly shifted toward more educated workers – particularly well-educated women. At the same time, the post-war Social Compact was challenged by the inflationary 1970s and collapsed in the 1980s. Nothing has emerged to replace it...

 

 What is needed is a new Social Compact not in the mirror image or with the same institutions of the original Social Compact, but with policies, institutions, and organizational practices suited to the current economy and workforce.

Two big challenges have to be overcome to put a new Social Compact into place. The first is political and in some respects ideological. Since the 1970s, large corporations have dramatically increased their economic power and political influence (Barley 2010). The results have been substantial legislative changes that deregulated major industries, liberalized banking rules, undercut labor-law enforcement and reform, prevented increases in the federal minimum wage, and fostered an ideology of free-market liberalism and the “maximization of shareholder value” at the expense of other stakeholders.

Prior to these changes, American business practiced a managerial capitalism that shared the returns on investments in new goods and services among the firms’ investors, science and engineering professionals, managers, and other employees. Today, American business emphasizes a form of financial capitalism that rewards financial innovations, transactions, and restructuring. As a result of this shift, a disproportionate share of the gains of recent productivity gains has gone to those in the financial sector who engineered this shift and to the top executives in corporations who applied these principles in their firms.

Over three decades, this evolution has been supported by a public belief in the proposition that left alone, unregulated market forces and corporations that maximize shareholder value would generate the economic growth and shared prosperity needed to raise living standards for all Americans. The 2008 financial collapse disproved this proposition as it involved financial markets. The compensation in Figures 1 and 2 disprove the proposition for most workers. A realignment of corporate and public interests begins with an honest discussion of these facts.

The second problem is analytical. While the past three decades have generated a number of localized organizational and institutional innovations in response to changing markets, technologies, and workforce characteristics — and many of these innovations havedemonstrated their effectiveness on a small scale — few if any have diffused widely enough to be tested for their potential as national strategies."

Analiza este foarte serioasă, şi multe dintre fenomenele descrise de autori ne privesc şi pe noi, mai ales consecinţele globalizării, destructurarea sindicatelor şi scăderea puterii lor de negociere colectivă, scăderea salariului minim, fragmentarea pieţei muncii, etc.  

Autorii formulează şi o serie de soluţii. Unele uşor utopice, altele destul de vagi. Toate presupun existenţa unei voinţe politice ferme şi a unor mecanisme de intervenţie ale statului. Adică fix ce nu vrea vulgata ideologică neoliberală. Caz închis.