11 - The neoliberal low point

Summary

ABSTRACT

The chapter is concerned with the 40-year crisis of organized labour in the advanced capitalist world since the end of the 1970s. While that crisis has had an uneven spatial spread and temporal evolution, the overall trajectory of organized labour has been, by all conventional measures, one of unrelenting secular decline. The chapter argues that labour strength and influence have been shaped by the underlying growth model and the extent to which unions and collective regulation contribute to or conflict with the dominant form of growth. As such, the collapse of Fordism and its replacement by a range of accumulation models not dependent upon wage-led growth have been central to the story of decline. The chapter also argues that foregrounding neoliberalism as a form of regulation of contemporary accumulation helps explain how and why labour movements have experienced such reversals and declines over the last four decades.

Keywords: Union decline; neoliberalism; challenges for unions

INTRODUCTION

Previous chapters have traced the rise of organized labour in both Western countries (Chapter 9) and state socialist ones (Chapter 10) to their highpoints in the 1970s. These highpoints were characterized by organizational strength, political influence and economic power. Indeed, it is often forgotten that the 1970s was widely seen as a moment when the long postwar class compromise disintegrated, not because of the strength of capital, but rather that of labour (Crouch & Pizzorno 1978). By the end of the 1960s, in country after country, labour militancy reflected a growing self-confidence on the part of workers and a willingness to challenge the Fordist bargains of social democratic countries, the Keynesian-welfarist compromises of most capitalist democracies, the indicative planning model of developmental states and the forms of labour paternalism in state socialist countries. In many, if not most cases, this newfound militancy involved challenging union bureaucracies (see Chapter 15) themselves through unofficial or wildcat industrial action. The response of governments, particularly those on the left, was to move left to accommodate this challenge, through new rights to unions, an extension of co-determination, a further decommodification of the labour market, and experiments in fund socialism, worker self-management and industrial planning.