The Left's Dirty Job: The Politics of Industrial Restructuring in France and Spain By W. Rand Smith. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998. 363p. $50.00 cloth, $22.95 paper.

Extract

W. Rand Smith compares socialist policies of industrial retrenchment in France and Spain during the 1980s and 1990s. Both governments sought to adapt their national economy to change in the global market, through investment incentives and labor policies, in a way that would avoid sectoral crisis or even collapse. They sought to achieve an “orderly exit” of labor from redundancy-plagued industrial sectors, notably steel and automobiles, through job retraining, help in establishing small businesses, relocation incentives, and improvements in the job market, not to mention such standard support mechanisms as severance payments and preretirement systems that supported the incomes of unemployed workers. There was a distinct convergence between French and Spanish policy around this kind of adaptive policy. Neither country after 1983 resisted global market trends through price controls or subsidies or trade protection, and neither government embraced market adjustment through more liberal policies of deregulation of capital or labor markets.