A World of Insecurity by Pranab Bardhan

Author:Pranab Bardhan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press

THE RECENT DECLINE OF SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC POLITICS

Long before the COVID-19 pandemic, social democratic parties in different parts of the world—including Brazil, Europe, India, Turkey, and the United States—had been on a long losing streak, yielding power or at least a large part of the political space to mostly right-wing populist parties. (There are now some signs of possible revival of social democrats in Germany and the Iberian Peninsula.) There have been a few cases of left-wing populism in Latin America; even in social democracies there, like Chile, public distrust and protests, and the recent election of a left-wing president, have been associated with inequality and decline of public services. In the United States, where the safety net for workers has been patchy compared to that in western Europe, it became much weaker, with cuts in government expenditure in recent decades, even as the need for it mounted. Data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (2020) suggest that between 1999 and 2019 the number of Americans aged twenty-five to fifty-four who are outside the labor force grew by 25 percent, or 4.7 million—over six times more than the number who received help from the main assistance program for displaced workers.

This has also been a period of decline for traditional working-class trade unions; for example, since 1985 trade union membership has halved on average across the member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). With automation and globalization many traditional jobs have disappeared, and workers have lost much of their faith in the power of trade unions to safeguard their interests. Yet they are increasingly suffering in low-paying, backbreaking jobs with relentless productivity quotas and surveillance routines. Various business interests run persistent and well-funded campaigns against unions and have captured the attention of much of the media and many think tanks, succeeding in shrinking organized workers’ traditional rights and domain—from the right-to-work movement pushed by employers (which undermines the unions’ ability to fund themselves) in the US Rust Belt to the hiring of large numbers of contract laborers without benefits to work side by side with regular workers in factories in India. (In Europe, where the bargaining is often not at the individual firm level but at the industry or sectoral level, there is less incentive on the part of business to try to weaken unions at the firm level, but then there is a “free rider” problem among individual workers, as they can get the bargained benefits without paying the dues for union membership.)

Technological and demographic change have also been at work in shifting the support base of social democratic parties. Let me mention two kinds of change here. The first is the way technological change and the spread of education and the knowledge economy made a significant fraction of the workforce more professional, skilled, or at least white-collar. In their work patterns, income profile, lifestyles, assortative mate selections, and residence in gentrified parts of cities, these white-collar workers are increasingly different from the older, less educated,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.