Power, Norms, and Inflation by Michael R. Smith

Author:Michael R. Smith [Smith, Michael R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781351497350
Google: 8GVQDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-09-29T03:29:17+00:00

There is, of course, the difficulty of establishing the moral preferences of the relevant community. But even if that can be done, there is no guarantee that the settlement most suitable for economic growth coincides with the settlement that addresses the moral concerns of that constituency. For example, if Goldthorpe (1978:203; 1984:320) is correct, the notion of citizenship in industrial societies has been extended to include some degree of proprietorship over one's job. That is an issue of what is fair; it is a moral matter. But superior long-run economic performance requires phasing out less productive jobs (that are likely to be clustered in particular industries) and replacing them with more productive jobs, with a high potential for growth in productivity. The popular moral judgment is, then, that people should keep their jobs; the requirement of growth is that some people—quite a lot—should lose them. A suitable job placement scheme of the sort thought to exist under Sweden's active labor market policy might address this issue. But it is not obvious that someone losing his or her job in an industry in decline is going to be much enthused by the need to retrain, move jobs, and, perhaps, relocate from one part of the country to another, even with an active labor market policy. Such a person is likely to use all the moral suasion at his or her disposal to mobilize political sentiment—that is, to generate moral outrage at the phasing out of an industry that happens to be unproductive. The general point is, simply, that economic policies that generate moral approval are, much of the time, likely not to coincide with the economic policies that are consistent with economic growth.

Besides, we do know that moral judgments about inequality are not shared across the working class. Much of the resentment of workers is directed at the pay of other workers and there are some grounds for thinking that this is not simply a question of outrage at the distribution of income produced by the blind and impersonal workings of the market. Quite apart from anything else, there is no current capitalist society in which the pattern of inequality can reasonably be attributed to blind impersonal market mechanisms. Even the United States has some unions and welfare programs. But beyond this, the behavior of skilled workers tends to suggest that they regard substantial skill differentials as appropriate and, historically, they have created and maintained trade unions to protect those differences (Littler, 1982:77, 167) or caused problems within unions where the leadership pursued policies deemed to be inappropriately egalitarian (Hinton, 1973:166 ff.; Flanagan, Soskice, and Ulman, 1983:372). There is no shortage of resentments of white-collar workers towards blue-collar worker wages, and vice versa—and this in both liberal and neocorporatist societies (on the former see Bain, 1970:49; on the latter, Martin, 1984:212-213; Lash and Urry, 1987:246-248). I believe that the potential for moral legitimacy of a centrally negotiated set of wages is greatly limited by the lack of consensus on what an

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