Thomas Palley has posted a particularly interesting essay on labor's globalization dilemma. According to Palley, the language of neoliberalism has become the lingua franca of economists throughout the world, providing economists with both capital-friendly framing and a set of assumptions about how the global economy works that put labor at a disadvantage in the battle of ideas. It is difficult, if not impossible, to advocate for labor-friendly policies in Neoliberalspeak.

Pally proposes an alternative metaphor—the box:

The box describes how workers are being boxed in and squeezed from all sides by today’s corporate inspired economic order. The box has four sides: globalization, less than full employment, small government, and labor market flexibility. These four sides describe the neo-liberal policy paradigm, which puts workers under continuous economic pressure that none can escape.

The four sides of Palley's box all describe the same thing, only from different angles.

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• Globalization creates a worldwide labor market in which workers bid against each other for work. American workers are thus drawn into competition with Chinese workers earning miniscule wages compared to the minimum wage in the U.S.
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• Less than full employment creates a game of musical chairs for workers that guarantees insecurity for individual workers and dampens demands for higher wages.
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• A truly democratic government would look to the interests of the majority of its citizens, who happen to be the workers. A small government, no matter how democratic, will lack the power to protect those interests, to the benefit of the owners of capital. It also pits public workers against private workers.
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• Finally, labor market flexibility is furthered by globalization, in that a worldwide labor market, combined with little or no legal or regulatory protection of jobs, guarantees that capital, in its quest to drive down labor cost, is able to hire and fire with without regard to social cost.
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In addition to providing a common frame for labor-oriented communication, Palley points out that this vision of labor's dilemma makes it easy to identify and critique the anti-labor policies that both Republicans and Democrats have implemented over the past two decades, such as NAFTA, the WTO and the massive tax cuts for the most wealthy. Most people nowadays have been conditioned to believe that their economic difficulties are the result of either universal economic laws or their own personal inadequacies, rather that the predictable outcome of deliberate decisions by political elites to shift wealth and income from the bottom two-thirds of the population to the top one percent.

We've seen all these things in Mississippi for years. From antebellum times, the power elite in this state has been unremittingly hostile to labor rights and determined to keep wages as close to subsistence level as possible. The state bases its economic development program on low wages, labor flexibility, underemployment, and weak or nonexistent labor unions. The results are predictable: poverty, ignorance, and the shortest life expectancy and highest infant mortality in the nation.

Tags: Palley, capital, labor, economics, NAFTA, WTO, neoliberal, Mississippi