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On the persistence of labour market insecurity and slow growth in the US: Reckoning with the Waltonist growth regime

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posted on 2017-11-27, 09:35 authored by Matt VidalMatt Vidal
In this article I systematically incorporate empirical work on rising income inequality and wage stagnation into a regulation theoretic framework for analysing macroeconomic growth. The rise of job polarisation and income inequality coincides with a long period of macroeconomic stagnation, both continuing through to the present (with the exception of a brief period of strong growth and declining inequality in the second half of the 1990s). The corporate scramble to restore profit rates after the crisis of Fordism has transformed the institutional configuration of the political economy. In particular, institutions supporting upward mobility and middle-class incomes in the economy have been eroded by the twin forces of internationalisation (leading to the re-emergence of wage-based competition) and employment externalisation (outsourcing, downsizing, antiunionism, etc). The current growth regime, which may be characterised as Waltonist, based on the Wal-Mart model of buyer-driven global supply chains focused on cutthroat wage-based competition and deunionisation, is not transitional but rather embedded in apparently long-term institutional settlements that amount to a dysfunctional regime. © 2012 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.

History

School

  • Loughborough University London

Published in

New Political Economy

Volume

17

Issue

5

Pages

543 - 564

Citation

VIDAL, M., 2012. On the persistence of labour market insecurity and slow growth in the US: Reckoning with the Waltonist growth regime. New Political Economy, 17(5), pp. 543-564.

Publisher

© Taylor & Francis

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2012

Notes

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in New Political Economy on 02 Mar 2012, available online: https://doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2012.630459

ISSN

1356-3467

eISSN

1469-9923

Language

  • en

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