Understanding the long, managed decline of American labor power.
The connection between productivity and wages is not a mathematical equation - it's a social relationship, and it's a political relationship. So if workers are told over and over that there's no room for them to have higher wages, this isn't just an economic calculus, it's a political statement about whose contribution matters and whose contribution doesn't matter.
Jacobin Managing Editor Nicole Aschoff examines the class project behind decades of declines in autoworker wages and working class power in general - rejecting the 'inevitability' of loss under globalization and instead pointing towards a set of industrial and political decisions made by politicians, companies and unions - and points to a larger failing of the left to provide an inclusive project based on class solidarity across industries, from the plant floor, to the classroom, to the call center.
Nicole wrote the article The Long Road to Crisis in the latest issue of Jacobin.
Guest
Nicole Aschoff
Nicole Aschoff is the author of The New Prophets of Capital and an editor at Jacobin magazine.
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