According to Piven and Cloward, what where the main features of the Social Compact that grew out of America’s industrial economy?

Who had power and how did they get it???

How was it organized and expressed?

What concessions was organized labor able to wrest from government/capital?

What is Keynesianism?
 

 
What trends/data indicate that the social compact of industrialism under attack?

 Economic Change:
 Income and wealth disparities at historic extremes;
 Richest 1 in US controls 40% of wealth
 Real wages of less skilled falling;
 Poverty increasing;

 Changes in Organized Politics:
Union membership decimated;
Left parties in disarray;
 
 Changes in Welfare State:
 Welfare programs being rolled back;
 

Why are all these things happening??

Globalization!!!
“We don’t think this explanation is entirely wrong but is deployed so sweepingly as to be misleading.  The implication is that the global economy is in command; in effect, markets no longer permit politics, at least not a politics which sustains the industrial era social compact.  And right or wrong, the explanation itself has become a political force, helping to create the institutional realities it purportedly merely describes.  In fact, globalization is as much political strategy as economic imperative” (5)
 

Globalization: Variations on a theme
 What are some of the ways globalization has been characterized?

 1. decentralization, shift in production to low wage countries

2. expansion of trade (facilitated by new communication and transport technologies)
meaning both a greater reliance of every economy on trade
and new markets (e.g. Eastern Europe)

3.  vastly accelerated flows of capital
 

How have three variants undercut the power of organized labor?
 
 

How do Piven and Cloward challenge the idea that globalization is inevitable, a fait accompli, a convergence/race to the bottom for everyone, everywhere????

What evidence do we have that it is not???