SCPL2601 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Social Reproduction, Living Wage, Aggregate Demand
23 May 2018
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WEEK 7: WORK AND THE WELFARE STATE:
• What is Fordism?
o Henry Ford and the assembly line
o Social Sciences: dominant system of social, political and economic production in
industrial society
• Fordism is a set of production and accumulation practices centered around mass production,
standardization of production and products and mass consumption
• Accumulation Regime:
o Mass production
o Mass Consumption
• Sociocultural Regime:
o Mass Media
o Mass Politics
o Exclusion
o Family and Leisure
• Production:
o Standard production
o Standard products
o Deskilled labour
• Regulation:
o Business organization and protection
o Unionization
o Wages
o Centralised Finance
o Welfare State
o Standard Employment
• The Golden Age of the Welfare State:
o The Keynesian Compromise
• Workers got full employment, a living wage and welfare state
• Capital got wage resistant, labour productivity, economic growth and high levels of
protection
• Steady economic growth
• Stable political activity
• Stable forms of family and work
o Institutional reinforcement of male breadwinner model/nuclear family:
• Sociocultural and legal exclusion of women and Indigenous peoples from paid
employment
▪ System reliant on social reproduction being unpaid and undertaken by
women
o SER and KWS disciplined workers (time, leisure, identities, consumption, politics)
• Privileged male subjects contribution to work, leisure, consumption and politics
o Privileged Economic Growth:
• Excluded social reproduction and domestic labour from economic measures
• Environmental costs ignored
• Relationship between Fordist Production and KWS:
o Flattening the boom bust cycle of capitalism (by managing aggregate demand), market
stability and growth could be anticipated
o Social Investment (in infrastructure, housing and transport policies which helped to
maintain and secure fordist accumulation (in which growth in investment, productivity,
income, demand and profit were intertwined)
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o Normalisation of the collective interests of labour and capital around a program of full
employment and universal welfare.
o The management of social problems caused by fordist growth (such as accelerated
commodification and urbanization)
• The End of the Golden Age: 1960s/1970s:
o Economic 'Crisis'
• Collapse of Keynesian compromise
• Delinking of economic growth and employment
• Restructuring of work
• End of the long boom
• Higher rates of inflation and unemployment
• Oil Crisis
• Financial Deregulation
o Political/Legitimacy Crisis
• Emergence of neo liberal rationalities
▪ Refocus on individual reliance rather than collectuve responsibilities
• Challenge of 'new' social movements
▪ Challenge to the exclusionary nature of the post war welfare state
• The end of history
▪ Triumph of liberal democracy as the final form of government
o Towards a post Fordist Regime:
• Decrease in the importance of manufacturing
▪ Particularly labour intensive manufacturing (automation and off shoring)
▪ Delie i lue ollar ork •
• Rise in the Service Industry
▪ Including hospitality and retail
▪ Financial services (insurance and business services)
• Change in the mode of organisation of core services
▪ Contracting out of non core services
• Financialisation:
▪ Financial services become the dominant economic, political and cultural
driver of national/international economies
• Intensified automation:
▪ Significant change but uncertain impact on employment and business
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