LABRST 2M03 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Glass Ceiling, Sun Belt, Deindustrialization

• School: McMaster University
• Department: Labour Studies
• Course: LABRST 2M03
• Professor: Samuel Goldstein

Document Summary

The late 1960s to the early 1980s saw important shifts in the political economy of labour. 1) the global mobility of capital and its financialization (facilitated by new transportation and communications technologies. 2) a breakdown in the postwar consensus with labour, including a renewed emphasis on profitability and the embrace of neoliberal economic policies. 3) shifts in the economic structure, leading to deindustrialization in the declining northeastern rush-belt and emerging service and it industries in the sun-belt. 4) shift to a flexible regime of accumulation based on just-in-time production methods and precarious employment relations (increasing part-time, fixed-term, contractual, and outsourced work) 5) increasing feminization of the labour market, meaning both that a) women were increasingly represented in the workforce, but also that (b) the nature of work increasingly came to resemble that found in traditionally female sectors (i. e. more precarious) Collectively these shifts weakened the structural power of organized labour, leaving it increasingly on the defensive by the early 1980s.