Unhinged: Industrial relations liberalization and capitalist instability

Lucio Baccaro and Chris Howell

No 17/19, MPIfG Discussion Paper from Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies

Abstract: This paper makes two interrelated arguments. First, based on case studies of Sweden and Germany, it argues for a generalized liberalization trend in industrial relations, affecting not just "liberal" but also "coordinated" forms of capitalism. In coordinated economies, liberalization has not taken place primarily through outright deregulation, but has involved alternative mechanisms that increase employer discretion without fundamentally altering the form of existing institutions. Second, the paper links the liberalization of industrial relations to "secular stagnation" - i.e., to the growing difficulty that all advanced economies have in generating adequate levels of aggregate demand. It argues that strong unions and centralized collective bargaining were cornerstones of the wage-led Fordist model, and that the liberalization of industrial relations has undermined a crucial institutional channel for transmitting productivity increases into real wages and aggregate demand. Post-Fordist growth models are based on alternative drivers of growth, but they are all fundamentally unstable.

Keywords: capitalism; liberalization; industrial relations; secular stagnation; Europe; Kapitalismus; Liberalisierung; industrielle Beziehungen; säkulare Stagnation; Europa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hme and nep-pke
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/172298/1/1007209828.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:mpifgd:1719

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPIfG Discussion Paper from Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().