Class, Gender and the Politics of Neoliberal Globalization in the USA

Abstract

The sharp recession of 1979, which Paul Volcker and the Federal Reserve Board inflicted upon working Americans in order to ‘squeeze inflation out of the economy ’and protect the interests of the investor class, may, in retrospect, be seen as the first indication that volcanic processes were about to rearrange the landscape of the US political economy and its relations with the world economy (Greider 1987, 75‘123; Wachtel 1990, 132‘6). The subterranean transformations that, since the mid-1960s, had been restructuring the postwar national and international historic bloc — the alliances of classes, ideas and institutions governing the US-led world economy — erupted in 1979. Since 1979, they have destabilized the conditions of life for many Americans. Both blue-collar and white-collar workers have been rocked by waves of corporate restructuring, mass layoffs and plant closures, aggressive concessionary bargaining and union-busting, and increasing use of temporary and contingent forms of work, all set against a backdrop of a mythical (or at least ‘mythic#x2019;) process of ‘globalization ’that was just real enough to enable employers to make widespread use of the threat to relocate jobs if workers failed to be sufficiently responsive to the putative imperatives of global competition.