The Demise of Industrial Man

Abstract

At the beginning of the twenty-first century a return to regular full employment is little more than a pipe dream. Unemployment and non-standard forms of work, including part-time, temporary and contract employment are as much a part of the economic landscape as the rust-belt, silicon valley and the Dow Jones Index. Nevertheless, some commentators in the United States argued that at the beginning of our new century, a combination of fiscal probity, technological innovation and global free markets, have tamed the boom—bust nature of capitalism. Consequently, there was the prospect of permanent growth and a return to full employment. Robert Eisner neatly captured the mood: ‘the current technological, informational, and communications revolution is spawning all kinds of economies so that we can produce more with less. Only God knows how fast our economy can actually grow, or how low unemployment can get, if we have the purchasing power for all that we can produce’.¹ In Britain, Gordan Brown, as New Labour’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, resolved that `if those who can work take the responsibility to work, if employers take the responsibility to train and to invest, and if all of us show the same responsibility in pay’, then Britain can, he argued, deliver ‘a goal now within our reach for the twenty-first century — full employment for our country’.² A commitment to full employment is politically seductive because it is seen to be a way of resolving the distributional question of ‘who gets what’, as we will show in the following chapter. But these echoes of the Golden era clearly underestimate the scale of economic and social change.

Even outside of work, industrial society is a wage labor society through and through in the plan of its life, in its joys and sorrows, in its concept of achievement, in its justification of inequality, in its social welfare laws, in its balance of power and in its politics and culture. If it is facing a systematic transformation of wage labour then it is facing a social transformation.

Ulrich Beck

Welfare has essentially ended for economic failures in America.

Lester Thurow