Employers Have Upperhand (is that new?)
Columnist Robert Samuelson, no friend of organized labor, provides a sobering assessment of where we are on this labor day. 

He argues today we are observing another epoch defining change of regime.

In his view we once lived in a wild west regime before the Great Depression.  This was when all the sound-bites about the power of an unregulated free market were enshrined in policies that nearly destroyed both the American dream and the free market system.

Then he claims we moved to what he calls the ‘regulated and administered regime,’ which he notes as starting after WWII to avoid reminding us that it started in response to the Great Depression in the 1930s…before WWII even started.

Today, he sees us in a new regime with no name.  It would seem to be the responsibility of an author arguing that there we ought to use his three consecutive regimes framework to think about our situation…to actually name the current era. 

Instead he calls it simply a ‘confusing mix of old and new” and describes is a return to the wild west, where workers will be described as ‘free agents’ to communicate that the regime (that is, the rules of the game) have eroded worker power while sounding like it is a good thing for the workers themselves.

His focus is on how long workers stay with the same company.  In wild west 1.0 ‘less than a third of manufacturing workers in 1913 had been at their current jobs for more than five years,’ while in 1973 half had been.  Here is what he expects the future to look like.

‘Workers can’t be too picky, because their power has eroded.  [quoting another economist] The new compact isn’t about being nice.  It’s based on an understanding that a company is its talent, that low performers will be cut, and that the way to attract talent is to offer appealing opportunities.

Today less than 7% of the private workforce is unionized, down from 30% in 1945 (and even down from 10% in the wild west of 1929).  The share of social profit that goes to labor continues to decline, despite rising worker productivity.  According to Samuelson, ‘the private welfare state’ created after WWII to ‘protect millions from job and income loss’ began to ‘shred’ in 1981 and is nearly gone today.  A sobering and sad note to strike on Labor Day 2013.