With numerous high-profile strikes and organizing drives over the past year, workers are fighting to rebalance the economy and ensure that when corporations and zillionaire CEOs are successful, they’re successful, too. This is self-evidently a good thing for workers, and for the whole economy: when more people have more money, that means more customers for more businesses, which means more jobs, and the cycle repeats.
So, of course, the high priest of neoliberalism Larry Summers has weighed in to express concern that the wave of “highly publicized labor conflicts” resulting in large raises might “give a lot of workers in a lot of places some pretty big ideas,” which could “complicate the issues around inflation.” In other words: workers making more money is not something to celebrate, but rather something to anguish over. Meanwhile, CEOs making more money is never bad news, and billions in stock buybacks are rarely even worth mentioning. It’s all pretty gross, but it isn’t even quite right to call it neoliberal thinking, because it’s not thinking at all. It’s just the coded expression of an unhinged need to put workers in their place. But somehow, it gets treated as economic analysis.
Make it make sense. |
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is how much New York Times columnist David Brooks said he spent at the Newark Airport on a meal which supposedly consisted of a simple burger and fries. While he intended it to be a relatable lament about rising prices, internet sleuths quickly discovered that 80% of his bill was spent on alcohol, and the restaurant in question roasted him for his absurd claim.
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is how long Julie Su can continue to serve as Acting Secretary of Labor, according to a legal analysis by the Government Accountability Office. Her nomination has been held up in the Senate for months over concerns by some Senators that she might do too good a job of enforcing basic labor protections. |
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have newly joined the UAW’s “Stand Up Strike” as it expands to 38 GM and Stellantis locations responsible for distributing replacement parts to dealer service departments. The union reported significant progress in negotiations with Ford, so no additional Ford plants are on strike. |
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Over the past few years, surveys of consumer sentiment have indicated a remarkably downbeat economic mood — one dramatically more pessimistic than economic data would indicate. It seems COVID was the breaking point: as the chart below shows, consumer sentiment and underlying economic data had been closely tied for many years until the pandemic took hold. And while the immediate large-scale impacts of the pandemic have receded, the sentiment data has yet to realign with the data on actual economic activity. Underscoring the extent of the break, The Economist reports that “if the pre-2020 associations still held, today’s score would be 98, some 30 points above the actual value.”
It’s unclear what this all means going forward. It could be that we’re in a bit of a collective depressive episode, and so perhaps our feelings about the economy won't predict our actual economic behavior until we snap out of it. Or perhaps the sentiment figures never had any meaning of their own. In other words: maybe consumer sentiment had worked as an economic indicator in the past because we had tended to derive our feelings from our experience of the data... but it's different now because in the post-COVID world, we all just have big feels.
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One of the key moments that marked the shift to neoliberal dominance was Ronald Reagan’s decision in 1981 to fire striking air traffic controllers. The aggressive move by the President changed the norms around acceptable behavior towards workers — if the US Government could retaliate against strikers, private employers had a green light to do almost anything.
In a perfect inversion of that turning point in US economic history, President Biden is set to join the UAW picket lines today, becoming the first US President to join a picket line while in office and thus making perhaps the strongest show of strike solidarity by a US president in history. President Obama saved the auto industry with a bailout during the Great Recession, and President Biden could very well be key to remaking the future of the industry by making sure these companies invest in America and in their workers. It’s heartening to see the president make a big moment even bigger.
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