“The
ongoing explosion of the incomes of the richest households and the erosion of middle-class
employment opportunities for most of the rest have become integrally related in
the now-normal operation of the U.S. economy. Since the beginning of the 1980s,
employment relations in U.S. industrial corporations have undergone three major
structural changes – summarized as “rationalization,” “marketization,” and
“globalization” – that have permanently eliminated middle-class jobs in the
United States. . . .
“The
fundamental problem is the obsessive focus of U.S. corporations on their stock
prices. While the old structures of stable and remunerative employment were
being undermined by rationalization, marketization, and globalization, U.S.
business corporations became afflicted with a socioeconomic disease known as
“financialization.” The prime manifestations of financialization have been, and
remain, the distribution of corporate cash to shareholders through stock
repurchases, often in addition to generous cash dividends, and, incentivizing these
distributions, the stock-based explosion of the remuneration of top corporate
executives. . . .
“The
exploding incomes of the top 0.1% and the erosion of the American middle class
are integrally related. The attainment of stable and equitable growth in the
U.S. economy in the twenty-first century will require an organizational
revolution far more profound than the managerial revolution that occurred in the
opening decades of the twentieth century. And it is the employees at the top of
the major corporations, the legatees of that managerial revolution, who now must
be brought under control. If not, inequity and instability in the U.S. economy
will only get worse.”
Read
the complete paper at -- http://www.theairnet.org/v3/backbone/uploads/2014/09/Lazonick_LaborInTheTwenty-FirstCentury_AIR-WP14.0801.pdf
