Search

Many Americans believe free trade destroyed the U.S. industrial base, and blame foreign workers for taking their jobs. During World War II, Keynes had similar misgivings about the effect of postwar free trade on Britain’s economy. Yet for Keynes, economic forces are never inevitable, and capital rather than labor was the cause of trouble. His 1941 proposal for an International Clearing Union suggested capital controls, forced creditor adjustment, and an international fiat reserve as remedies for deindustrialization. This framework channeled financing toward production rather than speculation, leading to a rising standard of living for workers. A counterfactual with balance of payments data for the United States and China since 1982 suggests his ICU would have prevented U.S. deindustrialization, while yet permitting export-led growth in China. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the experiences of two rural communities that, since the advent of the North American Free Trade Agreement, lost major employers. Rural deindustrialization has struck the Midwest particularly hard. While the disappearance of hundreds or thousands of jobs is devastating, some small towns have adapted faster than others. Farmington, Missouri has, for now, weathered the storm far better than another small town, Galesburg, Illinois. This article seeks to do something other than retell a familiar, if generally accurate, story about the suffering caused by the current wave of globalization, facilitated by trade deals. Rather, it will explore the possibility that corporate-driven globalization is not an unmitigated disaster for rural America and rural Americans. Rather, some towns struggle but persevere, some suffer tremendously, while still others create jobs, although all jobs seem ever more insecure in the increasingly global economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While union density in the public sector has increased in recent decades, private sector union density in the U.S. has declined steadily since the mid-1950s. Scholars have evoked a variety of explanations to account for the decline in union membership, but substantially less attention has been devoted to understanding the contribution of the union organizing process as governed by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). In this paper, we focus on two aspects of this process: union organizing effort (the effort to establish union representation elections to organize non-unionized workers) and union organizing success (success in winning union representation elections). Using annual time series data for the U.S. from 1948 to 2004, we show that there has been a long-term decline in both union organizing effort and union organizing success, which likely contributes to declining union density. We focus on three explanations for these changes: the political-legal environment for unions, deindustrialization and globalization, and employer opposition to unionization efforts. We find that each of these factors contributes to organizing effort and success and conclude with a discussion of the implications of this research for future mobilization efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic insecurity is commonly held to be the key psychological mechanism underpinning the relationship between rapid economic change and the size of welfare states, Transformations like deindustrialization and globalization are held to create winners and losers, and the latter demand greater governmental protection against the forces undermining their economic insecurity. This individual-level relationship has been assumed rather than specified and tested. Economic insecurity can take more than one form, Moreover, its different forms vary not only in their socioeconomic roots, but also in their relationship to support for enhanced social protection. A comparison of the United States and Australia highlights the variability of economic insecurity's impact of welfare preferences and the need to unpack the complexity of their relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]