The Mobility Of Workers Under Advanced Capitalism

Using Dominicans in New York City as a case study, Ramona Hern?ndez challenges the old belief that workers necessarily migrate from one region to another because of supply and demand or because of a de facto government policy to make people leave or stay. As a result, she shows that the traditional correlation between migration and economic progress does not always hold true.

Originally published in 1984. At that time many formerly prosperous regions were becoming impoverished and many former "core" areas were being demoted to peripheral status. This book considers this crisis, its nature and manifestations and its implications. It looks in particular at how the regional crisis affects the socialist analysis of capitalism and it analyses how the crisis affects the political outlook and political actions of the working class in afflicted regions. The theories and analysis put forward apply throughout the world in both advanced and less developed countries.

What explains the international mobility of workers from developing to advanced societies? Why do workers move from one region to another? Theoretically, the supply of workers in a given region and the demand for them in another account for the international mobility of laborers. Job seekers from less developed regions migrate to more advanced countries where technological and productive transformations have produced a shortage of laborers. Using the Dominican labor force in New York as a case study, Ramona Hernández challenges this presumption of a straightforward relationship between supply and demand in the job markets of the receiving society. She contends that the traditional correlation between migration and economic progress does not always hold true. Once transplanted in New York City, Hernández shows, Dominicans have faced economic hardship as the result of high levels of unemployment and underemployment and the reality of a changing labor market that increasingly requires workers with skills and training they do not have. Rather than responding to a demand in the labor market, emigration from the Dominican Republic was the result of a de facto government policy encouraging poor and jobless people to leave—a policy in which the United States was an accomplice because the policy suited its economic and political interests in the region.

It is a widespread view that democracy and the advanced nation-state are in crisis, weakened by globalization and undermined by global capitalism, in turn explaining rising inequality and mounting populism. This book, written by two of the world's leading political economists, argues this view is wrong: advanced democracies are resilient, and their enduring historical relationship with capitalism has been mutually beneficial. For all the chaos and upheaval over the past century--major wars, economic crises, massive social change, and technological revolutions--Torben Iversen and David Soskice show how democratic states continuously reinvent their economies through massive public investment in research and education, by imposing competitive product markets and cooperation in the workplace, and by securing macroeconomic discipline as the preconditions for innovation and the promotion of the advanced sectors of the economy. Critically, this investment has generated vast numbers of well-paying jobs for the middle classes and their children, focusing the aims of aspirational families, and in turn providing electoral support for parties. Gains at the top have also been shared with the middle (though not the bottom) through a large welfare state. Contrary to the prevailing wisdom on globalization, advanced capitalism is neither footloose nor unconstrained: it thrives under democracy precisely because it cannot subvert it. Populism, inequality, and poverty are indeed great scourges of our time, but these are failures of democracy and must be solved by democracy.

The contemporary debate on economic policy is dominated by the issue of 'which model of capitalism works best'.

In this stimulating and highly original work, Kevin Doogan looks at contemporary social transformation through the lens of the labour market. Major themes of the day — globalization, technological change and the new economy, the pension and demographic timebombs, flexibility and traditional employment — are all subject to critical scrutiny. We are often told that a new global economy has emerged which has transformed our lives. It is argued that the pace of technological change, the mobility of multinational capital and the privatization of the welfare state have combined to create a more precarious world. Companies are outsourcing, jobs are migrating to China and India, and a job for life is said to be a thing of the past. The so-called ‘new capitalism’ is said to be the result of these profound changes. Kevin Doogan takes issue with these widely-accepted ideas and subjects the transformation of work to detailed examination through a comprehensive analysis of developments in Europe and North America. He argues that precariousness is not a natural consequence of this fast-changing world; rather, current insecurities are manufactured, emanating from neoliberal policy and the greater exposure of the economy to market forces. New Capitalism? The Transformation of Work is sure to stimulate academic debate. Kevin Doogan's account will appeal not just to scholars, but also to upper-level students across the social sciences, including the sociology of work, industrial relations, globalization, economics, social policy and business studies.

Work Under Capitalism synthesizes recent institutionalist and Marxist ideas about the organization of production, situating production within a social context. Starting with the transaction rather than the individual, it builds upon a coherent theory and applies it to a wide range of experience, from household labour to transformations of health c

Bob Milward presents an alternative view of globalization and argues that indeed there has been a continuum in capitalist development, but that this has been forged by historical processes and the dynamism of the competitive forces of capitalism. Milward identifies the emergence of monopoly capitalism as an important shaping factor, and in so doing sheds new light on issues of underdevelopment, multi-national imperialism and crises in advanced capitalist economies.