People are insecure. Young people worry
about getting a decent job, finding a secure home and having to pay off
the vast debts run up in the decade of uber-liberal economic policies of
European governments to 2007.
Elderly people worry about their security in old age, access to decent health care, about their children getting jobs or being forced to emigrate.
Read more: How Globalisation And Technology Drive Insecurity
Elderly people worry about their security in old age, access to decent health care, about their children getting jobs or being forced to emigrate.
A recent Eurofound study concluded that
14% of jobs in Europe are high-paid good jobs; 37% are well-balanced
good jobs; 29% are poorly balanced jobs; and 20% are poor quality jobs.
Thus almost half of all those at work are not in good jobs.
Yet we have never had such high incomes
or wealth. This is in spite of the six years of the Great Recession.
Total national income is substantially higher than what it was a
generation ago. Yet only a generation ago too, jobs and pensions were
more secure, homes were easier to find and health care was not such a
big worry.
What has led to today’s insecurity? The
big drivers of insecurity are globalisation and technology. They have
shifted low skilled jobs and now even middle income jobs offshore,
created intense competition, change and uncertainty. They give great
power to large corporations, while undermining the power of states and
of organised labour. Crucially, they have also changed the nature of
politics.
Globalisation and technology have been
key drivers in the three-decade-long (a generation) decline in the share
of national income of workers and the self-employed and its
corresponding shift to wealthy people and corporations A few countries
like Ireland witnessed the boom of catching up with the rest of Europe
for 20 years, when overall earnings rose so the seismic shift in income
was not so evident, but thanks to the Great Recession, it now is.
Both globalisation and technology have
reduced labour’s bargaining power through offshoring, through sectoral
shifts in employment from manufacturing to services, from large units to
smaller ones and to autonomous, self-employed working. It has
facilitated the massive decline in corporate governance – in the way
firms are run and what their objectives are. It boosted the pay of the
elite to extraordinary levels that have nothing to do with performance.
Both have also facilitated financialisation – where finance rules the
real economy.
Globalisation has also reduced financial
disclosure, blurring our knowledge of the real ownership and control of
business. It has led to the privatisation of swathes of public
services, and these privatised public services are increasingly run by
big, non-competing oligopolies. It has facilitated increased tax evasion
and tax avoidance on unprecedented scales by the wealthy and by large
companies. The Luxleaks and HSBC exposures are only the tip of this
iceberg of tax cheating on an industrial scale in some countries.
Read more: How Globalisation And Technology Drive Insecurity
