Technical and economic change
and pressured democracies
n an article published in March 1994, in
Futures, Sally Lerner, a Canadian scholar linked to Waterloo University (Ontario),
gives a worrying projection with regard to the labor situation in North America, in the
21st. century. She sees it as a consequence of the restructuring process of such region's
economy, since the eighties, as an answer to the pressures of technological change and
the globalization of economic activity.
Said article's main question þits title is "The future of work in North America:
Good Jobs, Bad Jobs, Beyond Jobs"þ is if, at least during the next 30 or 60 years,
there will be safe, full-time, fairly remunerated jobs in that region or if, on the
contrary, the standard will be "growth with unemployment", sub-employment and
"contingent" employment, as it first occurred in Great Britain and was shortly
evidenced thereafter in other industrialized nations. Such question is particularly
relevant when two factors are borne in mind: on one side, the millions of jobs in the
manufacturing sector that have been permanently lost since the last decade, often
to be replaced at other locations in other latitudes with more propitious or "efficient"
labor and wage conditions; and on another side, the impossibility of replacing them
with other jobs in the services sector in view of the dual trend in such sector:
automation and computerization of "high value added" positions (being performed
by an ever smaller number of knowledge workers or symbolic analysts), and the
creation of millions of jobs with a lower technical level or with "low value added" (the
so called mac-jobs) and, accordingly, with lower labor conditions.
Structural unemployment and social polarization
A crucial aspect referred by Lerner is the possibility that in a world context
such as the current one, characterized by a high level of technological innovations,
an accelerated and powerful trend towards economic globalization, with the
consequent appearance within many national economies of structural
unemployment, there may result a polarization of societies in North America (e.g.
those of the USA and Canada) between a growing, impoverished, "redundant", and
unfit sub-class and a small and affluent technical and professional élite. A
polarization that, as qualified analysts and researchers of U.S. society such as Paul
Reich and Paul Krugman, is already being perceived as an inevitable reality in the
USA þto a point of ever making it harder to sustain that country's myth of a society
without classes or with a middle class only, as the providential future guide for its
population. Such polarization could contribute to the rupture, in a near future, of
the exemplary Canadian "national experiment". That is more so if one considers the
huge unbalances haunting that country (Canada's national debt is the equivalent
of 100% of GDP), the consequent and inevitable budget cuts and their restrictive
effects on the Canadian well being. It affects also those areas meant to alleviate
that country's unemployment (around 11%).
Structural unemployment and possible democratic government
One should not be surprised if Lerner concludes her article
exhorting the U.S. and Canadian governments to produce realistic plans to
mitigate the negative effects resulting from the high structural unemployment
levels that, under the current trends, could be evidenced in North America by
reason of the technological and economic change. This is more so because, if
nothing is done, both societies could suffer from weakened political foundations
þmeaning their democratic forms of governmentþ when resorting to chaotic
searches of solution leading, at the end, to authoritarian courses of action.
Even if this Canadian scholar's worries could seem rather exaggerated
in the light of the US and Canadian democracies' solid historic, historic, valuation,
legal and political
foundations of US and Canadian democracies, it is clear that the symptoms of
social fracture and the disenchantment, frustration and fear feelings being
experienced by North Americans, and most specially in the USA, during the coming
years could produce the enthronement of "new leaders" who, representing a "third
party" based on a populist-integrationist-neoconservative-isolationist-nativist
platform, could inexorably undermine the possibility to rule the USA or seriously
affect its democratic institutions þand perhaps that of Canada. The Perot
phenomenon in the 1992 presidential elections, the new Republicans' boom in the
November Congress and Governors' elections, the Grand Old Party's recent
penetration by a Christian coalition under the leadership of the Robertson-Reed
duo, the increased racial polarization and the anti-immigration feeling of US society;
the resounding of the ultra-conservative and dangerously chauvinist speech þin
spite of its obvious contradictionsþ of an open exponent of the "Catholic right" as
Pat Buchanan in the midst of mostly Protestant population, point towards the
gradual erosion of the tolerant, optimist and turned-to-the-future spirit of the average
US citizen.
Social costs and "contractual" effects of industrial restructuring
It is an erosion that has been mostly caused þ as accurately
suggested by Business Week (03-11-1996) þ by the decreasing trust of
US workers in their ability to prosper, after ten years of reductions, new
dimensioning , corrections and re-engineering processes in Corporate America.
They condemn them to unemployment or to salary reduction or stagnation and, in
both cases, to engross the wide population sector affected by growing, regressive
and unequal income distribution. Hence, on the United States side the common
references to the dismantlement of the "social contract" between workers and
employers that sustained that country's liberal aspiration to create a "good society",
i.e. a society where its private actors could reach their individual well being and that
of their families þor, in other words, where they could enjoy rights never to be taken
away from them such as the rights to "life, freedom and search of happiness"þ with
minimal government interference. At the same time, on the Canadian side, it is
common also to find a population used þas opposing the US peopleþ to a benign
social and economic intervention by governments being faithful to the contractual
principles of "peace, order and good government" that led to federation, but that is
ever more apprehensive of the eventual dismantlement of their undeniable social
democracy, as a consequence of the private-devolutionist course followed, since
the end of the last decade, by the federal government and many provicnical
governments þon its turn, a product of the loss of the Canadian economy's
competitiveness and of the accrued deficits in federal and provincial public sectors).
A course of which the accuracy is already being seriously questioned within its
Southern neighbor, that is to say in the indisputable cradle of the most successful
and vibrant "market democracy" ever known.
Of "creative destruction" and "creative construction"
It is then evident that the hemisphere's two most lasting, stable and
functional democracies are suffering the huge social costs of that "creative
destruction" mentioned by Joseph Schumpeter þthe Austrian economistþ as a
defining feature of capitalism. It seems, however, that their preservation and
continuous strengthening will depend, in a not so far future, on their leaders' ability
to replace þboth conceptually and factuallyþ that capitalist logic of creative capacity
to destroy with a less materialist one, centered on a creative capacity to construct.
In other words, what both democracies would require to survive and to become
deeper, is an ethically different logic allowing them to be reinvented in order to keep
satisfying their citizens' basic needs; a logic contemplating between its columns a
closed cooperation and coordinated action of business and government to
re-launch not only their human but also its environmental capital, within a frame of
present and future self-support; a logic ensuring open discussion and debate of
political ideas and initiatives with civil society's pertinent actors; and a logical
fostering a commitment "from the top", authentic, not rhetoric or ideological, in order
to return its protagonist role to civil society, preparing it to face the challenges of
post-industrialism.
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