On 4 August 2010 05:18, michael perelman <michael@ecst.csuchico.edu> wrote:
> http://www.ustream.tv/channel/unsettling-economics
>
>
On your ideas about raising the minimum wage, I think the Swedish
'Rehn-Meidner model' already embodied a more progressive take on this. In
this strategy, national trade-unions would push for a uniform 'solidarity
wage' policy across all firms in one sector. Thus low-productivity firms
would obtain lower profit shares. High-productivity firms, by contrast,
would earn 'excess profits'. This mechanism would increase the rate of
technical change in industry while reducing wage differentials. This
strategy was successful on its own grounds but ultimately hit the limits
predicted by Marx and Kalecki.
Rudolf Meidner eventually saw the limits of the strategy as being rooted in
the private ownership of capital and proposed that the so-called 'excess
profits' that the high-productivity firms earned due to the restraint of
wage policy should be transfered to collective funds controlled by the
unions. The proposal was adopted by the national trade-unions, but
undermined by the Right and the Social-democratic Party in power and finally
vanished in the international context of neoliberalism.
//Dave Z
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Received on Wed Aug 4 05:17:42 2010
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