[OPE] Dream of globalisation

The median expected salary for a typical Instructor - Economics in the United States is $48,223 http://swz.salary.com/salarywizard/layouthtmls/swzl_compresult_national_ED03000194.html This of course does not tell you about the overall distibution of pay rates, nor distinguish between parttimers and fulltimers. The range is circa $50,000 to $90,000 http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Economics_Teacher,_Postsecondary/Salary

I can see that academia has got more and more organised in a "neoliberal" way: a core of rich executive and managerial staff and technical specialists with permanent contracts, a stratum of middle-level employees on annual contracts, project workers and externals on shortterm contracts, and then casual employees - with a tangential salary scale in the hierarchy. This sort of thing is also mimicked in the public service, which becomes a kind of corporation serving customers. Work often just becomes a means to extract income, that is all, whatever the propaganda.

However, I am reluctant to criticize the Bureau of Labor Statistics since I think they actually still do a very good job of making useful data available in accessible, comprehensible form. In fact if I was the head of Eurostat I would get the publications officer to the Bureau of Labour Statistics to get experience in data access, and after that send her to Statistics Canada and Statistics Australia. Much of what you need from BLS you can extract on-line.

In Europe we get endless talk about flexible, transparent labour markets, but if a worker wants to inform himself about the labour market, it often turns out the data you need is not there, and you have to go through a whole tour to find it.

In the Resulate manuscript, Marx prognosticated that capitalism "overturns all the legal and institutional barriers that would prevent it from buying this or that kind of labour-power as it sees fit, or from appropriating this or that kind of labour" (Pelican, p. 1013). Just as soon as a labour law is made, a new way is found to get around it.

Jurriaan

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Received on Thu Nov 13 15:39:35 2008