the protections have been slowly eroded over time, and have failed to adapt to the increases in technology and globalization that create for extremely concentrated wealth.
The increases in globalization (aka, few customs barriers and no cross-border capital controls) were purely a political choice. There was noting either necessary or inevitable about that.
But as automation comes it messes up that equation because now you can eliminate labor entirely and you can sell the goods overseas or for really expensive prices only to the well off. So eventually we'll have to address it, though for the time being there should be some sort of equilibrium.
The alleged "threat of automation" is being used in contemporary political discourse as a weapon against worker demands. Not content with having a reserve army of low-paid workers in other countries, especially ebcause those other countries where it was somewhat "safe to do business in" are having rising labour costs, the wealthy in the past few years have been seeding the idea that rising automation will create mass employment.
This is a lie. Its purpose is to discourage workers from demanding higher wages. It is no accident that the ones making the most noise about this are a handful of billionaires and their pet journalists and economists.
The reality over the past few years is that people keep working long hours (often much longer hours) and products are getting crapified because of corner-cutting to decrease costs. Doing real stuff, providing good services, still requires training, time, human labour and will keep requiring it. We'll produce more in those tasks that are amenable to mass production, but we also keep consuming more. Productivity in advanced economies has actually stagnated or even decreases in some - check the statistics. Services are not easy to automate: you can build some complex software to do it, and in a few years you're having to replace the whole thing or produce separately systems to add new functionality. IT projects, which supposedly should be an example of rising automation and productivity, and more often that not failures or turn out to be delivered with huge cost overruns, limited functionality and very late.
But if you want to examine why wages have stagnated over the last 3-4 decades it's due to policy changes. One major one was in the early 90s when tax laws changed to disallow companies to deduct executive salaries over a million dollars. This led to work-arounds where executives were awarded stock options and other compensation instead. Now an executive is not necessarily paid for company performance, but instead is paid based on how much the stock goes up. This is an important distinction cus the stock price is not always related to a healthy company. It's often very short sight based on recent profits, thus suppressing costs which usually means suppressing labor costs/wages, becomes a huge priority for executives. In fact it's basically incentive. If I pay you less then my profits go up which raises the stock which nets me a gigantic bonus. In essence executives must pay employees less to make more money themselves.
Then in the 80s unions started disappearing. A lot of the protections for unions were done away with. Reagan dismantled the air transit unions when they went on strike which sent a huge message to the rest of the country. Free trade agreements undermined a lot of the manufacturing unions so they had to give in tons of concessions or face companies simply relocating and the government didn't bat an eye. They let all these companies screw over the labor or flee. There ought to be protections against that.
True. The executives became the higher caste or society, where before they were seen as employees now they see themselves (and managed to have a compliant media portray the as) heroes and "leaders".
But the rise of the managerial class has been long in the making. Big corporations do not have real owners controlling them, the stock is too spread and even the big stockholders often buy and sell opportunistically. They're not in it for the long term, and the managers have free rein so long as they produce dividends (not even profits...) in the short term. The only way to make managers become what they are supposed to be, employees of the corporation there to serve a greater good instead of themselves, is to place a big owner on top. But if that big owner is an individual you'll get people with over-sized political influence. Some kind of social control , democratic accountability, would be better.
Unfortunately a system where the state took over that job eventually developed its own privileged managerial class, they even coined a word (nomenklatura) for it. So it's not as simple as placing the state as owner. Perhaps we should turn again to cooperatives, or even to selecting the board members randomly from among all the workers of the corporation for relatively short, non renewable terms? That might place there someone who might know what is going on in the corporation and rein in the management. New styles of organization should be tested. If one goal is that permanent positions of privilege should be avoided, then selecting the overseers randomly and frequently might actually work.
