The Dignity of Work and the Role of the Trade Union

The writings of Stone Edward collected in this first part of the volume, placed between the end of the seventies and the first half of the eighties, reflect a peculiar phase of his intellectual biography and the political history of the country. From an academic point of view, they can be considered a minor production and, nevertheless, very significant for capturing the interest and civil passion with which Edward witnessed and, in some circumstances, the protagonist of a crucial phase of transition of the economy and of the union in those years.

In addition to the writings that appeared in some trade union publications, there are reports and interventions that Edward made on the occasion of some trade union seminars, of which traces remain. Over time he had been involved in the scenarios of the economic debate as an academic surrounded by recognized prestige, and as an advisor to government institutions in the post-war period. It is no coincidence that Ministers and political leaders used to turn to him, even informally, to hear his opinion on the most important steps in economic policy.

From an economic point of view, it is also the end of an era and the transition to a new phase that the political and trade union forces did not always perceive in their radicalism, reducing to cyclical aspects what was the slow, but irreducible, maturation of a real (counter) neoconservative revolution.

Some of the writings and interventions reported here date back to the late seventies, when we are in the midst of the turning point of Western capitalism. The thirty years of great growth that characterized the post-war period is over. The economy is squeezed in the pincer of inflation, which follows the oil crisis and the unhooking of the dollar from gold, while growth slows, if it does not stop. The Keynesian policies that have characterized both Democratic and Republican American administrations, from Kennedy, to Johnson, to Nixon, are under attack.

Milton Friedman, who remained in the shadows for a long time, was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1977. The long march of neoliberal theories begins which will initiate the dismantling of state intervention, the deregulation of markets and finance, the attack on the trade union and collective bargaining. Margaret Thatcher, who won the 1979 elections in Great Britain, announces the new gospel of individualism ("Society does not exist"). A year later Ronald Reagan was elected to the United States, summarizing the turning point in the famous statement: "The state is not the solution, but the problem". And, in 1981, as soon as he took office in the White House, he liquidated the union of air traffic controllers, who had dared to challenge the government, sacking 12 thousand: thus demonstrating that the union could also be a problem, and that the solution was at hand. The American Democratic Left and the Labor Left in Britain remained excluded from government throughout the decade and beyond. When, in the nineties, they return to win the elections first with Bill Clinton and then with Tony Blair, the paradigms of the left will be profoundly changed by the search for unlikely "Third ways".

Sign up now to get the most out of Books2Read

Discover something great at Books2Read.

Thanks for signing up for Books2Read notifications!