ABSTRACT
Abstruse economic subjects may seem to be unrelated to workplace and political struggles, yet they profoundly affect union growth and strength. Indeed, labor's current decline can be traced largely to macroeconomic policies and to the private monopoly of investment decisions. Deregulation of the private sector has paralleled the privatization of the public sector in that it has substituted private control for public responsibility and often injected low-wage, nonunion competitors into unionized, high-wage industries. For labor, privatizing often leads to layoffs, wage cuts, and shifts from unionized to less unionized sectors of an industry. In the 1980s, British Tories led the way in selling off public industry to private firms and in so doing reduced the strength of the Labour Party opposition and its union supporters. A proper distribution of wealth, one that is socially equitable and economically stabilizing, is a political matter and requires support from powerful advocates of such a policy.
