http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/1297, by Bob Brenner, Solidarity
excerpt:
Brutal Corporate Offensive
But if consumers did their part, the same cannot be said for private business, despite the record economic stimulus. Greenspan and the Fed had blown up the housing bubble to give the corporations time to work off their excess capital and resume investing.
But instead, focusing on restoring their profit rates, corporations unleashed a brutal offensive against workers. They raised productivity growth, not so much by increasing investment in advanced plant and equipment as by radically cutting back on jobs and compelling the employees who remained to take up the slack. Holding down wages as they squeezed more output per person, they appropriated to themselves in the form of profits an historically unprecedented share of the increase that took place in non-financial GDP.Non-financial corporations, during this expansion, have raised their profit rates significantly, but still not back to the already reduced levels of the 1990s. Moreover, in view of the degree to which the ascent of the profit rate was achieved simply by way of raising the rate of exploitation — making workers work more and paying them less per hour — there has been reason to doubt how long it could continue. But above all, in improving profitability by holding down job creation, investment and wages, U.S. businesses have held down the growth of aggregate demand and thereby undermined their own incentive to expand."