Employment has continued to expand, and, as it has, with slowing productivity growth, so it has used up the relative surplus population created by the technological revolution of the 1970's/80's. The graph of UK labour supply to jobs illustrates that point, with the number of jobs now exceeding the number of workers to fill them.
That means, irrespective of what trades unions might do, with their bureaucratic, tailist leadership, and irrespective of workers taking industrial action for higher wages, the market itself drives wages higher, as a result of this imbalance of labour supply to demand. Its why employers, in particular industries, have been led to raise wages significantly to attract workers; its why the average pay rise for a worker moving jobs is 14%. It is the state, as employer, that is using its monopoly power to hold down public sector wages, to act as a drag on wages in general. The result is the massive deficit of workers in public sector jobs, notably in the NHS.
This increase in employment, and of wages, drives demand for wage goods, and, if larger companies do not meet it, because their executives have become more concerned to use profits to buy back shares, so as to inflate share prices, then other, smaller, less efficient firms fill the gap, which is one reason that productivity levels have been abysmal. But, that, ultimately heightens the contradiction, because the lower productivity means even more labour employed to produce the required increase in output, a contradiction that was only continued as long as those workers were not strong enough to demand higher wages, and could be more brutally exploited by conditions of precarity etc., like those of the 19th century sweat shops, described by Marx in Capital, and Engels in The Condition of The Working Class.
In addition, if large firms in western economies do not meet this rising demand for wage goods, then large, and growing firms in newly industrialising economies will, which is one reason those economies have closed the gap on the developed economies. It is also the material condition behind the increased support for those 19th century, and early 1900's ideas of protectionism returning, as, once again, the existing hegemon looks to hold on to its global monopoly power, which, in turn, leads to a slow down of global trade, and the global economy, once more pushing the increased liquidity out of the real economy, and into the fictitious economy, to inflate asset prices. As Marx put it, in The Poverty of Philosophy,
“In practical life we find not only competition, monopoly and the antagonism between them, but also the synthesis of the two, which is not a formula, but a movement. Monopoly produces competition, competition produces monopoly. Monopolists are made from competition; competitors become monopolists. If the monopolists restrict their mutual competition by means of partial associations, competition increases among the workers; and the more the mass of the proletarians grows as against the monopolists of one nation, the more desperate competition becomes between the monopolists of different nations. The synthesis is of such a character that monopoly can only maintain itself by continually entering into the struggle of competition.”
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