The Next Proletariat? - a capitalist view of the declining power of labor..
Since the peak of the Industrial Revolution, the nature of work in western capitalist economies has been changing. The massive factory manufacturing model of employment is giving way to more specialized skill and knowledge based employment, as technology replaces labor on the factory floor, factory jobs move to less wealthy countries, and computers make human organizational activity more productive. These technological changes are embodied in the service industries, which have been growing across the Europe and North America. While this shift is not complete, and is not universal, it is wide enough to have had a significant impact on the political and institutional landscape in the US and Europe. The social and labor market policies of European countries like France, Germany, and Austria, were shaped primarily as a reaction to the challenges of an industrial-manufacturing labor force. Similarly, labor unions are most effective in an industry structure similar to manufacturing. For this reason, the shift to service industries in the western world has already begun to undermine the labor union movement, as well as the continental European economic model. Future reforms will likely move governments closer toward a model which gives workers more flexibility to compete on their own merits. This is the case not because it will allow them to compete globally (though it may), but because their citizens will find the antagonistic rhetoric of Marx and his modern allies to be foreign and unappealing.
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