It is well known that earnings inequality has been rising in the US and many other countries over the last forty years. What is less well known, is that the great rise in contemporary earnings inequalities is propelled to a large extent by between-workplace wage polarization, whereby some organizations accumulate large resource bases while others fight over the crumbs.
These processes have been described as being propelled by “macro” forces: the financialization of production encouraging externalization, physical and social technologies of surveillance that enable between firm control of production, skill-biased technological change, and market fundamentalism in public policy that permit unfettered firm practices.
However, macro trends are always products of a set of meso-level organizational decisions. It was not disembodied “technology” or “markets” that generated the growth in inequality, but social movements promoting the interests of shareholders over other stakeholders, neoliberal policy orientations in the state, and union-busting consultants that drove these shifts.
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