Employmentweb_low

an historical perspective on labour MarKets
time employment among men. Meanwhile, working women mostly held
“feminised” job positions which were marginalised from this negotiation
process.
Public spending not only improved the skills of the labour force
through educational policies but also provided the out-of-work population
(the unemployed and pensioners) with benefits and some purchasing
power, which stimulated consumption and production, thus conferring
political legitimacy to the Mid-Century Compromise. The situation of
unemployed women and female pensioners was quite different than that
of men, since social provisions and even access to rights of citizenship
were based on the “male breadwinner” model, which situates men as the
source of social provisions for their spouses.
The family unit also played a critical role in production relations during
this period. The relationship between employment and social protection
reinforced a family model centred on the male breadwinner. In other
words, while it was certainly not the first time in history, this period saw a
normalisation of the "model in which the husband is the sole agent
operating within the market sector, deploying his labour in order to secure
the funds necessary to support a dependent wife and children. In
exchange, the wife assumes responsibility for the unpaid labour required
for the everyday reproduction of her husband’s work, such as cooking,
cleaning, and laundering" (Janssens, 1997). This is important because in
many respects, the labour market was dominated by workers both
demanding and receiving a wage that was sufficient to support the entire
family. As the overlapping interests of organised labour and the controllers
of capital began to diverge, labour market wage levels began to fall.
By 1973, even before the Arab-Israeli War and the Organization of the
Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) oil embargo, the Bretton Woods system
that had regulated international economic relations had dissolved and there
were many signs of a serious crisis of capital accumulation (Harvey, 2006). The
oil crises of 1973-74 and 1978-79 sparked a period of economic adjustment that
realigned dominant economic and political interests, challenging the trends of
steady economic growth and abundant stable employment. The decline in real
growth rates of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and the increase in public
deficit and inflation, together with a slowdown in productivity and profits and an
increase in unemployment, gave way to a period of economic uncertainty that
transformed the socio-economic order which had prevailed since the Mid-
Century Compromise. During the 1980s a strong neo-liberal ideological
offensive challenged the views and legitimacy upon which welfare states had
previously developed and labour markets were subjected to regulatory reforms.
These social changes produced the so-called "Washington Consensus" of the
mid 1990s (Fine, 2001; Harvey, 2006) (see Section 9.2. Macro policies and health:
a historical perspective).
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