Is increasing workers' bargaining power a way of raising real wages?

There is no doubt that the last decade has been a terrible period for average real wages in the UK, with levels still below where they were before the Global Financial Crisis. It is very tempting to related this to the weak baragining power of workers. After all, we were being told before Brexit that the economy was strong, so if the benefits were not going to wages they must have been going somewhere else. Some people go further and say that one of the reasons that the bargaining power of UK workers is weak is because of high levels of immigration, and that therefore immigration must be responsible for lower real wages.

What people often forget is that real wages depend as much on prices as nominal wages. If nominal wages in the economy as a whole rise, firms can just pass additional costs on by raising their prices, leaving real wages unchanged. Equally if nominal wages are depressed because of weak bargaining power or immigration, firms are able to cut prices to become more competitive, rather than keep prices unchanged and raise their profits.

To see what firms have done on average we can look at the chart below, which shows the percentage shares of profits and wages in national income over the last thirty years. (They do not sum to 100 because of factors like self employment income and sales taxes.) The share of wages and profits in national income have been remarkably stable over the last two decades. It is simply not the case that bosses have been expropriating the gains from growth over the last decade.

So what does explain why real wages are still lower than before the Global Financial Crisis (GC), when the size of the economy a whole surpassed its pre-GFC level in 2013?

The first explanation is that GDP is not the right measure to use if you want to know about standards of living, because it can increase just because there are more people producing things in the economy. A much better measure is GDP per capita (GDP divided by the total population), and that only surpassed pre-GFC peaks at the end of 2015. It is one of the great ironies of UK politics (and a big media failure) that the growth the Conservatives like to boast about is in good part due to immigration they want to stop.

Yet GDP per capita is still higher than it was pre-GFC and real wages are not. The main reason for that is the exchange rate. We have had two very large depreciations since the GFC: one that happened as the crisis was unfolding and one as a result of the Brexit vote. This raises the price of imported consumer goods, which reduces real wages relative to GDP per capita. Another way of making the same point is that although each worker is producing a bit more stuff than pre-GFC, that stuff buys less overseas goods than it used to, which means workers are worse off.

The first depreciation probably reflected in part our dependence on a financial sector that was hit by the GFC, but the Brexit depreciation was a completely self-inflicted wound. But that aside, the overall message is that the main reasons for lower UK real wages are stagnant productivity and a decline in sterling.

Does this mean that weak bargaining power has nothing to do with weak UK wages? There are two potential reasons why there could still be some connection. First, there is some evidence that individual firms that have some monopoly power now share less of their surplus profits with workers than they used to, and that might well reflect weaker bargaining power. Perhaps the UK aggregate profit share might have fallen over the last decade if it hadn’t been for these firms passing on less of their surplus to workers.

Second, it might be the case that one reason why productivity is so poor is that nominal wages have remained low. If nominal wages rose because workers had more bargaining power, that might induce some firms to investment in labour saving machinery. This is an argument I examine in a new article in a special edition of Political Quarterly on post-Brext policy.

We have one clear recent piece of evidence on what happens if you raise nominal wages, and that is when minimum wages are increased. If George Osborne’s hike in minimum wages raised labour saving investment and productivity then no one has noticed. More seriously, the near consensus of the empirical literature on minimum wages is that increases generally do not reduce employment, and that appears inconsistent with those increases promoting labour saving investment. Now an increase in the minimum wages is not exactly the same as an increase in the bargaining power of workers, so this piece of evidence is not definitive, but as yet we have no strong evidence that greater bargaining power would spur innovation.

All this suggests that the declining bargaining power of workers is at best only a minor factor behind the decline in average real wages. To increase UK real wages we need to improve productivity, and that means not hitting investment on the head with first austerity and then Brexit. Evidence suggests that the best way to increase productivity is by raising demand so firms need to invest to meet that demand. Raining public investment would be the best way to stimulate aggregate demand.

But that does not mean that we should not increase the bargaining power of workers. There seems little doubt that working conditions in some occupations are pretty bad, and a strong union presence would be an effective way of improving the working conditions of workers. But I also think a strong union presence in a worksplace can have a positive influence on the distribution of real wages.

The average wage measure in the national statistics include some some very high wages at the top of the income distribution. Over the last thirty years the typical or median real wage has fallen by much more than the average, and that is because of rising inequality, a good part of which is due to high pay rises for the top few percent of earners. While some of that is just down to the rise of the financial sector, some is also within a firm. Andy Haldane at the Bank of England has also noted (page 8) that since the 1990s the wage share of older workers has risen, but the wage share of younger workers (below 35) has fallen. Furthermore, as Martin Sandbu points out, it is often inequality in the wage distribution that allows firms to continue to employ workers on low wages to do things a machine could do. Some of this growing inequality may have been a consequence of weaker trade unions.

There are therefore plenty of good reasons to want to increase the bargaining power of UK workers. Just don't expect that to have much impact on the living standards of workers. To raise real wages we need higher UK productivity, and that will only come from stronger private and public sector investment.

Bad business

This post mainly uses examples from the UK, but I suspect much the same story could be told in many countries. The reaction to Obama's criticism of Wall Street was extraordinary, until perhaps you realise that in the US political support is sometimes a commodity that corporations and the wealthy can buy. I return to the US at the end of this post.

I am sure the employment regime that existed at 'Sports Direct' would horrify anyone. A system of discipline that penalised taking time off sick such that ambulances responding to emergency calls were regular visitors to the factory. Many of the staff were not paid the minimum wage. This is what can happen when the majority of workers are not represented by a union, and local jobs are scarce, or other employers are not much better. We know about it because of the work of investigative journalists, but there are few of them left so how many other cases do we not know about?

A long time ago the Conservative party represented business, and the Labour party represented employees through their links to trade unions. In the 1980s the power of the trade unions was significantly reduced, and Labour leaders even thought they could gain votes by attacking some union actions. Since then, Labour have avoided ever siding with workers in industrial disputes. This continues under the current leadership: Labour did not even endorse the junior doctors strike. As a result, we can ask who represents employees against exploitation by employers within the workplace, and who represents society against rent seeking by employers at the national level?

The Conservative party was and still is the party of business. As Aeron Davis notes, even in 1997 only 7% of the business community voted Labour and 69% voted Conservative, despite all of Blair's efforts to show Labour was business friendly. In the last election business leaders did all they could to support the Conservatives, both financially and with explicit support. When this tight link between a political party and business is combined with an ideological belief among many in the party that regulations such as those that support employees are 'red tape' that needs to be cast aside, we get a mix which is potentially dangerous for employees and society.

We have seen many examples of bad business behaviour since the 2015 election, such as the emission test scandals. In some cases governments, being ‘business friendly’, actively helped with that deceit. Other examples are here, or here, or here, or here, or here(FT)/here/here/here/here, and that is not even counting the financial sector. It is estimated that over 200,000 employees are paid less than the minimum wage they are entitled to (HT Jo Maugham).

The links between the party and business, and an instinctive dislike of regulations on business, does not of course necessarily mean a Conservative government will automatically create an environment where abuses of employees and customers can flourish. As George Osborne showed when he increased the minimum wage, politicians can act against type. But it would clearly help in avoiding business exploitation if the Conservatives faced an opposition that felt free to be critical of business.

That is what Ed Miliband tried to do when he was Labour leader. He put the issue of producers versus predators, or as an economist might put it wealth creating versus rent seeking, at centre stage. Labour also proposed some relatively mild measures to reduce inequality (e.g. the mansion tax). The latter in particular were unpopular with CEOs. Partly as a result, we saw near universal endorsement of the Conservatives from business leaders.

An interesting question is why this should be seen as a problem for Labour. The answer has to be that approval by business is seen by many voters as a mark of economic competence. Of course economists know that running a business is very different from running the economy. In addition, as I think Justin Wolfers said, when a businessman claims economic expertise, remember: business is about enriching yourself, economics is about making us all better off. But the media environment encourages a rather different view. Economic issues, unless they are of major importance, are typically discussed in business sections or segments.

I have personally never understood the prominence that business news has in all parts of the media. For example, are there really that many people who want to know the daily movement in stock markets around the world every hour on BBC 24 hour news? More worrying is how often business leaders and business representatives get media coverage compared to representatives of employees, particularly at the BBC. (Business leaders also seem to beat economists at the BBC, as Justin Lewis noted about the 2015 election. This has been repeated during the referendum campaign. This is despite the public trusting us more than business leaders. [1])

The result of all this may be that Labour wants to avoid appearing anti-business. The Blair/Brown regime went out of their way to cultivate business, and were famously relaxed about the large increase in inequality at the top that occurred before their time. It is not totally ludicrous to claim that the UK financial crisis, the biggest example of business mistakes adversely effecting society for many decades, might have been partly a result of this.

The current Labour leadership is unlikely to repeat that mistake. But the problem remains that the Conservatives will throw the anti-business charge the moment Labour adopts any measures that restrict business freedom or threatens the incomes of business executives, and business leaders – for reasons already explained – will back them up. If this leads to a significant number of voters concluding that Labour are not competent to run the economy, we are in danger of hard wiring bad business. As Luigi Zingales observes in this perceptive article, although there is a deep distrust of crony capitalism among many Republican supporters, they still elected a crony capitalist.

[1] In Justin Lewis's article, he notes that “newspaper partisanship directly influenced the broadcast news agenda”. Perhaps this is the most plausible explanation for many of the BBC's biases, together with – ironically – a fear of being too left wing, as Jack Seale reports with a great quote from Robert Peston.

Neoliberalism

The term ‘neoliberalism’ has become so ubiquitous that some might think that it has lost all meaning, beyond a useful catch-all for everything some people on the left dislike about current social and economic trends, or more specifically for those on the left to be rude about those on the centre-left. That is in my view far too dismissive, but the reasons for both the use of the term and confusion over its meaning have real historic and cultural roots.

I know what I mean when I (occasionally) use the term neoliberal. Neoliberalism is a political movement or ideology that hates ‘big’ government, dislikes any form of market interference by the state, favours business interests and opposes organised labour. The obvious response to this is why ‘neo’. In the European tradition we could perhaps define that collection as being the beliefs of a (market) liberal (although that would be misleading for reasons I give below). The main problem here is that in US discourse in particular the word ‘liberal’ has a very different meaning. As Corey Robin writes, neoliberals

would recoil in horror at the policies and programs of mid-century liberals like Walter Reuther or John Kenneth Galbraith or even Arthur Schlesinger, who claimed that “class conflict is essential if freedom is to be preserved, because it is the only barrier against class domination.”

So in this US line of thought, neoliberalism is an adaptation of a position on the left towards the ideas of the right.

Contrary to some perceptions, the term neoliberal was not a US invention, but was first used by Rüstow, as this excellent account by Hartwich and Sally sets out. It was designed to be a ‘third way’ between socialism and a German version of capitalism. It was adopted by a group that later became the Mont Pèlerin Society, which included Mises and Hayek and Milton Friedman, but it would be a great error to view that group as some kind of united intellectual conspiracy. As Hartwich and Sally remark, it is “named after the location as the participants could not agree on anything else”. The group was sufficiently diverse that the idea of what we now call a social market economy can also trace some of its roots to this group.

One of the disagreements in the group was over the problem of what we might call ‘corporatism’: the domination of markets by a small number of large firms or cartels that is a long way from the ideal of a perfectly competitive market. Rüstow saw that as a problem that was inherent to capitalism and required a strong state to prevent it (an idea that is central of what we now call ordoliberalism), whereas Mises thought corporatism is the result of state intervention. (Economists would just say that both are potentially true and it all depends, which is one reason why many economists find it hard to talk about ideologies that involve their own discipline.)

From this group we have the term neoliberal being adopted as a modification of European liberalism and (for some at least) it involved a move from the right to the left. I think the clearest way of thinking about the Mont Pèlerin group is that it was a group that had in common a dislike of communism, but out of which different ideologies emerged, including ordoliberalism and neoliberalism as we understand these terms today. I am tempted to argue that what we now call the neoliberal element of the Mont Pèlerin discussions placed such an emphasis on their dislike of the state that they were prepared to ignore the market imperfections that a state could correct.

I think this alone would be a good reason for the use of the term neoliberal rather than, say, market liberal. Neoliberalism as most people use the term seems quite relaxed about departures from the ideal of a market as seen by economists. A clear example, as Chris Dillow points out, is CEO pay. When people argue that CEO pay ‘should be left to the market’ they mean something very different from ‘be determined by the market’. The role of any market in determining CEO pay is marginal compared to most ordinary workers: pay is set by remuneration committees who reference to the pay of other CEOs.[1] What ‘left to the market’ actually means here is ‘no state or union interference’.

Yet this example also tells us that dismissing neoliberalism as a non-existent ideology is wrong. How often have you heard people arguing that CEO pay should be left to the market, and this assertion has gone unchallenged? This common acceptance of ‘left to the market’ really meaning ‘no state or union interference’ suggests something like an ideology at work. Other commonly used language, like taxpayers money (by which is normally meant income taxpayers) rather than public money, or wealth creators for the 1%, does the same.

Attitudes to the state, both on the right and centre of politics, are very different to those I (distantly!) remember from the 1960s. The ability of the state to achieve economic goals is today routinely denigrated. Part of the reason for the success of Mazzucato’s The Entrepreneurial State (apart from it being a very good book) is that it points out how creative and wealth creating the state can be. What would have seemed obvious in the days when we put a man on the moon today needs to be argued case by case.

This is why I do not think it is a problem that few today would describe themselves as neoliberal. Indeed that may be part of the greater problem as perceived on the left: neoliberal ideas have become so commonplace, not just on the right but also the centre of politics, that no self-identification by label is required. But there may be another reason why few call themselves neoliberal, and that is because if we try and regard it as a coherent and consistent set of beliefs it can very quickly be shown to be inadequate and confused. Commonly held beliefs do not have to be coherent and consistent.

This is where many accounts on the left go wrong. Rather than seeing ‘left to the market’ as a deliberately misleading shorthand for no state or union interference, they think neoliberalism involves a devotion to free markets, or worse still (see this piece by George Monbiot for example) they equate neoliberalism with unbridled competition. While that might have been true for some of those at Mont Pèlerin, it is no longer true of neoliberalism today.

The reason is obvious enough. Neoliberalism has been adopted and promoted by monied interests on the right, and that money often resulted from what we might call today crony capitalism. So, for example, there is a big difference between promoting competition within the NHS (which some research suggests works if done in the right context, such as fixed prices), and the privatisation of health contracts. Privatisation is neither necessary nor sufficient for competition. To describe the promotion of competition within the NHS as neoliberalism is confusing and alienating.

More generally, it is a huge error to think that because neoliberalism invokes a highly selective and distorted view of basic economics, the left must therefore oppose mainstream economics. It is a huge error because using mainstream economics is an excellent way of challenging neoliberal ideas. Take the example of banking. At first sight the financial crisis was simply a failure to regulate a free market. But it was a market which included what is to all intents and purposes a huge state subsidy, which is that if the market goes wrong the state (either directly or through its central bank) will come to the rescue. Here state interference in the market encourages lack of competition: only those too big to fail could be sure of support.

For this and other reasons (natural monopolies and other forms of rent seeking), the financial sector embodies many of the things that those who first used the term neoliberalism were opposed to. It is important that those who use the term neoliberalism today recognise this contradiction. It does not mean that using the term neoliberalism to describe the dominant ideology is wrong, but it is a mistake to assume the ideology has not be moulded/adapted/distorted by those in whose interest it works. These changes have made it intellectually weak at the same time as making it politically strong.

[1] This is very similar to how pay was determined under UK ‘incomes policies’ in the 1960s and 1970s. Here the state would set up a committee that would fix the pay of some group of workers with reference to the pay of comparable occupations. At least in that case, however, some of the reference occupations may have had pay that was actually market determined!

What is it about German economics?

I recently had the privilege to speak in Berlin at the 10th anniversary celebration of the Macroeconomic Policy Institute (IMK). (The talk I gave, on the Knowledge Transmission Mechanism, is here if anyone really wants to watch it.) I had known about the IMK for some time through reading incisive posts by Andrew Watt on the Social Europe website, but more recently I had been citing important papers by other IMK economists looking at the costs of austerity. You could describe the IMK group within Germany in various ways (see below), but one would be an island of Keynesian thinking in a sea that was rather hostile to Keynesian ideas.

As my talk, and this subsequent post, focused on how Keynesian ideas are pretty mainstream elsewhere, this raises an obvious puzzle: why does macroeconomics in Germany seem to be an outlier? Given the damage done by austerity in the Eurozone, and the central role that the views of German policy makers have played in that, this is a question I have asked for many years. The textbooks used to teach macroeconomics in Germany seem to be as Keynesian as elsewhere, yet Peter Bofinger is the only Keynesian on their Council of Economic Experts, and he confirmed to me how much this minority status is typical. [1]

There are two explanations that are popular outside Germany that I now think on their own are inadequate. The first is that Germany is preoccupied by inflation as a result of the hyperinflation of the Weimar republic, and that this spills over into their attitude to government debt. (The recession of the 1930s helped create a more serious disaster, and here is a provocative account of why the memory of hyperinflation dominates.) A second idea is that Germans are culturally debt averse, and people normally note that the German for debt is also their word for guilt. The trouble with both stories is that they imply that German government debt should be much lower than in other countries, but it is not. (In 2000, the German government’s net financial liabilities as a percentage of GDP were at the same level as France, and slightly above the UK and US.)

A mistake here may be to focus too much on macroeconomics. Germany has recently introduced a minimum wage: much later than in the UK or US. I think it would be fair to say that German economists generally advised against this. In the UK and US the opinion of economists on the minimum wage issue is much more balanced, largely because there is a great deal of academic evidence that at a moderate level the minimum wage does not reduce employment significantly. So here German economics also appears to be an outlier.

Many people have heard of ordoliberalism. It would be easy to equate ordoliberalism with neoliberalism, and argue that German attitudes simply reflect the ideological dominance of neo/ordoliberal ideas. However, as I once tried to argue, because ordoliberalism recognises actual departures from an ideal of perfect markets and the need for state action in dealing with those departures (e.g. monopoly), it is potentially much more amenable to New Keynesian ideas than neoliberalism. Yet in practice ordoliberalism does not appear to allow such flexibility. It is as if in some respects economic thinking in Germany has not moved on since the 1970s: Keynesian ideas are still viewed as anti-market rather than correcting market failure, and views on the minimum wage have not taken on board market distortions like monopsony. But that observation simply prompts the question of why in these respects German economics has remained isolated from mainstream academic ideas. [2]

One of the distinctive characteristics of the German economy appears to be very far from neoliberalism, and that is co-determination: the importance of workers organisations in management, and more generally the recognition that unions play an important role in the economy. Yet I wonder whether this may have had an unintended consequence: the polarisation and politicisation of economic policy advice. The IMK is part of the Hans-Böckler-Foundation, which is linked to the German Confederation of Trade Unions. The IMK was set up in part to provide a counterweight to existing think tanks with strong links to companies and employers. If conflict over wages is institutionalised at the national level, perhaps the influence of ideology on economic policy - in so far as it influences that conflict (see footnote [1]) - is bound to be greater. 

As you can see, I remain some way from answering the question posed in the title of this post, but I think I’m a bit further forward than I was.  

[1] The ‘Hamburger Appell’ of 2005, signed by over 250 German economists, is clearly anti-Keynesian. The intellectual rationale given there is unclear, but one theme is that a more effective way of increasing employment is to increase international competitiveness by holding down domestic costs. Now if you are part of a fixed exchange rate regime or a monetary union, and you have - for institutional reasons - an ability to influence domestic wage costs that other countries that belong to the regime do not have, then it may make perfect Keynesian sense to use that instrument. This is exactly what happened (deliberately or not) from 2000 to 2007, which of course is a major reason why Germany is currently not suffering the recession being experienced by the Eurozone as a whole. (Of course, unlike a fiscal stimulus, it is a beggar my neighbour policy, because demand increases at the expense of other countries in the regime: for the regime as a whole a flexible exchange rate will offset the impact of lower costs on competitiveness.)

[2] On this isolation see Tony Yates here. At the end of this post Tony also references an interesting discussion regarding ordoliberalism and other issues in comments on a post of my own: see here.   

Inequality and the media

Kathleen Geier asks why there is not more outrage about growing inequality. Her starting point is an excellent piece by Justin Fox, in which he recounts the history of class warfare in the U.S. To quote:

“What’s been unique, or at least highly unusual, has been the environment in which entrepreneurs and business executives were able to operate from the late 1970s through the early 2000s. Taxes dropped, high-end incomes exploded, and hardly anybody complained at all. Far from complaining, in fact, the news media for the most part celebrated the recipients of those exploding incomes for their boldness, creativity, and economic importance.”

On this side of the pond there may be more awareness of past class conflict. Yet I suspect there is even less outrage in the UK than in the US, and there is just as much to be outraged about. Anyone who thinks what has happened over the last few decades to executive pay just represent increasing marginal products should read Will Hutton today on recent pay deals at the Co-op. As those in the UK will know, this company has not been doing too well of late, which means no performance related bonuses. So instead the Co-op’s executives are to receive ‘retention payments’ equal to their base salary. This ‘retention bonus’ is also being paid to a director who is leaving the company!

Remuneration committees, who fix these salaries, always say that they are just aligning pay ‘to the market’. But this is a market without supply and demand! What these committees invariably do is fix pay to somewhere in the upper half of ‘market rates’, because their particular company faces ‘unusually difficult challenges’ and wants to retain the ‘best talent’. It does not take an economist to see that this process will generate over time steady increases in executive pay relative to the pay of everyone else, which is of course exactly what we have seen. (For one possible story of why this process goes on at some times and countries but not others, see here.) Even David Cameron calls this market failure.

So why no outrage? Geier gives two explanations. The first is the welfare state, which reduces poverty and therefore takes the edge off outrage. I’m not sure I buy this. In the UK a third of a million people received a minimum of three days emergency food from Trussell Trust food banks in 2012-13, compared to 26,000 in 2008-09. Plenty of potential scope for outrage there. The second is the media, which I certainly do buy. But what I found interesting was how she ended her piece. She felt that the media could only “explain a part of the public’s eerie underreaction to the skyrocketing economic inequality we’ve seen over the past several decades. There’s got to be more to the voters’ lack of outrage.”

I’m sure there are other potential explanations, such as the decline of trade union influence. I know that Geier is not alone in feeling that any explanation that focuses on the role of the media is somehow inadequate. Yet why is this? We know that the public significantly underestimates the extent of inequality in both the US and UK. The image that most people have of the super rich is movie stars or the likes of Bill Gates, not common or garden executives doing managerial jobs. How can people be outraged, when they do not have the outrageous information? I think the decline of trade unionism in the US and UK is important partly because unions provided an alternative source of information from the mass media, and because they were a resource which - once upon a time - media that wanted to be unbiased felt they should draw upon.

So why are many on the left reluctant to put an analysis of the media at the centre of any discussion of political beliefs and attitudes? The mechanisms by which power of various kinds can influence the media are hardly mysterious. (Here is an example of how this can be modelled, and here is a case study.) Perhaps it is hard for those obsessed by politics and adept at obtaining information to imagine the position of the majority who have other priorities. Perhaps it is a reaction to how some abused Engels’ idea of false consciousness as a means of overriding democracy. Perhaps arguing that people’s attitudes depend on the information they receive can too easily be portrayed as paternalism. But when it comes to understanding the lack of outrage about inequality, I’m not sure there has got to be more than the media.

Two earlier but related posts:

Inequality and the Left

Is UKIP the UK's Tea Party?