Against Labour: How the Great Recession Reconfigures Power in Advanced Capitalism.

In this paper we argue that the 2008 crisis has systematically weakened the position of labour in advanced capitalism in contrast to the power of  business and banking, which has gained from state responses to the economic disruption. For example in the US the Fed Reserve's response to liquidity and credit crises in 2008 and 2009 was focused exclusively on meeting the needs of the banking and industrial sector, utterly disregarding the parlous labour market position and income and income losses of labour and workers.  Importantly this pivot to capital over labor is observable regardless of government partisanship (governments of the left have been as bad as governments of the right). In the Comparative Political Economy literature, our way of thinking about compensation in bad economic times has traditionally been about compensating labor losers. Since 2008, however, government policy is all about compensating business losers (with the tax money that labor pays!) while making compensation for losers harder and harder to get (conditionality, workfare, budget constraints, etc). Our paper develops an argument and analysis to explain these outcomes.