Labour relations financialization

Abstract

Economic globalisation has involved a range of structural changes that have transformed local and worldwide economic relationships. One of its most pervasive and persistent effects has been the growing importance of financial sector in the economy to the point that it has acquired a new centrality with serious consequences for the rest of economic relations – a circumstance not exclusively the result of improved technology and communications but the consequence of political decisions – that have transformed the institutional framework of global capitalism. As a result of this process, which has been called economic financialization, labour relations around the world have suffered a series of mutations due to a new corporate governance that has become more short-sighted in every areas, including human resources management; an almost universal change in legal framework both nationally and internationally that has relocated the bargaining power between employers and employees to make it more favourable to the former; and a drift in the welfare state towards a reduction of its size, configuration and essence. Overall, the financialization has meant in practice a distribution of income and power more favourable to the capital vis-a-vis labour, never known in the contemporary period.