What do indebted employees do?: Financialisation and the decline of industrial action

Giorgos Gouzoulis

doi:10.1111/irj.12391

What do indebted employees do? Financialisation and the decline of industrial action

Giorgos Gouzoulis^*

^*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article (Academic Journal) › peer-review

24 Citations (Scopus)

148 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

While isolated episodes of work stoppages keep occurring, aggregate industrial action rates have been on the decline over the last five decades. Attempts to explain this trend centre on the short-term effects of the business cycle and the long-term impacts of labour market liberalisation, deindustrialisation and globalisation. This paper argues that household indebtedness is a missing piece of the puzzle. Since indebted employees tend to become self-disciplined at the workplace on the fear of losing their job and defaulting, this paper argues that the post-1970 rise of household financialisation is associated with the decline of strike activity. The econometric evidence reported provides strong support to this argument for the cases of Japan, Korea, Sweden, the United States and the United Kingdom over the period 1970–2018.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	71-94
Number of pages	24
Journal	Industrial Relations Journal
Volume	54
Issue number	1
Early online date	2 Jan 2023
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1111/irj.12391
Publication status	Published - 4 Jan 2023

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
The author is grateful to Collin Constantine, Paul Edwards, Tamara Lee, Adam Seth Litwin, Aggela Papadopoulou, Harry Pitts, Alex Wood and participants of the BUIRA Annual Conference 2022: ‘Why Employment Relations Matter(s) for Democratizing Work’ for discussions and their feedback on earlier versions. Special thanks are also due to two anonymous referees for their constructive suggestions and comments.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 The Authors. Industrial Relations Journal published by Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Research Groups and Themes

MGMT Work Organisation and Public Policy
Global Political Economy
MGMT theme Work Futures
Perspectives on Work

Keywords

strikes
industrial action
debt
Financialisation

UN SDGs

This output contributes to the following UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

Access to Document

10.1111/irj.12391Licence: CC BY

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Cite this

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abstract = "While isolated episodes of work stoppages keep occurring, aggregate industrial action rates have been on the decline over the last five decades. Attempts to explain this trend centre on the short-term effects of the business cycle and the long-term impacts of labour market liberalisation, deindustrialisation and globalisation. This paper argues that household indebtedness is a missing piece of the puzzle. Since indebted employees tend to become self-disciplined at the workplace on the fear of losing their job and defaulting, this paper argues that the post-1970 rise of household financialisation is associated with the decline of strike activity. The econometric evidence reported provides strong support to this argument for the cases of Japan, Korea, Sweden, the United States and the United Kingdom over the period 1970–2018.",

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