Francesco Garibaldo

Regulations and impact: a worker's perspective: a paper  for the seminar in Montevideo on the labour market, Organised by the Inter-American Development Bank, on the 19^th – 20^th of May 1998

I will start from employment and I suggest that it is impossible to overcome high unemployment levels in the present liberalisation orthodoxy, hence we have to question it either theoretically and practically : in other words we need a set of theoretical arguments and a set of policies questioning this theoretical and practical orthodoxy. Why do I suggest this incompatibility ? The question of unemployment is not” a technical one
about detailed ways of changing the economy, but a fundamental social and political choice of whether to accept high unemployment as a price well worth paying for regulating inflation, or whether rather to replace such brute force methods for tackling inflation with instead an approach based on consent”i and the consequences of long term unemployment on society at large are very impressive : poverty, crime, social dislocation with an overall effect of a strong polarisation of society : in UK wage inequality is greater
than at any time since records began in 1886.