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In Labor in the Age of Finance Sanford Jacoby brings together his deep knowledge of management practices and labor history to examine how unions have contended with management to win higher wages and better workplace conditions for workers.1 Today, the struggle is complicated by the decline in private sector union membership on the one hand and the heightened role of financial engineering to greater wealth on the other. In the post-World War Two period, finance was a handmaiden to the companies producing goods and services; it supported economic development and the growth of productivity. Great fortunes were made in those years by the titans of industry; unions won wage gains for workers that tracked the rise in productivity. But the deregulation of the financial sector that began during the administration of Jimmy carter, accelerated under Ronald Reagan, and came to fruition under Bill clinton created new opportunities for the accumulation of wealth via financial maneuvers not previously possible. corporations today are at the mercy of financial actors like hedge funds that can take a stake and dictate policy or private equity firms that can take the companies over and control management's decisions.
The current period, Jacoby observes, is not the only historical era in which finance has dominated the actions of firms. He notes that finance is a force whose influence has waxed and waned over the past 130 plus years: it was strong during industrialization, weakened during the New Deal era, and strengthened again as the economy pivoted in the late 1970s to the primacy of shareholder value. As finance again grew strong, it ushered in the neoliberal era that persists to the present time.
