Whatever Happened to the ‘Goodwin Pattern’? Profit Squeeze Dynamics in the Modern American Labour Market

Abstract

ABSTRACT The ‘Goodwin pattern’ — an anti-clockwise rotation in real activity × wage share space recurring at intervals that correspond roughly to the duration of business cycles — is an enduring feature of high-frequency dynamics in capitalist economies. It is well known that the centre or focus of this rotation shifts over time. More recently, however, the Goodwin pattern seems to have broken down, the wage share no longer increasing as the real economy improves over the course of short-term booms. In this paper, the apparent breakdown of the Goodwin pattern is associated with the consolidation of an ‘incomes policy based on fear’ that is part-and-parcel of neoliberalism. As a result of this incomes policy based on fear, the institutional structure of the labour market disciplines labour at any rate of unemployment. This decouples wage-share dynamics from the state of the real economy, with the result that as recently witnessed in the US, the wage share is rendered invariant to improvements in economic performance over the course of short-term cyclical booms.