Talk:Rehn–Meidner model

It seems that whoever wrote much of this article does not have English as a first language. I corrected as much grammatical errors as I could while trying to keep all the content intact, but its a choppy mess. Somebody more familiar with the subject ought to re-write the article. The only person I know of that might be knowledgeable on this subject is David Harvey, whose book inspired me to look up this subject. If anybody knows of somebody with the knowledge, please recruit them for writing this article.

Spartan2600 (talk) 08:44, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

Dubious
"Eventually in Sweden, starting in the late 60s, the wage compression would demoralize high skilled workers…" The citation supports this. The citation also claims to introduce an alternative explanation to the popular consensus explanations. The citation given has been cited four times, once related to conflict resolution in Sweden and Ireland; once related to family wealth and the education of grandchildren; once in a paper about collective bargaining in South Africa; and once in a paper exploring the correlation between geography and immigrant labor wage gaps. This does not sound to me like sufficient evidence to make such powerful and authoritative claims. John Moser (talk) 04:36, 16 June 2022 (UTC)

Having a look at DOI 10.2753/JEI0021-3624440306, "The Rehn-Meidner Model in Sweden," explanations given include the following bit:


 * Already in the mid-1960s, LO had begun to prioritize job security, work environment, worker participation and collective ownership rather than labor mobility and structural change. During the following decade LO persuaded the social democratic government to legislate on co-determination, work environment and on job protection, the Job Security Act of 1974. Legislation on job security displayed, as the job protection measures in labor-market policy and the subsidies to companies in stagnating industries, the ideological hegemony of LO in the middle of the 1970s. But the LO priority to job protection also reflected the shift of priorities within the organization, and the Swedish society-at-large, violating the goal of structural change and “security of wings” in the R-M model.

The paper describes the Rehn-Meidner policy's goals as including policies to push out low-productivity business and encourage productivity growth. "Structural change" means exactly that: labor is moved around as technical progress brings productivity growth. Fewer factory workers needed to produce product X, freeing up labor to produce product Y. Erixon describes a history in which the mid-60s period faced a change in economic policy moving away from this, which would predictably reduce business investment and the associated structural change:  job protectionism reducing productivity growth. John Moser (talk) 16:22, 23 June 2022 (UTC)

I've incorporated some of that information; not sure about the edit as it is. I've tried to NPOV it, but I'm dealing with the balance fallacy here as well: the paper cited to claim demoralization of wages goes against the consensus view, and I'm uncertain how to avoid presenting these positions as equally valid. John Moser (talk) 17:40, 23 June 2022 (UTC)