The shift to automated manufacturing and the decision on the part of
many major companies to relocate operations in lower-wage, nonunionized
Third World countries have undermined the power of Western trade
unions. Faced with a lower demand for labor and the increasing structural
unemployment created by plant relocations, support for militant
action among union membership has declined. Fear and uncertainty have
replaced the sense of power, confidence, and strength that characterized
earlier times. This has opened the way for management to more or less
dictate the terms of labor-management negotiations and to obtain a reversal
in basic conditions of employment that in the heyday of unionism
would have been completely unthinkable.
The trend has been so dramatic and extreme that in continental Europe
it has become known as the "new brutalism." The ruthless drive for efficiency
and "bottom line" profits at the expense of human concerns andconsiderations is seen as more or less shifting capitalism back into the