In the heady days of union activism, the interests of the whole society were broadly aligned: everyone wanted economic activity to occur in much the same way, and the argument was about how to slice the cake.

More recently, though, motives have diverged. The net contributors to state income - anyway, the A/B/C1 groups - want the economy to grow by whatever means. The net transfer recipients - the C2/D/E classes - are, by contrast, getting hammered by precisely those growth mechanisms. This text notes that trade and international outsourcing are one category of just such tool, just as re-engineering, benchmarking, TQM, automation and supply chain sprawl are its domestic equivalents.

This divergence of interest is relatively new, dating back to the 1990s by really getting going after the turn of the millennium in most countries. It's not the results of "capitalism" or any other such generic twaddle, merely the way that events are going. If you are working in a high skill environment, it is really helpful to have low artisan wages and cheap imported goods. If you are working in a low skill environment, those and many other factors pull down your wages.

Collectively, this unhappy group will flail around trying to find villains (bankers/ capitalists/ immigrants/ old people/ secularism/ immorality). That, of course, evades the unpalatable truth, which is that the world workforce has doubled in numbers and much more than doubled in skills; and that process redesign and automation is an unstoppable force. The result is "two nations": one group rational, adapted to change, pulling the levers that make things work; the other irrational but righteously pissed off, ill-adaptd to the present, let alone the future and supporting politicians who will pull entirely the wrong levers. Wrong, because although current systems cause social pressure, not having those systems is a direct path to utter disaster. A world of isolationist old rich nations in which each subsidises antique work practices from behind tariff walls is not a world that will survive for very long.