How do markets function? Who creates, shapes and organizes them? And what do they mean for the relationship between labor and capital? Marketization examines how the state and capital use markets to discipline the working class. Ian Greer and Charles Umney provide a comprehensive overview of the European political economy, from the European Commission to the workplace, to show how neoliberal principles translate into market mechanisms and reshape the lives of workers. Drawing on dozens of conversations with policymakers, administrators, businesses, workers, and trade unionists across many European countries, Greer and Umney unpack marketization. They go beyond liberal theories that see markets as natural forms of economic organization and broad-brush left critiques of neoliberalism, looking behind the scenes in the current European political economy to examine the practicalities of how markets are created and manipulated by employers, policymakers and bureaucrats in pursuit of greater profitability. Far from leading to greater freedom, these processes often override the rights of individuals, degrade the status and security of workers, and undermine democratic accountability.

How capitalist exchange has disciplined the working class and corroded democracy and how to reverse this process in politics and in everyday life.

About the Author
Ian Greer is Director of the ILR Ithaca Co-Lab at Cornell University, USA. Charles Umney is Associate Professor at the University of Leeds, UK.

Reviews
Marketization is a must-read for any heterodox economist working on distribution, bargaining power, and the state. Ian Greer and Charles Umney bring the political economy of the state in the age of neoliberal globalization and financialization into empirical terrain based on a broad spectrum of case studies ranging from welfare-to-work systems, healthcare, digitalization and the gig economy based on years of field work. * Ozlem Onaran, Professor of Economics, University of Greenwich *
Under the umbrella of 'marketization,' Greer and Umney provide a coherent framework to explain how EU and national government actors have colluded with European capitalists to undermine the Welfare State. Based on 20 years of extensive field research in specific industries and European countries, they go beyond broad neoliberal accounts of change. They examine the concrete processes through which market exchange has penetrated public services, while intensified private sector competition has undermined worker power, disciplined class resistance, and eroded democratic processes. A must-read for students of 21st century European political economy. * Rosemary Batt, Alice Hanson Cook Professor of Women and Work , ILR School Cornell University, USA *



Book Information
ISBN 9781913441456
Author Ian Greer
Format Hardback
Page Count 192
Imprint Zed Books Ltd
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing PLC