Businesses cancelled the postwar compact to reduce the wage share.

Evidence

Behind this diagnosis already lay the premises of a conscious class strategy. If the demands of overly entitled citizens represented by strong mass parties had provoked an inflationary spiral and driven states to the precipice of ungovernability, the power of trade unions furnished another target for the neoliberal offensive that gained momentum from the mid-1970s. Faced with sluggish growth and pressure on capital accumulation, businesses unilaterally cancelled the postwar compact. To increase profits, or at least to arrest further decline, required a reduction in the wage share, supposedly artificially maintained by labor “cartels.” If breaking the unions dealt a blow to other institutions, so be it. — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics, 137

Categorization

• XREF: The wage-share reduction motive connects to the reader’s broader labor economics literature, and the Trilateral Commission report is a concrete causal anchor for the postpolitics diagnosis. — connects to: Postwar austerity deliberately collapsed the wage share to crush egalitarian expectations. — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 1471
• QUESTION: Does Jäger argue that breaking unions was the decisive causal lever for the postpolitics hollowing — or does the financialization story come later in the chapter?