En EEUU y otras partes del mundo se ha producido un fenómeno que viene explicar parte de la diferenciación de rentas: la diferencia de éxito entre diferentes empresas, de manera que las empresa exitosas, por las razones que sean, se diferencian crecientemente de las empresas que se retrasan, de manera que las primeras pueden pagar salatios más altos - y crecientememte más altos - que las que quedan relegadas en innovación (innovación en sentido lato, que incluye tanto la tecnología como la novedad de producto, así como la subrogación de una parte de la producción a otras empresas).
Este es un fenómeno que por supuesto debe relacionarse con la globalización, en el sentido de que las empresas más expuestas a la competencia, y más exitosas en contrarrestarla, las que aguantan el tirón, se convierten en empresas punteras. Pero hay muchos ot os elementos en juego.
En Conversable Economist nos ofrecen un gráfico ilustrativo del creciente diferencial de productividad entre empresas del mismo sector, que se encuentran también entre industrias.
"In other words, the increasing inequality we’ve seen for individuals is mirrored by increasing inequality between firms. But the wage gap is not increasing as much inside firms, our research shows. This may tend to make inequality less visible, because people do not see it rising in their own workplace. This means that the rising gap in pay between firms accounts for the large majority of the increase in income inequality in the United States. It also accounts for at least a substantial part in other countries, as research conducted in the UK, Germany, and Sweden demonstrates. ... I believe that much of the rise of between-firm inequality, and therefore inequality in general, can be attributed to three factors: the rise of outsourcing, the adoption of IT, and the cumulative effects of winner-take-most competition."
In other words, a number of leading companies are now focusing on a very specific core competence. For other services, they hire outside contractors (either locally or long-distance). Bloom writes:
"Employees inside winning companies enjoy rising incomes and interesting cognitive challenges. Workers outside this charmed circle experience something quite different. For example, contract janitors no longer receive the benefits or pay premium tied to a job at a big company. Their wages have been squeezed as their employers routinely bid to retain outsourcing contracts, a process ensuring that labor costs remain low or go ever lower. Their earnings have also come under pressure as the pool of less-skilled job seekers has expanded, due to automation, trade, and the Great Recession. In the process, work has begun to mirror neighborhoods — sharply segregated along economic and educational lines."
En el siguiente gráfico puede verse el aumento del diferencial salarial entre empresas:
Estos gráficos, que dicen que este fenómeno es relativamente nuevo, sugieren que antes las empresaseran más uniformes y la diferenciación salarial se producía dentro de la firma, lo que podía traducirse en una expectativa de ascenso y de carrera, y una integración más fuerte entre trabajadores.
The rise of between-firm inequality raises some social questions that go beyond the general issue of inequality between individuals. For example, it suggests that in the past, successful firms were more likely to have played a role in redistributing income, in the sense that all the employees of a successful firm tended to share, at least to some extent, in the firm's success. In the past, successful firms could offer a kind of career ladder, where a combination of experience and training helped some of their entry-level workers move up to middle-class jobs. In the past, successful companies offered a kind of integration across high-wage and low-wage jobs, because people in all kinds of jobs were more likely to have a common employer.
En cambio, ahora, la integración social es más difícil.
In contrast, a rise in between-firm inequality suggests that the US and other leading economies are becoming a more economically segregated, in the sense that those with high pay and those with lower pay are becoming less likely to have the same employer. It means that the classic "American dream"success story, of someone being hired in the mailroom or as a secretary or janitor, and then getting promoted up the company ladder, is less likely to occur. Nowadays, those jobs in the mailroom or the secretarial pool or the janitorial work are more likely to involve working for an outside contractor. In that sense, some of the rungs on the bottom of the ladder of success have been sawed off.
En OCDE, tenemos un estudio bien reciente y extensivo sobre el fenómeno, del que destacamos una parte de su resumen, en el que se destacan otras causas actuantes.
We show that a particularly striking feature of the productivity slowdown is not so much a lower productivity growth at the global frontier, but rather rising labour productivity at the global frontier coupled with an increasing labour productivity divergence between the global frontier and laggard (non-frontier) firms. This productivity divergence remains after controlling for differences in capital deepening and mark-up behaviour, suggesting that divergence in measured multi-factor productivity (MFP) may in fact reflect technological divergence in a broad sense...
This could be a reflection of increasing costs for laggard firms of moving from an economy based on production to one based on ideas. But it could also be symptomatic of rising entry barriers and a decline in the contestability of markets. We find the rise in MFP divergence to be much more extreme in sectors where pro-competitive product market reforms were least extensive, suggesting that policy weaknesses may be stifling diffusion in OECD economies.
En suma, esto desmentiría la teoría conspiranoica de que los capitalistas no suben más los salarios porque se han aliado con el poder para mantenerlos a ras del suelo. Las empresas que ganan más dinero pagan mejores salarios, el problema es que la productividad aparenta ser cada vez más selectiva, menos difundida. Lo que se necesita es una política empresarial, no distributiva.
