Uneven competitiveness
Each success any one government had in doing this put pressure on other governments to do likewise. But real wages could not be cut, working hours prolonged, or welfare benefits curtailed without causing popular resentment with the potential to explode into all out resistance. The level of resistance varied from country to country, depending on established levels of working class organisation and the outcome of key attacks on it (like the defeat of the long 1980s strikes of air trafic controllers in the US and of miners and print workers in Britain). The most visible result was that the proportion of national output going to welfare in the mid-1990s in France and Germany was about 14 percent higher than in the US and over 6 percent higher than in Britain. The same contrast between the success of the capitalist offensive in the US and Britain and its effects in Europe was shown by the figures for working hours. In these trends lay the supposed advantage of the "Anglo-Saxon" model over the European model for the capitals based within each.
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The New Age of Global Instability