Efficiency Wages, Labor Intensity, and Equilibrium Unemployment: The Origin and Contemporary Development of the Labor Discipline Model

In recent years, the global economy has faced increasingly severe risks of recession, with sluggish economic growth and persistently high unemployment rates. Unemployment has become a major issue of concern for governments and scholars worldwide. At the same time, the intensity of labor for those employed has continued to increase, and despite the lack of significant wage growth, many positions remain highly competitive. In the context of overlapping types of unemployment, the efficiency wage theory, which focuses on wage rigidity, struggles to provide a comprehensive explanation for the persistent unemployment problem. In contrast, the labor discipline model, based on the perspective of the labor process, offers a more complete analytical framework. This paper systematically integrates the labor discipline model for the first time, traces its intellectual origins, and summarizes a labor extraction function that can characterize general employment relationships. It also presents the basic logic of model construction from the perspectives of neoclassical, radical, and Kaleckian schools. The Kaleckian labor discipline model provides a reasonable explanation for the coexistence of different types of unemployment and offers a unified theoretical framework for studying the complex unemployment issues of today. It holds the potential to lead the way for innovative development in labor discipline models.