Brazilian Protests and their Effect on Labour

Kjeld Jakobsen

Introduction
At the beginning of June, some Brazilian municipalities and local state governments decided upon a change in prices of public transport, with an approximate increase ranging between 5% and 10%, depending on the city or state. Minimal issues were expected as a result of this change because on average, the inflation rate sat on approximately 6% a year and, there was at least a two year gap since the previous increase in price. However, the motion put forward has triggered protests in many Brazilian cities, with a youth movement reiterating demands for free transport for students.

Brazilians experience new forms of political participation
The initial protests comprised of small opportunist groups who went to the extent of smashing windows and the entrances of some metro stations; provoking harsh reactions from local state police. Far worse, some rioters in São Paulo surrounded a policeman and assaulted him. Two days later a new march was organized, with approximately two thousand participants. It is alleged that police came out to avenge the attack on their colleague and subsequently reacted with extreme violence. Unfortunately, this confrontation also came to affect some people who were not actively involved in the protest, with an extreme incident of a journalist who lost her eye due to a rubber bullet being shot and another incident where people inside cafés were allegedly beaten with riot police sticks.

A Lesson from South Africa: Are Construction Cartels dramatically increasing Brazil's 2014 FIFA World Cup Infrastructure Costs?

André Furlan Meirinho

Paulo Capela

Eddie Cottle

Introduction

The 2008 report of the competition committee of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) into the construction sector found that, ‘Unfortunately the construction industry has tended to suffer from cartel activity, as shown by the spate of well-publicised recent matters around the world’. There were 19 countries included in this OECD roundtable from Europe, Asia, North America and notably South Africa that participated. South Africa presented its report on the massive cost overruns in relation to the 2010 FIFA World Cup stadiums which it, at the time, suspected of bid-rigging.[i]  

Through the collusive practice of bid rigging and excessive overpricing, construction companies extract or attain huge financial gains for themselves at the expense of workers and the tax payers of host countries. By implication this means the development goals that governments set themselves when hosting the World Cup are offset in part by massive transfers of wealth to private companies at the expense of job creation and income redistribution, thus stifling the economic multiplier that is intended. It is in this context that nationwide discontent emerged in Brazil involving over one million people.

Zero-hours Contracts

Steve Davies

Introduction
This summer in the United Kingdom (UK), ‘zero-hours contracts’ grabbed the headlines and dominated discussion about changes to working life. Zero-hours contracts are those in which a worker agrees to be available for work with a particular employer but without any guaranteed hours or times of work and therefore usually no guaranteed pay either. Under these contracts employers only need to pay for work when they need it. These contracts are not a new phenomenon, although the scale of their current use in the UK is unprecedented. This is seen by employers and ministers as part of the ‘necessary’ flexible labour market.

Who benefits from flexibility?
The Conservative-dominated British government boasts the UK is on the road to economic recovery and that, even at the worst point of the crisis, the private sector created hundreds of thousands of jobs which compensated for the impact of austerity on public sector employment. What ministers never explain is the nature of these new private sector jobs or how the crisis has been used to restructure the labour market. The increase in forms of ‘flexible’ work is closely related to the attacks on workers’ rights and trade unions. Thatcher began the process of weakening the position of workers, through legislative change to the labour markets and through laws which made it more difficult for unions to engage in legal strikes. This assault continued under the Blair and Brown ‘new Labour’ governments (Blair boasted that the UK had the least regulated labour market of any major industrialised country). The current British government has pushed even harder to remove legal protections for workers and to discourage the use of remaining legal protections by increasing the costs of bringing a case.

Why asbestos should be banned

Jan Cremers

There has been an outburst of public anger after the ‘discovery’ of asbestos polluted social housing, despite there being several other topical asbestos related incidents. This coupled with the spectacular Turin trial against some captains of industry who were sentenced for knowingly exposing their workforce for decades to the killing fibre and the alarming reports of annual death rates among teachers who were working in asbestos containing public schools. In turn, the driving thoughts behind recent research by a group of outstanding international experts were of a more pragmatic nature. The aim was to document that asbestos is still carried around the globe and that there is no reason to retreat from the fight against the trend and its effects. Unfortunately, the European Union (EU)-wide ban is not the end of the hazardous story; it is only one of the necessary steps to protecting workers and citizens against the fatal consequences of the use of a mineral fibre that started as the eternal, global insulation champion. The fairy tale of 'safe handling' that still leads to import and use in large parts of the world has to stop. In the following sections we summaries major developments that led to a slow phasing-out in Europe and a turn to other continents by the industry.

State Funding of Research and the Narrowing of Economics in the United Kingdom

Frederic S. Lee

In 1986, the United Kingdom instituted an exercise through which the allocation of state research funds to universities and their departments was based on the quality of the research they produced. While the official justification for the exercise was the need to be selective in the allocation of limited research funds, the non-talked about agenda behind the exercise was to reduce the number of research universities to a manageable number and to ensure that these elite universities conducted research and carried out teaching that was consistent with the interests of the economic and political elite which control the state. Consequently the ensuing research selectivity exercise known as the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) was and is popular with the Tories, New Labour, and anybody else who believes that the State should have quasi-direct and complete control over the thinking and research activities of its citizens.

Most academics initially thought the exercise would be a fair way of allocating state research funding when the state decided to reduce its commitment to higher education. However, in some disciplines, such as economics, it became evident by the mid-1990s that the exercise was also being used to cleanse economic departments of heterodox economic ideas that did not conform to mainstream (neoclassical) economic theory and with the neoliberal, pro-market policies based on the theory and which the state approved of. But the precise manner through which the cleansing process operated was not clearly understood. The rest of the article deals with the cleansing process, its consequences for UK economics, and what can be done about it.