Repositioning Social Dialogue: The South African Case

Katherine Joynt 

Edward Webster

Introduction
A crucial moment in South Africa’s transition to democracy was the signing of the Laboria Minute in 1990 between unions, employers and government where it was agreed that no laws on labour market issues would be passed without the agreement of all three social partners. This led to the establishment of the National Economic Forum (NEF) in 1992 and its merging with the National Manpower Commission (NMC) to create South Africa’s premier social dialogue institution, the National Economic Development and Labour Council (NEDLAC). In many ways the Laboria Minute was to pre-figure the political negotiations that led to South Africa’s first democratic elections in April 1994.

NEDLAC is distinctive as a peak-level social dialogue institution in that it includes not just labour market issues but also trade and industrial policy, monetary and fiscal policy as well as developmental issues. The traditional tripartite structure was also broadened to include community organisations.

In 2013 the authors were appointed to undertake an External Review to recommend ways of repositioning NEDLAC. We interviewed representatives from all four of the constituencies and wrote up a report. Subsequently we presented the report separately to all four constituencies and then incorporated their feedback into the review again before finalising our recommendations.

Austerity policies and trade unionism: A glance at Portugal

Hermes Augusto Costa

Elísio Estanque

Wage labour played and continues to play a central role in Western industrial societies, not just on the economic plane but above all as a vital support for social cohesion and the rule of law. The main advances of the last 200 years including the building of the welfare state and its important gains in the field of human rights (e.g. dignified work and social rights) are examples of the importance of struggles waged by organised wage labour. The major problem, however, is the imminent civilisational regression in which we find ourselves, teetering on the brink of a new cycle of mercantilist barbarism similar to the times of Marx (Estanque and Costa, 2013). In fact, the Portuguese labour context has in recent years been battered by austerity policies, formally with the entry of the Troika (International Monetary Fund (IMF)/ European Central Bank (ECB)/ European Commission(EC0) in May 2011 and even beyond its exit n May 2014.

In this text, we initially identify some internal challenges put before unions and the external threats underlying austerity policies. We also set out some tasks for trade unions.

Fiscal redistribution: yes, but inequality starts in the labour market: Findings from the ILO Global Wage Report 2014/2015

Patrick Belser

The International Labour Organisation (ILO) Global Wage Report[1], a publication released every two years, has been issued on the 5th of December 2014. The report is titled “Wages and income inequality” and, as usual, it has three parts. The first part analyses the evolution of real wages around the world. The second part, examines the link between wages and household income inequality, and also looks at wage gaps between certain groups: women and men; migrants and nationals; workers in the formal and the informal economy. The last part challenges the reader on what could be appropriate policy responses. The purpose of this column is to therefore highlight and discuss some of the crucial findings of the report.

Wage trends: Flat wages in developed economies, growing wages in emerging economies
The most recent global wage growth was driven almost entirely by emerging and developing economies, where real wages have been rising – sometimes rapidly – since 2007. Before the financial crisis, real average wages in developed economies grew by an average of about 1 per cent per year, and global wage growth was about 3 per cent. Such figures have since changed in recent years; wage growth in developed economies almost stands at zero, and global wages are growing by 2 per cent. If you take China out of the equation, the global wage growth is quite simply cut in half (see Figure 1).

The G20 / OECD Base Erosion and Profit Shifting Action Plan

Pierre Habbard

During a meeting held in November 2013 in St Petersburg, the G20 endorsed an Action Plan on Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS[1]) prepared by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development OECD – the leading forum on international taxation. In line with addressing corporate tax “avoidance” practices, the 15 action points were to be delivered by end-2015.

The international cooperation on tax evasion has been on the G20 agenda since 2009 but tax avoidance is a fairly new topic for the G20. Unlike tax evasion – which is illegal – tax avoidance is in the grey area of compliance. It involves aggressive corporate tax planning schemes by Multinational Enterprises (MNEs) and financial institutions that exploit differences between jurisdictions to shift profits away from economically relevant jurisdictions (“Profit shifting”) or to artificially reduce the taxable corporate income base (“Base erosion”). It is more difficult to detect and to deter but it leads to similar outcomes than tax evasion in terms of losses of revenues for governments.

For years, the OECD has not taken tax avoidance to heart but was rather more concerned about the risk of “double taxation” of MNEs operating over several jurisdictions. Prior to the 2009 crisis, OECD staff would in fact never miss an opportunity to praise “tax competition” between jurisdictions and the competitiveness of low-tax economies. But the political mood within OECD finance ministries changed post-crisis and, with that, the realisation that national tax laws have not kept pace with the globalization of businesses. In turn, this leaves gaps that can be exploited by MNEs to artificially reduce their taxes.

The Epoch of Market Based Funding: Shadow Banking

Anastasia Nesvetailova

The epoch of Market based funding: Shadow Banking
In the midst of a 2008 financial crisis, a senior French banker revealed that “It takes me about two hours to assemble a team of finance geeks and lawyers to devise a product or a transaction that would bypass any new rule or regulation coming our way”. And it is this confession that captured the essence of the challenge that daunts the regulators and policy-makers in the aftermath of the most devastating financial crisis since the 1930s. It seems that whatever financial regulators come up with, industry players are likely to find a way to bypass it. Or at the very least, minimize its impact. The most compelling illustration of this blunt logic of financial evolution is the phenomenon of shadow banking, a term that entered public debate in 2007 and has since preoccupied regulators and finance experts.

What’s in the name?
Simply-put, shadow banking depicts a market-based funding system (rather than bank-based), or “money market funding of capital market lending” (Mehrling et al 2012). More extensively, it implies a complex network of credit intermediation outside the boundaries of the traditional, regulated bank. It was the crisis of 2007-09 that brought the scale of shadow banking to light and transformed a phenomenon considered to be a benign force of financial innovation and competition, into a political problem. Paul McCulley (2009) argued that the growth of the shadow banking system, which operated legally yet entirely outside the regulatory realm “drove one of the biggest lending booms in history, and collapsed into one of the most crushing financial crises we’ve ever seen.”

Switzerland-China Free Trade Agreement and Labour Rights

Zoltan Doka

Vasco Pedrina

After four years of negotiations, Switzerland has become the second European country to sign a free trade agreement (FTA) with China[1]. The importance of the FTA rests in the fact that China regards it as a significant trial run for further FTAs with industrialised countries and the European Union (EU). This has led to political controversies accompanying the negotiation process.

Right from the start, the Non-governmental Organisations (NGOs) and the trade unions successfully committed the Swiss negotiating party to the inclusion of a “durability chapter” in this FTA, which emphasis human rights and labour rights as well as environmental standards. Swiss officialdom had long upheld a taboo on mixing trade issues with commitments to such standards by building them into an FTA; changing course in 2010 – mainly due to an international trend[2].

Sustainability, Just Transition and Trade Unions

Brian Kohler

Getting to Sustainability 
Working people and their unions want a future in which the environment is protected and where sustainable industries create decent, safe and healthy work. That, essentially, implies changes in present patterns of production and consumption. However, if society wants workers and their unions to make changes to what they are doing today; logic dictates that it must be able to tell them what they will be doing tomorrow. Furthermore, it had better sound good; otherwise the resistance to change will be overwhelming. The challenge is to build a bridge from where we are now; to the future we must reach. A Just Transition for workers, their families, and their communities is the essential prerequisite for a movement towards a sustainable future. Such a transition would incorporate the elements of sustainable industrial policy; robust social protections; and creative labour-market adjustment programs.

Fear Uncertainty and Doubt 
In popular understanding of climate issues, unscientific scepticism often triumphs over science because it is a form of asymmetric warfare. Scientists are not engaged in a scholarly debate with other scientists but are debating a climate-denial noise machine. A scientist may spend years researching climatic forces and refining the algorithms in a climate model, and finally publishing a scholarly paper in a peer-reviewed journal; only to have the noise machine ridicule it and be given equal weight to real science in the popular media. In the face of rejection, the scientist responds with further years of research and another peer-reviewed paper. There is a possibility that it will again be rebutted when it is released, and the cycle continues.

Call for Support of the International Unions to Stop the Suppression of Democratic Movement in Hong Kong

The Chinese government committed to develop democracy in Hong Kong after the handover in 1997 in the Sino-British Joint Declaration signed in 1984. Further in 2007, the National People’s Congress (NPC) passed a resolution agreeing that the Hong Kong Chief Executive would be elected by universal suffrage in 2017. Since the handover, people in Hong Kong have been demanding the Hong Kong and Chinese government for democratic elections. Yet against the will of the people in Hong Kong, the Chinese government has broken its promise. While agreeing to universal suffrage in 2017, the NPC passed the plan on 31 August 2014 in Beijing to ensure control in future elections of the Hong Kong Chief Executive by means of a nomination committee. A number of abstract, unreasonable criteria for the candidacy were laid down including patriotism and loyalty subject to Beijing’s interpretation.

Why a European Unemployment Insurance would help to make European Monetary Union more sustainable

Sebastian Dullien

Since the onset of the euro-crisis, the old debate pertaining to the supra-national stabilisers in the euro-area has gained new relevance. While economic textbooks have long stipulated that countries forming a monetary union need an alternative mechanism for dealing with asymmetric shocks and even the early feasibility studies on Economic and Monetary Union EMU had demanded a supranational transfer scheme (MacDougall 1977), EMU came into existence in the late 1990s without such a scheme.

By now, most observers agree that the euro-crisis was (with the exception of Greece) is not the result of irresponsible fiscal policies, but the consequence of problems in the banking systems which resulted partly from national boom-and-bust-cycles. Hence, for a more sustainable and better-functioning monetary union, a growing body of literature now asks for mechanisms to dampen booms and bolster recessions.

The new debate can best be observed in a number of European Union documents, such as the European Commission’s roadmap detailing propositions for a more complete monetary union; as well as that dubbed the “four presidents‘ report” prepared by the president of the European Council, in conjunction with presidents of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the Eurogroup. The European Commission’s concept for “Social Dimension of EMU” is also an example of such documents, all of which call for a “fiscal capacity” for the eurozone.

Trade Unions in Transition: Changing Industrial Relations in Vietnam

Erwin Schweisshelm

Introduction
Trade unions in Vietnam are closely tied to the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) and have yet to find their role as autonomous representatives of the interests of workers. However, the ever growing influence of foreign investors and the increase in wild cat strikes put pressure on the Vietnam General Confederation of Labour (VGCL), the only legally registered trade union in Vietnam. This pressure has an impact on both the ideological self-perception of the VGCL, as well as its organisational behaviour. It then faces a difficult political dilemma: if the situation remains unchanged and the VGCL does not deal with the challenges of changing labour relations, workers will nevertheless fight for better working conditions and render the official trade unions obsolete. Should the VGCL start to perform its role of a genuine representative of the interests of workers in Vietnam, it must do so independently of the party and state in Vietnam.

Trade Unions in Transition – from harmony to conflict
Under the political conditions of a Leninist one-party state, the trade unions are a “mass organisation” under the leadership of the CPV. According to Article 10 of the Constitution of Vietnam, the VGCL is the only trade union organisation in Vietnam and represents the whole working class in Vietnam, not limited to its members.

Selling Free Trade with Pseudo-Exact Science: The ifo-Studies

Stefan Beck

Christoph Scherrer

The US government and the European Commission are negotiating a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). The trading partners push for the elimination of the tariffs, less regulation, and more rights for investors. The governments try to justify the TTIP by pointing to significant welfare gains from additional exports, higher growth, and increases in efficiency, income and employment. They draw on various economic studies which, are based on complex modelling; concluding that a TTIP would increase prosperity in both the US and the European Union.

Trade impact studies usually make use of Computable General Equilibrium models. These models have been criticised in recent years. Among the critics is a team from the Munich ifo Institute which produced two impact studies in 2013, one for the German Federal Ministry of Economics (ifo-BMWi) and the other for the Bertelsmann Foundation (ifo-Bertelsmann). We concentrate our assessment on the impact studies drawing from the ifo studies.

On the Right to Strike Controversy

Kari Tapiola

Last year June marked the third consecutive year where serious divergences concerning the right to strike affected the International Labour Conference. In turn this resulted in the Conference Committee on the Application of Standards only being able to partially conclude its work. Historically it is worth recalling that, since the 19th Century, the fear of strikes had been the main reason for limiting workers’ organising rights. Conversely, the gradual permission of organising – or “combining”, as it was previously known – was accompanied by recognising the right to strike.

A Comparative Analysis on Freedom of Association was published by the ILO in 1927 and at that time there was no formal agreement on the standards regarding freedom of association. The Analysis concluded that it was seemingly impossible to make a distinction between the right to strike and the right to organise. Limitations of the right to strike also translated into limitations of the right to organise. The right to limit both, in certain conditions or for specific categories of workers, was recognised. Yet the two rights were, and still are, indivisible.

Chinese Construction Companies in Africa: A Challenge for Trade Unions

Eddie Cottle

The recently Chinese-built African Union (AU) headquarters, in Addis Ababa, is a bold symbol of China's rapidly changing role in Africa. China-African relations run as far deep as China being the biggest supporter of Africa’s anti-colonial struggle and the first to assist reconstruction efforts for the newly formed African States. The most famous example is the 1,800 kilometre Tanzania-Zambia Railway (Tazara) that was built in the 1970’s by some 50,000 Chinese engineers and workers, during which 64 of these workers died. China had provided a US $400m interest free loan to build the railway; even at a time when it was poorer than most African countries.

Chinese investment boosts African economic growth and infrastructure
China’s rapidly growing economy has resulted in the need to secure energy resources for stable development in the future. In this regard, Africa's importance to China's overseas investment agenda would still remain significant. In July 2012, President Hu Jintao pledged $20bn in credit for Africa for lucrative investment and infrastructure - critical and to the annoyance of the West is China’s no-strings attached loans. Two years previous to that, in 2010, China and Ghana signed an agreement for a 20 year loan of $13,1bn with an interest payment of only 2%. There is increasing fear over this arrangement that it might lead African countries to opt-out of International Monetary Fund -World Bank loans and other forms of dependence on Europe and the US.

Turkey seen through the Prism of Occupational Diseases: Success Story or Hidden Disaster?

Ahmet Tellioglu

It is hard to diagnose and recognise an occupational disease (OD) because the diagnosis must prove the occupational factors which caused it. The diagnosis of ODs in a workplace has important consequences for employees and employers:

1. The employer has to pay compensation; 
2. An increasing number of ODs diagnosed lead workers to demand higher wages;
3. The workplace will be inspected more frequently and more carefully. 

While the process of diagnosing and recognising ODs requires close collaboration of many parties in and around the workplaces (employers, employees, occupational health and safety (OHS) professionals and state institutions), employers try to avoid OD diagnoses because of the financial costs they may incur as a result. Regulations about OD issues should be aware of these issues.

The first row in Table 1 shows the number of ODs recognised in Turkey in the past nine years. The second row shows the expected number of ODs, if Turkey has on average the same incidence as in EU member states. According to official data, the incidence of ODs in Turkey is 30 times lower than in the EU. Since it is unlikely that this is a true reflection of reality, we can infer that only one of 30 OD cases is reported in Turkey.

Labour Issues in Indonesian Plantations: from Indenture to Entrepreneurship

Stéphanie Barral

This article documents the labor issues in Indonesian plantations focusing on how changes in agrarian capitalism and state regulation have affected plantation workers. Plantation-based capitalism in Indonesia dates back to the 1860s, when European and American companies opened up the province of North Sumatra, mainly in order to produce tobacco, rubber and palm oil. This system continued long into the post-colonial period, alongside an expansion of the plantation system elsewhere from the 1960s. The 1980s saw a boom in large private estates, especially oil palm plantations, which also spread to other Indonesian islands where forested land was available. Big oil palm plantations now cover more than five million hectares. Each production unit consists of approximately 20 000 to 30 000 hectares; harvesting, the main technical operation, currently requires between two and four thousand permanent laborers per unit.

The first decades of the plantation system in North Sumatra
From 1863 into the 1930s, private concessions expanded to cover around 10,000 square kilometers. From a 250 km stretch of coast to 50 to 70 km inland, 265 companies occupied 700,000 acres of farmland. The planters had great power during the 19th century and in the first decade of the 20th century, due to the weak presence of government representatives, political pressure from the Netherlands and the colonial government to meet the economic interests of the plantations (notably through Coolie Ordinance Acts, starting from 1880).

Winelands, Wealth and Work

Kees van der Waal

Profits made by landowners through real estate development in the Cape Winelands have social costs for workers on this land despite measures to mitigate the consequences. A group of researchers in social anthropology, history, psychology and planning, based at the University of Stellenbosch or associated with the Solms-Delta farm project has come to this conclusion in a research project they have completed on social transformation in the Stellenbosch wine-farming area[1]. The researchers argue that the financial gains of converting agricultural land into lifestyle benefits were offset by social disruption and costly adaptations experienced by the working class.

The Cape Winelands region is well known for the economic value derived from producing export wines. It is a landscape of exquisite beauty, with towering mountain ranges protected by conservation management and valleys treasured as agricultural land. Heritage is a rich resource here, evidenced by the Cape Dutch architecture of Boschendal and a recorded history going back to the 1680s. The Cape Winelands area is presently strongly associated with elite tourism and a wealthy lifestyle, embedded in viticulture and deciduous fruit production. However, the obvious visual importance of landscape and heritage hide the mundane relations of production experienced by agricultural workers. Relations between workers and owners in the wine industry were extremely exploitative during the slave era and have remained paternalistic to this day. Farm labour unrest in the Western Cape in 2012 attests to the tension generated by extreme inequalities.

There are Alternatives to the Neoliberal Blind Alley! Towards a New Progressive Consensus

João Antônio Felício

In its Working for the Few briefing paper, Oxfam has called attention to a worrying trend: the wealth of 1% of the world’s richest people is equivalent to a total of US$ 110 trillion – 65 times the total wealth of the poorer half of the world’s population. In the last 25 years, wealth has been increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few; leading to a tiny elite owning 46% of the world’s wealth. An aggravating factor in this situation is that this wealth is mostly from profits derived from capital, property and assets, rather than from wages, as French economist Thomas Piketty recently showed in his outstanding book, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”. A large number of highly profitable businesses are often under-taxed – an unacceptable trend across stock markets around the world. Ultimately, this contributes to economic inequality and creates a new Belle Époque, in which the social mobility of the working class is severely limited by the system of “patrimonial capitalism”.

Street Vendors in India get Legal Protection

Sharit Bhowmik

On the 5th of March 2014, the President of India approved a law passed by both houses of Parliament, titled ‘Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act, 2014.’ This is a landmark legislation for around 10 million street vendors operating in different cities in India. The Act has not yet been operationalised because the day it received the presidential assent, the Model Code of Conduct for the general elections came into effect. Under this code, no new laws can be enforced till a new government is formed after the elections namely after 16 May 2014.

Extent of street vending
India is perhaps the only country that has provided legal protection to street vendors for conducting their business. According to the act, between 2 and 2.5 % of the urban population is engaged in street vending. In metros like Mumbai and Delhi, street vendors number 250,000 in each. The Act defines a street vendor as:

a person engaged in vending of articles, goods, wares, food items or merchandise of everyday use or offering services to the general public, in a street, lane, side walk, footpath, pavement, public park or any other public place or private area, from a temporary built up structure or by moving from place to place and includes hawker, peddler, squatter and all other synonymous terms which may be local or region specific...

Human Rights and the Freedom of Association in Eastern Europe: The Challenges of Zhanaozen and the Hopes of the Maidan

Kirill Buketov

The outcome of the current confrontation between Ukraine and Russia is yet unclear, but already it has become evident that the social and economic system of the region’s two largest countries will change. This article is about emerging threats and opportunities in the area of labour relations in terms of workers’ ability to realize their collective rights. 

Post-Soviet Legal Context
Workers’ right to organise and bargain collectively has been recognised by the United Nations as fundamental and is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These are the rights that empower any worker to participate in economy and ensure a balanced distribution of profit created by labour. Recognition of these rights is one of the main features that make a modern civilised state distinct from despotic, authoritarian and totalitarian regimes. 

The Eastern European nations of the former Soviet Union are going through a painful and paradoxical transformation. The Soviet system of labour relations did formally recognise the right to organise freely and bargain collectively, although these rights were never realised in practice. Trade unions were a built-in part of the State machinery, dealing with the distribution of social benefits and workers’ edification in the spirit of love for the leaders of the one and only ruling political party.

The Tunisian General Labour Union - Candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize

Lassaad El Asmi

The Tunisian General Labour Union (known by its French acronym UGTT) is perhaps the country’s strongest civil society organization. For decades preceding the democratic change in Tunisia, the UGTT played a major role in organizing and maintaining popular resistance to the dictatorship and continues to play a positive role in the democratic transition process started after January 2011.

While trying to maintain distance from political power in Tunisia and even despite tense and sometimes outright antagonistic relations with the various governments before and after the revolution, the UGTT was nevertheless always considered neutral enough and especially popular and powerful enough to resolve crises and settle disputes. During the months following the revolution of January 2011, the union played a central role in federating the various political players and creating a consensus for a peaceful democratic transition. Independent intellectuals as well as key players from a broad political spectrum found in the UGTT the perfect space to work out a consensual plan for the transition period which eventually led to the first popular and democratic elections in the country since its independence, those of 23 October 2011.

Egyptian Labour in the Shadow of Revolution

Ahmed Badawi

There have been claims that Egyptian workers have been revolting against capitalism[1] but at a closer inspection of the pattern of workers’ protest, the various demands made by them and their mode of organisation do not substantiate such a claim. Activism by workers, in the decade preceding the January 25th, 2011 revolt, has been pivotal in paving the way for the overthrow of Egypt’s long-serving president Hosni Mubarak. In July 2013, the workers, together with millions of Egyptians, took to the streets again to demand the removal of Mohamed Morsi, the Islamist president, who was elected into office in June 2012. Otherwise, workers chose to go on localised, dispersed wildcat strikes and other forms of protest, demanding improvements in their conditions rather than the wholesale transformation of the system.

Egyptian labour: From compliance to revolt
The Egyptian labour force is approximately 26 million, in a country of more than 80 million inhabitants. However of those 26 million, only 6 million are members of trade unions, where half are members of the Egyptian Federation of Trade Unions (EFTU). The EFTU was decreed into existence by the Nasser regime in 1957, it is younger when compared to its Tunisian counterpart, the Union Générale Tunisienne du Travail (UGTT) established in 1946 upon the initiative of the Tunisian labour movement, and which has maintained its independence even during the authoritarian rule of Habib Bourguiba (1957-1987) and Zine El Abidine Ben Ali (1987-2011). Since then, Egyptian workers have been kept on a very tight leash. In the absence of independent trade unions, the EFTU became the only legal umbrella organisation for labour in Egypt.

Lessons learned for a European Minimum Wage Campaign

Stan De Spiegelaere

Ferdi De Ville

With the upcoming European elections, political parties on the left like the Party of European Socialists, the European Left and the European Green party are paying lip service to the call for a European minimum wage policy (European Green Party, 2010; European Left, 2014; PES, 2012). Such a policy would serve as a first step in the development of a more social Europe, enhance the legitimacy of the Union and could contribute to a wage-driven growth model for Europe. In this column we do not go into detail about the economic and social aspects of such a policy, but focus on the campaigning for a European minimum wage. A European minimum wage policy would mean a radical shift in the policy orientation of the Union and by consequence, the campaign for such a policy will be long and exhausting. Luckily, the European left can learn from two very recent and largely successful minimum wage campaigns in Europe: Germany and Switzerland. In Switzerland the campaign is still running while in Germany the current coalition is planning to implement a legal minimum wage in 2015. 

Putting Workers´ Agency at the Centre in the Indonesian Sportswear Industry

Karin A. Siegmann

Peter Knorringa

Jeroen Merk

Globalisation of production has been accompanied by a rise of informal and insecure work across different regions of the world, even in formal establishments. Yet, the role of labour has received scant attention in both the governance and analyses of global production networks (GPNs). Therefore, activists and scholars have demanded a “sea-change in the international business model and the active participation of informed and empowered workers” (Brown 2013: 5) that needs to be flanked by an analytical framework that puts workers’ agency at the centre.

This has motivated us to analyse the Freedom of Association Protocol, a voluntary initiative (VI) that has been implemented in the Indonesian sportswear industry since 2011. In that year, Indonesian exports of leather and leather goods peaked, generating more than 230 million USD in revenues (Statistics Indonesia 2014: 107). Overall, more than 600,000 workers were employed in the footwear industry in the same year, including production for the domestic market (CCC 2014). In export factories manufacturing footwear for Nike alone, one of the largest foreign buyers, more than 128,000 workers are currently employed, the vast majority of which are women workers (Nike 2014).

I want Council Houses in my Neighbourhood

Frank Hoffer

Sitting in nice wine bars or cosy restaurants in superbly gentrified inner city areas, the chattering liberal middle class expresses its disgust about the xenophobic under-classes turning against migrants and voting for right-wing populist parties. Being a member of the chattering class myself I fully share these feelings. The populist migrant bashing makes me furious. A Portuguese lady comes once a week cleaning our house, a Moroccan craftsman does all repair work at our place, a French lady does the ironing, the Bangladeshi dish washer helps to keep prices down in the local Italian restaurant, the coffee at work is served by migrants from Africa, and workers from Eastern Europe clean my office. Thanks to the housing bubble only well-to-do middle class people can afford to live in our neighbourhood, our kids go to a private school and, being a well-paid civil servant at the UN, cheap migrant workers do not compete for my job. Indeed, I have the great pleasure to work in a diverse multicultural and multiracial environment of similarly well-paid and privileged people. Actually I am an “elite migrant” myself who left his own country out of choice to take on exciting jobs in other countries. In short it is easy and cheap for me to be the nice and tolerant cosmopolitan criticising dumb xenophobia as I have all the benefits and none of the disadvantages of mass immigration.