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| 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.
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| João Antônio FelÃcio |
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”.
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| 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...
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
