Sex Workers’ Struggles: Trade Unions must accept Workers’ Realities

Thierry Schaffauser

While Amnesty International adopted a policy favouring full decriminalisation of sex work earlier this year, the labour movement remains divided: should it see sex work as violence against women, to be abolished (Bindel 2003), or as a legitimate occupation needing to be unionised (Hardy 2010)? Sex workers have organised for their rights since at least the 1970s, even forming or joining trade unions in some cases, but the labour movement tends to ignore these efforts.

Sex workers do matter! 
The debate around decriminalising sex work often focuses on questions such as whether or not we like the job, if we have been forced to engage in it, or if we have been raped as children. These questions are never asked about other workers before defending their rights. As sex workers, we accept that work is, most of the time, not a choice but an economic constraint, and we are able to distinguish between slavery, forced labour, and the consented exploitation of our work.

The conflation of sex work with trafficking conceals much about the reality of sex work. For instance, peep shows, bars, or massage parlours have to hide the fact that sex work happens. As a result, neither condoms nor information about safe sex are available in those workplaces. In some clubs, employers refuse to pay for heating while workers are almost naked. In others, sex workers now have to pay fees to enter when they used to be paid for their presence. Legal constraints on sex work allow websites and newspapers to censor our adverts as they please, making us pay again for new ones.

The Bangladesh Accord - a model to secure workers rights in global supply chains?

Frauke Banse

After the collapse of the Rana Plaza Building in Bangladesh in April 2013, there was massive public outrage on retailers and brands in Europe. It was under these conditions that a coalition of Bangladeshi unions, workers’ rights organisations such as the Clean Clothes Campaign (CCC) and the Workers’ Rights Consortium (WRC), and the global union federations IndustriALL and UNI Global Union was able to establish the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh. This agreement, known as the Accord, was to be signed by brands and retailers sourcing from Bangladesh. It is legally binding and has high standards of transparency. Labour and ca­pital are represented equally in the governing body of the Accord, and workers´ health and safety committees, with at least 50% of re­presentatives drawn from labour, have to be established in the factories covered by the Accord. The Accord provides the chance to reduce the incidence of deadly accidents in Bangladesh´s garment industry. Due to heavy public pressure, more than 200 companies have so far signed the Accord. It now covers more than 1 600 of nearly 6 000 Ready Made Garment (RMG) factories in Bangla­desh (BGMEA, 2014; Accord, 2015).

IndustriALL (2013a and 2013b) sees the success story of the Accord as a potential model for new forms of global industrial relations.[1] Similar sentiments were raised by the International Trade Union Conference (ITUC) and the German retailer KiK (ITUC, 2014; KiK, 2013). However these sentiments tend to overlook, first, the specific circumstances under which the Accord came into being and, second, the problems of practical implementation.

Fixing minimum wages in India: skirting real issues

Sharit Bhowmik

The issue of minimum wages in India has long been discussed but never resolved. It crops up during labour movements but dies out soon after. There was a nation-wide strike on 20 and 21 February 2013 (Bhowmik, 2013), and one of the ten demands submitted by the trade unions was to fix a national floor wage of Rs10 000 a month (roughly US$155). This is higher than the usual wage in agriculture; plantations and informal employment, but there was no real explanation for why this figure was chosen. Moreover, the trade unions did not take it up as a campaign issue after the strike.

When the new government led by BJP (Indian People’s Party) was voted into power in May 2014, it adopted a more aggressive attitude to labour, stressing the old World Bank stand that protective legislation would decrease employment. The government started to modify existing labour laws to be more employer friendly (Bhowmik, 2015).

Trade unions in the country then formed an alliance to oppose these anti-labour policies. The BMS (Bharatiya Mazdur Sangha, Indian Workers’ Union), which is the largest trade union federation with around 10 million members, was initially part of this alliance. BMS is closely affiliated with the government through a common mentor, the RSS (Rashtriya Swamsevak Sangh, National Volunteers Union), which is a Hindu fundamentalist body.

Minimum wages, collective bargaining and economic development in Asia and Europe

Maarten van Klaveren

National and international debates concerning the establishment of a Statutory Minimum Wage (SMW) have hitherto tended to polarise around what we might term the ‘social justice’ arguments for a wage floor to tackle poverty level wages on one hand, and on the other, the ‘economic imperative’ to ensure a SMW does not depress demand in certain labour markets. Lately, as low or declining rates of economic growth have gripped many developed and developing nations, the negative macro-economic effects of low pay have begun to receive long overdue attention. As a result, the need to address low pay has increasingly been articulated as a labour market recalibration that combines both social justice and economic imperatives. Crudely speaking, where levels of household debt are already unsustainably high, possibly the quickest way to increase consumer demand is through wage growth. Moreover, improving life at the bottom of the national wage distribution has further attractions, not least for politicians under pressure to reduce income inequality. This fusion of social and economic interests has rejuvenated the interest of governmental policy makers in Europe in the setting of national minimum wages and, in some cases, has even prompted them to consider ‘living wages’ higher than minimum wages as a means of arresting increases in income inequality.

Portugal’s new social and political context

Elísio Estanque

Hermes Augusto Costa

The elections on 4 October 2015 ushered in a changed parliamentary scenario which seems to herald a major political shift. After four years of austerity, which have affected every aspect of Portuguese life but particularly labour, the election outcome proved contradictory right from the start. The victory of the right-wing alliance between the Social Democratic Party, the PSD, and the Social Democratic Centre, the CDS, opened up the possibility for an alliance of the left.

The election results
There was a high rate of abstention – 44.14 % - from the parliamentary elections. The PSD-CDS coalition, which had been in government since 2011, received the most votes (36.86 % of the votes), followed by the Socialist Party (32.31 %), the Left Bloc (10.19 %) and the Portuguese Communist Party (8.25 %). In our view, this electoral outcome was not because the Portuguese people like austerity. Rather, the following factors must be considered:

How US Labour can still defeat the Trans-Pacific Partnership

John Cody

In a coup for lobbyists and harmful special interests, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is just months away from full ratification. TPP is a trade agreement among twelve Pacific Rim countries concerning a variety of matters of economic policy that will impact nearly 40 percent of global GDP. It is designed to lower trade tariffs, establish an investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism, and will have a broad impact on intellectual property, healthcare, and Internet freedom. However, this deal can still be stopped if labour, activists and progressives can successfully capitalize on growing discontent surrounding it. Already US labour has done much to fight TPP, but it’s important that it ramps up its efforts over the coming months or it may face the consequences of a deal that will negatively impact people around the world.

Where TPP Stands
Countries involved in the TPP wrapped up negotiations in October and recently released the text of the massive 5,554-page agreement. In the US, the Obama administration is racing to push the deal through within the next 90 days. The fear is that if agreement on TPP is not reached in time, the debate about its massive impact on the US workforce could spill over into the 2016 Presidential and House of Representatives election cycle.

UK Trade Union Bill: Latest in line of global attacks on right to strike

Helen Russell

Across the globe trade unions are faced with increasing restrictions on their ability to take industrial action. Within days of being elected to power, the British Conservative government announced its intention to make it harder for trade unions to take industrial action and introduced the Trade Union Bill, describing it as a “legislation to reform trade unions and to protect essential public services against strikes” (Queen Elizabeth II 2015).

The Bill is an assault on British trade unions, containing a raft of draconian measures designed to stifle their ability to protect workers’ rights. Although a continuation of the anti-trade union legislation passed since the 1980s by Conservative governments, the Trade Union Bill goes further than anything that Margaret Thatcher introduced.

New thresholds on union balloting 
The Bill contains new thresholds and minimum turnouts for any industrial action ballot. Currently in the UK there is no minimum threshold for turnouts and ballots only require a simple majority to take action. However, for a ballot to be accepted now, unions in all sectors have to ensure that 50 percent of members vote.

Greek Collective Bargaining after the Third Memorandum

Thorsten Schulten

The radical restructuring of Greek collective bargaining was right from the beginning one of the core demands of the Troika of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund (Schulten, 2015). Under the first two Memoranda, Greece was forced to agree to far-reaching changes in the legal framework of collective bargaining which led to a radical decentralisation and a large-scale elimination of multi-employer agreements. According to the third Memorandum from August 2015 the development of Greek collective bargaining should now be evaluated by an international commission composed of independent experts as well as representatives from international organisations – including the institutions of the Troika, but also the International Labour Organisation (ILO). Based on this, further reforms of the Greek bargaining system should be decided in light of “best practices” in Europe.

Changes in Greek collective bargaining law under pressure of the Troika
Since the beginning of the 1990s Greece had a comprehensive collective bargaining system with strong multi-employer bargaining at national, industry and occupational level and a comparatively high bargaining coverage of around 80 per cent. At the national level the peak organisations of trade unions and employers negotiated a collective framework agreement in which certain minimum working conditions – including the level of the national minimum wage – were agreed. Building on that, collective agreements could be agreed both at national and regional level for particular branches or occupational groups. Finally, companies could conclude special company agreements with the responsible trade unions. 

The National Living Wage and Alternative Enforcement

George Wilson

The surprise announcement in July of plans to introduce a ‘national living wage’ for workers over 25 in the UK has generated much debate. In effect a higher minimum wage for adult workers, the living wage will initially be set at £7.20 per hour and will be reviewed each year by the Low Pay Commission. The current Conservative government, who are responsible for the policy, have made clear their intention to increase the living wage to £9 per hour by 2020. Although this appears to be high, the living wage would still be less than two-thirds of the median wage in the UK.[1]

On the one hand, proponents of the policy believe it will help an estimated 2.7 million workers who currently earn below the new threshold (D’Arcy and Kelly 2015). On the other hand, commentators have labelled the policy a cynical attempt to hijack the popularity of living wage campaigns for short-term political gain (Wilson 2015a); the national living wage will not be set against criteria to ensure workers can maintain a decent standard of living.[2]

Although a higher minimum wage is welcome, increasing its level from the current rate of £6.70 per hour to upwards of £7.20 per hour raises concerns regarding the effectiveness of the existing enforcement regime. Businesses in traditional low wage sectors, including agriculture, hospitality, retail and social care, have argued they will find it difficult to pay the national living wage (Sky News 2015). Minimum wages only help those who rely upon them if they are paid, or put differently, if they are effectively enforced.

At What Level Should a National Minimum Wage in South Africa be Fixed?

Eddie Cottle

The struggle for a National Minimum Wage (NMW) in South Africa has a long history, having been waged, largely by organised worker formations, since the 1930s. These efforts have taken various forms from open class conflict, to more subdued trade union representations, to the various governments of the day. Most of these representations by the labour movement to government were made for the introduction of a NMW system that would enforce a minimum wage across all industries in the country.

To date, no NMW has been set. It is only after the Marikana Massacre and the farm workers’ revolt of 2012, that the post-apartheid African National Congress (ANC)-led government has decided to the introduction of a NMW, initially through agreeing to an investigation. The content of the various reports of the task teams involved in the investigation have not been made public, and the rank-and-file members of the trade unions have not been involved in democratic processes to decide where the NMW should be set.

Self-Managed Class-Struggle Alternatives to Neo-liberalism, Nationalisation, Elections

Lucien van der Walt

The 1970s-plus rise of neo-liberal policies profoundly destabilised Left currents that sought social change through the state. Old statist roads – the social democratic Keynesian welfare state (KWS), Marxist central planning as exemplified by the Soviet Union (USSR), and post-colonial nationalist import-substitution-industrialisation (ISI) – had some achievements.

But all had, on the eve of neo-liberalism, entered economic and political crises, and inherent flaws.

The subsequent neo-liberal victory entailed more than shifts in ideas and policies. These were part of a deeper shift in capitalism that reflected and reinforced the historic failure of statist roads. To follow the old routes today, whether through new Left parties, or efforts to win state elites to defunct policies, is futile.

What is needed is a working class Left approach freed of the failed statist past, resolutely opposed to capitalist and nationalist solutions, and rooted in historical anti-statist, libertarian Left traditions. While the Left remains statist, it is crippled by past crisis and current powerlessness, under intellectual and political siege.

After Rana Plaza: Multi-Stakeholder Governance of the RMG Industry in Bangladesh

Mohd Raisul Islam Khan

Christa Wichterich

In April 2013, the collapse of the Rana Plaza building in Bangladesh that killed 1,129 garment workers and left more than 2,500 seriously wounded generated a huge public outcry at the national and international level. The tragedy broadened earlier demands from trade unions and rights-based campaigns for regulation of labour relations in transnational apparel production chains and for improvement of workplace safety in the Readymade Garment (RMG) industry in Bangladesh. Public pressure led to the adoption of a range of action plans and agreements. The most notable is The Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh (Accord), the first legally binding multi-stakeholder agreement signed by over 180 apparel corporations, two global union federations IndustriALL and UNI Global Union, labor rights campaign groups and Bangladeshi trade unions. The Accord stipulates comprehensive inspection of the fire and building safety status of the factories, which should result in Corrective Action Plans (CAPs) to ensure remediation of safety hazards, a fire and building safety training and empowerment measures for workers. Thus the agreement acknowledges that workers’ participation has to play a significant role in improving workplace safety.

In parallel, the Government of Bangladesh has adopted the National Tripartite Plan of Action on Fire Safety and Structural Integrity (NTPA) which stipulates to accomplish 23 activities related to legislation and policies, administrative and institutional upgrading, as well as practical activities along with factory level safety inspections. The adoption of these regulatory tools was welcomed as a “breakthrough” for the RMG sector in Bangladesh.

Food sovereignty and Fair Trade: a link between alternatives to the neo-liberal food regime

Andreas Bieler

Jacklyn Cock

The multiple global economic, financial, food and ecological crises are deepening. And yet, neo-liberal capitalism continues to reign supreme. Every crisis is responded to by further marketisation and commodification. ‘Free’ trade is deepened in negotiations of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA), emission trading systems are one of the main strategies for mitigating climate-change. We suggest that the links between the concepts of ‘food sovereignty’ and ‘fair trade’ could promote connections between labour and community struggles and foster labour solidarity at both the transnational and local levels. Both concepts present challenges to the neo-liberal food regime.

The expanded free trade regime and tensions in the global labour movement
Since the completion of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) Uruguay Round in 1994, the expansion of the ‘free trade’ agenda into areas of trade in services, public procurement, trade related investment measures, intellectual property rights and agriculture as well as the highly controversial investor-state dispute settlement mechanisms has led to tensions within the global labour movement. Trade unions in the north especially in export sectors have tended to support free trade agreements, assuming that new markets will secure jobs for their members. By contrast, labour movements in the global south have generally voiced opposition since expanded free trade often means deindustrialisation and job losses for their countries (Bieler, Ciccaglione, Hilary and Lindberg, 2014).

Reflections on the Fair Food Agreement between the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and retail multinational Ahold

Karin Astrid Siegmann

Ahold signs on to a programme for farmworkers’ labour rights
On the 29th of July 2015, the Dutch retailer Ahold announced a historic agreement with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a migrant farmworkers’ organisation in Florida’s tomato fields. Being signatory of the CIW’s Fair Food Program (FFP) implies the following: Ahold-USA commits to a wage premium in its supply chain in the form of a ‘penny per pound’ of harvested tomatoes, compliance with the Fair Food Code of Conduct, the provision of worker-to-worker education sessions, a worker-triggered complaint resolution mechanism, as well as the establishment of health and safety committees on every participating farm.

The retailer’s participation represents a quantum leap towards decent work for workers who are disadvantaged relative to most other US wage and salary workers on the basis of their poverty, occupational hazards, their vulnerability to unemployment and their irregular immigration status (Kandel 2008). 

The agreement marks a U-turn for Ahold. Since 2010, the company had responded to the CIW’s Campaign for Fair Food with a ‘slow NO’. During shareholder meetings and in public statements, the retailer had denied responsibility for farmworker wages in their suppliers’ fields, arguing that enforcement of labour standards is the duty of US public bodies. In addition, it maintained that its own Standards of Engagement for suppliers were sufficient to guarantee fair and dignified working conditions in its supply chain, and that it already sources from growers who participate in the FFP - without disclosing, though, who those tomato growers are.

What next, after Tsipras dashed Schäuble’s hopes for a Grexit?

Frank Hoffer

A Greek government forced to bow to the impossible, a referendum brushed aside, the Franco-German partnership damaged, European compromise diplomacy replaced by ultimatums, the euro in limbo, large parts of Europe swept by anti-German fear and resentment and another €83bn sunk into a doomed “rescue package”. Not quite how successful policies are supposed to play out.

The worst thing about German policy is not that it is harsh and uncompromising towards the “reform-shy” Greeks, but that it is wrongheaded. Instead of sustainable debt restructuring and support for real investment in order to gain the time and acceptance needed for difficult and sometimes lengthy structural reforms, the Greeks have once again been prescribed more of the same: keep cutting till you collapse. Pursuing this failed policy with Swabian thoroughness and Prussian rigour has made Wolfgang Schäuble a popular figure at home and an unloved German martinet abroad. In Europe, this policy has done much to destroy confidence in, and respect for, Germany.

Power and Classification: Casual Workers Struggles in the South African Post Office

David Dickinson

Jennifer Chung’s (2009) important study illustrates how marginalised workers mobilised symbolic power in their struggles for better pay and conditions in the US and South Korea. Chung uses Bourdieu’s understanding of symbolic power as ‘one of the most fundamental mechanisms of change in the social world.’ Central to the disputes she describes were ‘classification struggles’ in which the legitimacy of the triangular employment relationship, created by the introduction of labour brokers, was challenged: workers demanded to be legally classified as employees of the client company, not of the labour broker. Labour broking separates the de jure and de facto employer, usually to the disadvantage of workers. Chung places emphasis on the ability of the precarious workers to shame their de facto employer by making visible the conditions under which they worked.

Labour broker employees or ‘casuals’ in the South African Post Office (SAPO) engaged in their own struggles against exploitation (Dickinson 2015). Organised into workers committees they successfully challenged labour broking. After strenuous attempts to resolve the dispute through legal channels, they focused on, often violent, forms of ‘disruptive power’ (Wilderman 2015). There were symbolic victories in their struggle, but these alone were far from decisive in their struggle.

The Labour Code on Industrial Relations Bill 2015: Tough times ahead for labour in India

Sharit Bhowmik

Headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, as of May 2014, the right-wing government has been in talks of increasing jobs by restricting workers’ rights. The government has categorically stated that, in the past, too much protection was given to workers in the formal sector. Subsequently, this is the main hurdle for expanding employment. If job protection is removed, job creation (it was argued) will peak when the employers have the power of hiring and firing. In keeping with its objectives, the government has decided to amend and amalgamate the existing laws that provide protection to labour. The Factories Act has been redefined to exclude all manufacturing units that employ less than 40 workers. In other words, nearly 75% of factories in the country will be exempted from regulating working conditions. Similarly four acts relating to wages and bonuses have been merged in one code. However the approval of parliament will be required before they become laws.

Fiscal Space for Social Protection: Options to Expand Social Investments in 187 Countries

Isabel Ortiz

It is often argued that social protection is not affordable or that government expenditure cuts are inevitable during adjustment periods. But there are alternatives, even in the poorest countries.

The paper "Fiscal Space for Social Protection: Options to Expand Social Investments in 187 Countries", published by the ILO Social Protection Department, offers an array of options that can be explored to expand fiscal space and generate resources for social investments. These include: (i) re-allocating public expenditures; (ii) increasing tax revenues; (iii) expanding social security coverage and contributory revenues; (iv) lobbying for aid and transfers; (v) eliminating illicit financial flows; (vi) using fiscal and foreign exchange reserves; (vii) borrowing or restructuring existing debt and; (viii) adopting a more accommodative macroeconomic framework. To serve as a general advocacy resource, Annex 1 of the paper provides a summary of the latest fiscal space indicators for 187 countries.

Not performing to standard: The IFC’s social conditionality and freedom of association

Conor Cradden

The potential for private or non-state regulation to improve labour standards has been much canvassed in recent years. It has been argued that working conditions in developing economies can be upgraded by making supply or investment contracts conditional on labour standards compliance. Alternatively, this can be achieved by offering access to premium price markets through product labels that certify the successful completion of a social auditing process. Nevertheless, it remains in dispute whether this kind of private regulation is effective from the perspective of workers. Existing research has found that while firms are often prepared to make modest improvements to pay for working conditions in pursuit of some market advantage, they remain unwilling to accept any significant increase in the capacity of workers to influence management decisions about employment conditions and the organisation of work. The research we report here confirms that as long as private regulators do not see it as their role to address the power imbalance between workers and employers, they will have little durable impact on labour standards.

Struggle in a Time of Crisis

Mbuso Nkosi

Nicolas Pons-Vignon

The crisis which started in the United States in 2007 has turned into a global depression whose consequences are wreaking havoc across the world, although affecting in a disproportionate manner the 99 per cent, people who depend on their labour or state transfers to live. While banks and large companies have been bailed out (a remarkable sign that state intervention is alive and well in the neoliberal era) it is the majority who are now paying the bill in the form of spending cuts. Such cuts have direct social and economic effects: on the one hand, they make life more difficult for the poor; on the other hand, they undermine investment and economic recovery, delaying desperately needed job creation. As shown by David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu (2013) in their work on austerity policies’ impact on health, austerity kills, not just growth, but people. 

The crisis has shown the limits of the neoliberal model of accumulation and of its theoretical or ideological foundation, the neoclassical belief in the self-regulating ability of ‘free’ markets. This is nothing new though, as many economists outside of the hegemonic tradition had been arguing since the 1980s that neoliberal capitalism does not only increase inequality, but generates disequilibria which threaten the possibility of sustained growth. There is however, in Europe and North America, a rampant sense of powerlessness in the face of the crisis. This is because, in spite of the rise of numerous movements of contestation of neoliberal policies, from Occupy to the Indignados, the only cure which politicians are implementing to respond to the ills of neoliberalism entail more of the same.

Freedom of Association and the Right to Strike

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva

It is a fact that technological innovations and changes in the organization of work have caused alterations in the labour market, making certain international labour standards obsolete and, at the same time, giving rise to demands for new rights. However, this does not justify the pressure that the International Labour Organization (ILO) has been put under to reduce its character as an International Organization (IO) to that of an agency of the United Nations system, nor indeed the questioning about whether the right to strike is part of Convention 87, on freedom of association, although the ILO has been fostering this concept for more than sixty years now. 

The ILO is one of the oldest and most important organizations in the UN system. It is also the only one to be run on a tripartite basis – governments, employers and workers. It has standard-setting and supervisory powers, as well as mechanisms for annulling obsolete standards, for updating incomplete standards and for enabling member countries to denounce Conventions that they consider unsuitable. So the instruments for perfecting the standards system do exist.

Farm Worker Uprising on the Western Cape: From “Flexible Work” to “Moment of Madness”

Jesse Wilderman

“We outnumber the farmers eleven to one and they still hoard the economic power and still talk to us with disrespect. We could kill all the farmers in a weekend if we wanted to and this land will be fucked up - it could happen in one day. But until this strike we were never able to get all the farm workers and all of us to come out and fight back”

Local Councilman and supporter of the farm worker protests 

In late 2012 into early 2013, tens of thousands of farm workers and their allies across more than twenty-five towns around the Western Cape of South Africa, engaged in a historic series of explosive and unexpected work stoppages and protests. There had not in living memory been a protest that reached this scale and intensity, even though grievances around low wages, inadequate housing, and unfair treatment have plagued farm workers for years; the perceived power of the farm owners coupled with a lack of large, formal organisation or trade unions among farm workers seemed to have stacked the deck against collective resistance.

Not only was the scale of this uprising historic, it displayed a form of resistance outside the “paternalistic” discourse that characterised relationships between farm workers and farm owners; as Ewert and Du Toit explain about traditional farm worker resistance, “. . . they rely on the ‘weapons of the weak’, operating within the framework of the paternalistic moral universe itself, relying on individual appeals, consensual negotiations, and the avoidance of the appearance of open conflict” (2005). Yet this uprising was defined by open conflict, including burning of vineyards, protest marches, and pitched battles with the police; farm workers and their allies adopted an overt, confrontational, and adversarial approach in an apparent break from the traditional discourse.

The Swedish Model in 2015: A ‘Safe Haven’ or a ‘Nordic Noir’?

Alexis Stenfors

Fiction versus a startling reality
I am positively surprised by the increasing number of people coming up to me asking for travel advice on Scandinavia. As is often the case, they admit to ultimately having been swayed by the dark landscapes and fictional characters in Nordic noir novels or television box sets. Simultaneously, foreign observers find the new political landscape in Sweden puzzling and worrying - and rightly so. Having slowly witnessed the deconstruction of the old ‘Swedish model’, a new element appears to have cemented the belief that Sweden truly has changed: the rise of the Sweden Democrats. How could an anti-immigrant party on the Far Right become the 3rd largest party in the country?

Initially, it would be easy to dismiss the Sweden Democrats as yet another European anti-immigration party on the Far Right, occasionally flirting with Fascism but portraying themselves as ‘neither Left nor Right’. As is then the case, the focal point gravitates towards immigration and multiculturalism for supporters and opponents alike. This might be a convenient and logical approach, but it also leads to the wrong precision.

The Swedish model offers an insight to why.

Chinese investments, Marange diamonds and ‘militarised capitalism’ in Zimbabwe

Nunurayi Mutyanda

Crispen Chinguno

Taurai Mereki

For the past two decades, China has undergone a massive global economic expansion and a continued search for resources to keep up its high growth targets. This converged with Zimbabwe’s adoption of a look East economic policy in 2003, following a fall out with the West. As a result there have been massive Chinese investments in various Zimbabwean sectors including mining, telecommunications, infrastructure development, agriculture and retail. This paper examines the experience of workers in Chinese investments, drawing from Marange diamond fields in Zimbabwe. 

The mining potential of the Marange fields was discovered in 2006 following the unorthodox withdrawal of mining rights from the British-owned African Consolidated Resources (ACR) due to a strained relationship between Zimbabwe and the United Kingdom (Sokwanele, 2011). 

‘Militarised’ capitalism

Zimbabwe discovered its biggest diamond deposit when it was under sanctions from the European Union and the United States. Underlying politics and the mineral rights legal wrangle presented an impediment for the attraction of investors. The regime was thus forced to adopt a militarised model of capitalism, a mining exploitation regime controlled by the military and its associates. Its industrial relations model is not receptive to independent trade unions. To start up the diamond mining operations at Marange, the government established a subsidiary closely linked to the Zimbabwe Defence Forces (ZDF) through a parastatal, the Mineral Marketing Corporation of Zimbabwe (MMCZ) (ibid). This was the onset of the militarisation of the Marange diamond mining operations and has a bearing on the labour relations that evolved.

Reducing inequality will not happen on its own – explicit policies are needed

Janine Berg

For the past decades, in many countries of the world, the State has slowly retreated amidst the belief that by giving more space to market forces there would be greater economic growth and thus greater economic opportunities. This belief was manifest in the drive to liberalize goods and financial markets in the 1980s and 1990s across the world, and in the decreased investment by the public sector of many advanced economies in public services and goods as well as in redistributive policies.

Not all countries instituted these changes as wholeheartedly as others, and not all countries originated from the same starting point, but the overall effect has been rising inequality in most parts of the world: North America, Europe, Asia, and parts of Africa. Latin American in the 2000s (though not in the 1980s and 1990s) stands as an exception, largely because many countries in the region increased public investment, strengthened minimum wages and instituted redistributive policies during this decade.

Over the past few years, the increase in inequality has become a growing concern among policymakers and the public at large. But while the problem is now recognized, many of the policy solutions advanced are the same as those espoused during the onset of globalization, namely improving workers’ skills so that they can better compete in the labour market.

The Transformation of the Construction Sector in South Africa since apartheid: Social inequality and labour

Eddie Cottle

Over the past 20 years South Africa’s construction sector has undergone marked expansion. In the apartheid era it was constrained by sanctions and racial policies. However, the post-apartheid state actively encouraged a series of policy measures to foster the economic growth of South African construction firms. Key to the policy process was the establishment of a Construction Industry Development Board, a Register of Contractors, the scheduling of public sector spending through the Medium Term Expenditure Framework process, and support programmes to develop the emerging black contractors. The post-apartheid state also became the construction sector’s biggest single client in the delivery of social and economic infrastructure. 

The almost immediate shift from the social democratic Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) in 1994 to a series of neo-liberal macro-economic policies, from 1996 onwards, ensured increasing levels of labour flexibility and improved productivity of the labour force. State intervention was therefore crucial in ensuring that the construction sector enjoyed 18 years of sustained economic growth with an average GDP contribution of 2.3 per cent over a 20 year period.

Preconditions for successful implementation of the new minimum wage in Germany

Thorsten Schulten

It is just a few weeks since the minimum wage was introduced in Germany, but it is already becoming very clear that its implementation in practice really cannot be taken for granted. Scarcely a day goes by without the media reporting new minimum wage breaches. Online, meanwhile, law firms openly offer counselling on how to sidestep the minimum wage. And every day on the minimum wage hotline set up by the German Trade Union Federation (DGB) and the Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs (BMAS), hundreds of employees tell of the sometimes highly devious attempts being made to do them out of the minimum wage.

Back in the autumn of last year, in a study commissioned by the Labour Ministry of North Rhine-Westphalia, the Hans Böckler Foundation’s Institute of Economic and Social Research (WSI) was already asking questions about the preconditions for the successful implementation of minimum wages. It examined examples from other European countries (France, the UK and the Netherlands), as well as German experiences with regional and sectoral minimum wages, which have existed for quite some time.[1]  Basically, it identified five factors for success:

1. A precise and manageable definition of the minimum wage
2. Clear, checkable provisions on the relationship between the minimum wage and working times 
3. The existence of efficient monitoring institutions and processes 
4. Effective instruments for wage-earners to get their minimum wage entitlements applied 
5. The broadest possible social acceptance, including by large sections of business.