Reflecting on electoral catastrophe: What lessons can we take away from the victory of Trump?

Peter Evans

Trump’s minions have already made it clear that organised labour will be among their immediate targets. Public sector workers, who are the main pillar of organised labour’s strength, will be attacked early. Turning the National Labor Relations Board into a thoroughly anti-labour organisation will make union certification, via officially sanctioned elections, close to impossible. Another obvious agenda item is a national ‘right to work’ law which will remove the requirement that workers represented by a union pay membership dues. I will not try to exhaust the list of likely attacks here, although projecting the disastrous details of Trump’s regime will be a crucial part of figuring out how to mount some kind of defense.

Trying to think about how it might be possible to change the political landscape is a different sort of task. It requires a careful debate on the structural circumstances that produced so many Trump voters. Theories of ‘The Trump Voter’ abound, and sorting them out will require a careful analysis of exit polls that has yet to be done. But two preliminary themes have already emerged. 

Trump and the Losers of Globalisation and Modernisation

Thomas Greven

Donald Trump clearly lost the popular vote and will only inhabit the White House because of the anachronistic and undemocratic institution of the Electoral College, once specifically designed to foil populists like him. Contrary to claims that he somehow ‘hijacked’ the Republican Party, I argue that he simply used the traditional Republican playbook to the extreme - dividing the population along racial, ethnic, and religious lines as well as exploiting anti-elite sentiment – to sell economic and social policies that will hurt the majority of Americans. This got him support from right-wing extremists in the Alt-Right movement as well as the white working class – Americans without a college education – and surprisingly also from white working class women, given that he tried very hard to offend all women. This latter group of voters, previously either non-voting or marginally part of the Democratic coalition, was the key group for Trump’s success in the old industrial heartlands now called the rust-belt states. It is necessary to ask why this group supported him.

The global economic slowdown

Trevor Evans

The 1980s finance-led phase of capitalism has been characterised by marked cycles led by the US economy, with periods of expansion leading to increasingly serious recessions in 1990/91, 2001/02 and of course 2007/09. The most recent expansion, now in its seventh year, has been especially weak, and the latest forecasts anticipate that growth will remain low (IMF 2016; OECD 2016; UNCTAD 2016). This is led by the world’s three largest economies – the US, the euro area, and China – which together account for more than half the world’s output.

United States
The US’s most recent expansion began in 2009, boosted by Obama’s US$ 787 billion expansionary programme, but it was not until 2012 that output returned to its pre-crisis peak, and growth has remained uncharacteristically weak.[1]

The expansion raised profitability. The share of profits in national income is strongly cyclical, and the peak has risen in every expansion since the 1980s, reaching a high of 14.5% of GDP in 2012. But the rise in fixed investment, which is also strongly cyclical, has weakened. Firms have made record distributions to shareholders through dividends and share buybacks, which incur lower taxes. Non-financial corporations have also become significant financial investors since the 1990s, with the value of their holdings rising from 4% to 9% of GDP. They have continued to borrow despite relatively weak fixed investment. Their indebtedness relative to GDP, which declined in the aftermath of the crisis, is once again as high as in 2008.

Two different approaches that fail to protect Brazilian or British agricultural workers

Vitor Filgueiras

Brazil and the United Kingdom are very different regarding the levels of working conditions achieved historically, but both have faced the same strategies to undermine public regulation lately. The failure of different approaches provides clues about the solutions for similar problems.

Many cases of labour exploitation have been uncovered, including slave-like conditions, in both countries. These exploitative conditions are typically found in the agricultural sector, and most of them are associated with outsourcing/subcontracting arrangements.

In Brazil, almost 90% (44) of the 50 largest cases of slave-like conditions uncovered by public institutions between 2010 and 2014 involved workers hired by main companies through intermediaries. These cases cover different regions, company sizes, and intermediaries’ appearance, ranging from gatos (‘cats’, as labour suppliers are called in the Brazilian rural area) to formal contractors. In the UK, labour exploitation and regulation of labour in rural areas are strongly linked to outsourcing, which is predominantly arranged through so-called gangmasters. Between 2013 and 2015, 900 victims of labour exploitation were assisted by the Gangmasters’ Licensing Authority (GLA) (GLA CEO 2015).

The Insufficient protection of Vietnamese domestic workers in Saudi Arabia

Ly Trinh Khanh

Recently the Vietnamese media has reported many cases of Vietnamese female domestic workers being maltreated in Saudi Arabia. They were required to work between 16 and 20 hours without breaks in a day. Ms. Ha Thi Thu Trang, a 36 years old domestic worker from Thai Nguyen province, reported that some of her friends were either provided insufficient food by the employers or had to eat the food left over from the tables of the employers’ families. Other female domestic workers were sexually abused, such as Ms. Oanh from Nghe An and Ms. K. from Ho Chi Minh City. The domestic workers reported that they were treated like slaves, being forced to work until exhausted (Dai, 2015). 

However the labour sending companies require workers who want to terminate the employment contract before the expiry date to pay a compensation of approximately VN$60 million (around US$2770) (Dai, 2015). It is reported that 30 Vietnamese domestic workers who were rescued from their employers’ maltreatment are residing in the labour camps in Saudi Arabia to wait to return home. Some of them have been waiting for more than one year without the intervention of the Vietnamese authority bodies (PVH, 2016).

Issues in the Restructuring of the Korean Shipbuilding Industry

Kim Kyung-Ran

“Restructuring” was the buzzword that defined Korean society and economy in the wake of the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s. It has returned with similar vigour. This time, the origin is the shipbuilding industry.

The shipbuilding industry has been the star of the Korean economy until now, providing massive exports and employment. At the end of 2014, there were 16 shipbuilding companies in total, with another 5 800 or so businesses of varying sizes tied up in the same industrial ecosystem. Since 2000, the Korean shipbuilding industry has been growing at an astonishing pace, focusing on high-end vessels, taking advantage of cheap and flexible subcontract labour, expanding the non-shipbuilding areas of its business including the development of offshore plants, and increasing offshore production.

The global financial crisis of 2008, however, has hit the industry hard, while the plummeting oil price since 2014 has radically contracted the demand for offshore oil plants. The offshore plant businesses of all the Big Three shipbuilding companies[1] began to produce deficits in 2014 and operating losses over the last three years. The Korean government, which waited for the market to naturally solve the problem, belatedly organised the Industrial and Corporate Restructuring Council, led by the FSS (the Financial Supervisory Service) and other government departments, in October last year. The Council announced the three principles of restructuring[2] in April this year, and began to exert mounting pressure on individual shipbuilding companies through banks. The three principles provide a guise of consistency, but can be reduced to making cuts to facilities and the number of employees.

Social Audits as a tool of transparency in the rural public works scheme of India

Rahul Tiwrekar    

This column uses a rights-based framework to analyse the assessment of social safety-net schemes meant for poverty alleviation. One of the most prominent initiatives taken by the Indian state is to provide a guarantee of employment to its rural citizens under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA). Today this is the world’s largest public works scheme. To bring about transparency and accountability in the implementation of this scheme, a social audit was made at regular intervals. This column analyses this social audit tool.

In 1972 the Maharashtra state government initiated an employment guarantee scheme. After 35 years, the government of India adopted it nationally for all rural districts of the country. Many efforts were made to reduce embezzlement of funds and implement this public works scheme effectively. However, there were still complaints about fake attendance, bogus works and low wages. Against this backdrop, the National Advisory Council (NAC)[1], comprised of activists, proposed to include a social audit in the NREGA. Under section 17 of the NREGA, every village council (Gram Panchayat) should conduct a social audit of work undertaken in its jurisdiction every 6 months. Beneficiaries of the government welfare scheme publically record their observation about the benefit they are receiving, and also issues related to its implementation. 

Unpacking CETA

Peter Rossman

‘The Parties hereby establish a free trade area…’
CETA Article 1.4

‘Trade, like Religion, is what every Body talks of, but few understand: the very Term is dubious, and in its ordinary Acceptation, not sufficiently explain’d.’ 
Daniel Defoe, A Plan of the English Commerce (1728)

The Canada-EU Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), like other looming mega-treaties, is a comprehensive vehicle for expanding the scope of transnational investment by rolling back the capacity of governments to regulate in the public interest. The attack on democratic governance is not restricted to the notorious Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) mechanism, which privileges transnational capital by creating a parallel legal system exclusive to transnational investors. The invasive claims of transnational investors permeate the entire treaty.

‘Free trade’ and the expanding investor universe
Canada and the EU are already among the world’s most open economies. Tariffs are at a historic all-time low. CETA’s primary mission is to eliminate ‘non-tariff barriers’ – namely the laws and regulations constructed over decades of struggle to limit corporate power and support the services and policies needed to defend workers, citizens and the environment. CETA is an investment treaty embedded in a comprehensive deregulatory project.

The treaty leaves existing regulations and policies in Canada and the EU vulnerable to investor challenges – directly through ISDS, or indirectly through corporate-driven state-to-state dispute mechanisms. It also forecloses the use of essential policy tools which progressive governments will need to reverse the social destruction which is feeding an authoritarian, nationalist and xenophobic right.

The Peace Process in Colombia: seeds of hope for an embattled labour movement

Daniel Hawkins

On the 2nd of October, the Colombian electorate will vote in a plebiscite to gauge popular sentiment about the peace accords recently finalised between the Colombian Government and the guerrilla group, Las FARC (in Spanish, the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia). The accords and their expected electoral approval would end the armed conflict waged between las FARC, the Colombian Government, and numerous paramilitary factions which has caused more than 220 000 violent deaths (Centro de Memoria Histórica, 2013) and created millions of victims, making Colombia the country with the second highest number of internally displaced people in the world – more than 6 million (Semana, 2015). Indeed, this peace deal, negotiated over the past four years in Havana, Cuba, would culminate in the transition of las FARC from an armed insurgency group, formally inaugurated 52 years ago, into a political party accorded minor congressional representation[1].

The deal, brokered during four years of intense negotiations, has six chapters[2] and marks a novel attempt to seriously incorporate a platform for justice and victims within the more concrete process of ensuring that the insurgent armed group makes the transition from guerrilla struggle to electoral politics. The chapter on victims seeks to uphold three core elements via a form of transitional justice, based on truth, reparation and no repetition. All those who openly and completely profess their crimes will be accorded a form of non-incarcerated punishment, which will involve territorial seclusion together with community focused, reparation-type work. All other perpetrators of crimes against humanity who do not voluntarily confess will face jail time of 15 to 20 years. This model of justice moves beyond a Kantian and Hegelian understanding of punishment as retribution towards a Hobbesian understanding, wherein penance should focus on the reformation and education of the guilty party.

Brexit and migration: a Swiss view

Vasco Pedrina

Just as in the Swiss vote on the mass immigration initiative two years ago, the issue of migration – together with the social consequences of radical neoliberal policies – was decisive for the outcome of the Brexit referendum. The results in the former heartlands of industry and of the Labour Party speak volumes. The argument was that the European Union (EU), with its free movement of people, was solely responsible for the pressure on wages and for growing social inequalities in the country. Is that really the case?

Of course, following Brexit, the EU authorities would be well advised to take stock and steer a new course – a social one again, at long last – if they really want the EU to survive this great watershed. People are not against the EU as such, according to this year’s Eurobarometer, but they are against an EU that, through extreme measures such as the fiscal pact or unmitigated freedom of establishment, sets off a downward social spiral while only a small minority of the already well-off reaps the benefits of this type of integration.

The UK’s role in the expansion of Europe
But what is the truth about the UK’s responsibility for the current mess? The British like to overlook or forget just who, in 2004 – and with no ifs or buts – favoured opening up the EU to Central and Eastern Europe, allowing free movement of people with as few social requirements as possible and doing without any transitional arrangements when the EU expanded eastwards. And just who was against any kind of flanking measures to the free movement of persons to avoid wage and social dumping[1]. Tony Blair (like a good pupil of Margaret Thatcher), Gordon Brown and David Cameron all, without exception, preached such a policy for decades on end. 

German Federal Labour Court finds that third parties are not entitled to damages during a strike

Reingard Zimmer

Trade unions around the world are facing severe attacks from employers on the right to strike. In the ILO, employers challenged the findings of the CEACR (Committee of Experts on the Application of Conventions and Recommendations) that the right to strike should be part of Convention 87 on Freedom of Association. The recent decisions of the German Federal Labour Court (the BAG, in German) that third parties affected by a strike are not entitled to claim for damages,[1] is therefore tremendously important far beyond German borders. Accepting third parties’ compensation claims in Germany would have been a further limitation on the right to strike.

German air traffic controllers called for a limited strike at Stuttgart Airport in March 2009 against the airport operator. Flights were reduced during the strike. Several airlines claimed for damages, although they were only indirectly affected, on the basis of violation of property rights and infringement on their established and ongoing business. Furthermore, the claimants argued, air traffic controllers were not authorised to strike because they have a policing function. This became the first case in which the Federal Labour Court had to decide whether third parties who were not involved in collective bargaining could claim damages from the trade union if the strike was unlawful.

The court fortunately stated that third parties which have not been part of collective bargaining, but which suffered negative effects of a strike, do not have any claims against the striking union for compensation under common principles of tort law[2]. The court did not decide on the lawfulness of the strike because it had already denied the claim for reasons of tort law.

Using the CETA to move towards a social and environment-friendly globalisation

Reiner Hoffman

Economic globalisation has accelerated enormously. With the advances in information technology and international trade policies, it now permeates almost every sector of the economy as well as our whole way of life. At the same time, tariffs and technical trade barriers have been massively dismantled through wide-ranging market liberalisation, and worldwide competition has been ratcheted up. This has resulted in tenfold increase in global trade and investment flows since the end of the 1980s.

The positive benefits of global linkages have infiltrated so much of our everyday economic and cultural lives that we cannot imagine the world without them. The gains in prosperity are enormous. The downside of it, however, is that stronger competition has massively increased the pressure on pay and working conditions. This applies to Germany and the other member states of the European Union (EU); this does not exclude the disastrous working conditions in the Third World countries and the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) states. More and more, the workers are bearing the brunt of the increased competition and social standards are coming under growing pressure. Unimpressively, the increased prosperity has been most unevenly distributed. While the wealthiest one per cent of the world population is clearly profiting from globalisation, the incomes of large portions of the middle class in the industrialised countries are stagnating and the poorest of the world population are seeing their real incomes decline.

What is at stake with the coup in Brazil?

Antonio de Lisboa Amancio Vale

Brazil's current political crisis was stirred up from the day after President Dilma Rousseff was re-elected with more than 54 million votes in October 2014. It was the fourth consecutive victory of progressive forces in the country's presidential elections.

First the national right wing, again defeated, asked for a recount. Then they tried to question the budgetary accounts of the re-elected president’s campaign and sponsored several other maneuvers aimed at impeachment. Since 2015, fabricated scandals were widely publicised by the media, giving truth to hundreds of lies. The architecture of the coup was drawn, therefore, from the daily action of the media oligopoly (in Brazil, six families control 80% of the media – TV, newspapers, magazines, radio, news agencies, and web sites) with financial support from industry, the finance sector, and agribusiness.

The right wing that conspired openly against an elected president’s mandate is the result of centuries of slavery and resistance against slavery which mark Brazil’s history. It is the legitimate heir of the social and economic forces historically responsible for that regime. When they reached the country, these elites stormed our land and wealth. Captured Africans were brought by force to Portuguese America, and initially became the fundamental labour force in sugarcane, tobacco and cotton plantations. Later this was repeated in villages and towns, mines, and cattle ranches. The socially dominant class, consisting of a white minority, justified this condition by pseudo-religious and racist ideas that legitimised their alleged superiority and their privileges. 

It is time for a global framework agreement in world sport

Walter Palmer

The labour and intellectual property rights of athletes are critical to the staging and marketing of international sporting events such as world championships and the Olympic Games, yet sports organisations have been slow to allow athletes any real power over the conditions of their participation. It’s time for athletes to take the initiative.

There has been progress representing workers’ interests around the field of competition, such as the agreement between the Trades Union Congress (TUC) and the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG) at the 2012 Olympics (TUC 2011), but the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and international sports organisations have retained almost exclusive control of the athletic workplace that fuels a multi-billion dollar sport entertainment business.

As the potential corruption and large scale social consequences of outdated governance models in international sport have become more and more apparent, the conversation needs to shift from the academic discussion prevalent today to one about action. Nothing would provide a more positive jolt to the moribund governance of international sport than if elite athletes were recognised as workers and allowed to negotiate the terms and conditions of their participation. If sports organisations en-gaged in social dialogue with independent, well-resourced athletes’ associations with a stake in the success of the event or sport, the benefits to democracy, transparency and accountability would be lasting. Unfortunately, the past few years’ experience demonstrates that international sport, instead of holding itself to a higher standard, has not yet exhausted lobbying for special treatment – a ‘sporting exception’ – under the guise of specificity and autonomy. Instead of honoring and respecting the rights of athletes in their workplace, international sport organisations have become adept at a practice that is becoming more and more common in the wider world of work: avoiding an employment relationship with their key workers.

Illegal and criminalised: undocumented Zimbabwean migrant workers as unfree labour in Witbank, South Africa

Johannes Machinya

Restrictive immigration enforcement practices have seen an increasing convergence between immigration and criminal justice systems with undocumented (im)migration becoming more illegalised and criminalised. Criminalising migrant ‘illegality’ gives legal legitimacy to discrimination and exclusion of undocumented migrant workers. It creates legalised unfreedoms and produces undocumented migrant workers as a subordinate workforce without legal status – a palatable fodder for exploitative employers, particularly in the informal sector.

This paper is based on in-depth interviews conducted for my Doctoral research in Witbank, South Africa, with undocumented migrant workers from Zimbabwe from July 2015 to July 2016 on their experiences of ‘illegality’ in their everyday encounters with state power. Migrant ‘illegality’ is a mode of being-in-the-world which works as a powerful disciplining mechanism for undocumented migrants. It is a condition attributed to the unlawful entry, residing and/or working by foreigners in South Africa without official documentation authorising them to do so. However, De Genova (2004:161) argues that migrant ‘illegality’ should not be simplistically conceived as the “presumably transparent consequence of unauthorised border crossing or some other violation of immigration law”; rather, it needs to be analysed as a complex “juridical status and a socio-political condition” (Willen, 2007:9) experienced in the everyday lives of undocumented migrants.

Assessing WAHSUN: lessons from the pioneer of regional networking of public sector unions

Baba Aye

The West African Health Sector Unions’ Network (WAHSUN) held its second biennial conference in April this year in Cotonou, Benin. WAHSUN has inspired the establishment of similar networks elsewhere, particularly in Africa, so WAHSUN’s development holds great hope for deepening trans-national unionism on the African continent. This article describes the origin and development of WAHSUN and assesses the challenges and opportunities that its consolidation represents, in the hope that this could inspire other creative efforts to further solidarity of workers across borders.

Origins and development of WAHSUN
The idea of establishing the network was first suggested in 2004 in Accra, Ghana, during that year’s annual review and planning workshop of the English-speaking (East and West) Africa sub-region of the Public Services International (PSI). Participants from the health sector unions of different countries recognised that they faced similar attacks against jobs and trade union rights under the guise of ‘public sector reforms’1. Two years later, PSI organised a meeting for leaders of these unions where a memorandum of agreement was signed to form a sub-regional network to defend public healthcare delivery and health workers.

On 9 November 2007, WAHSUN was established at Abuja, Nigeria. The unions which founded WAHSUN were the Medical and Health Workers’ Union of Nigeria, the Health Services Workers’ Union of the Ghana TUC, the National Union of Private Health Sector Workers of Liberia, and the Sierra Leonean Health Services Workers’ Union (SLEHSWU). Officials of the Ugandan government and the health employees union were present as observers.

A New Tool Is Born – The Social Protection Floor Index

Cäcilie Schildberg

Mohamed Attaallah

In 2012, the international community adopted Recommendation 202, concerning national floors of social protection, in the International Labour Conference (ILC) in Geneva. The recommendation calls on the 184 member states to implement nationally defined guarantees of income security from childhood through economically active age to old age, as well as access to essential health care. The need for universal social protection policies was acknowledged and reinforced by heads of states in the Sustainable Development Goals adopted in September 2015 in New York.

But moving governments from easy promises at the global level to real policy action at the national level only happens, in many cases, under pressure. How can implementation of social protection policies be supported?

The Global Coalition for Social Protection Floors, founded in March 2012, played an important role in pushing for a strong recommendation at the ILC in 2012 (Global Coalition, n.d.). The coalition is a network of more than 90 civil society and trade union umbrella organisations committed to supporting social protection floors as key instruments to realise the human right to social security and the advancement of social justice. The Global Coalition represents millions of people organised in or affiliated to the umbrella organisations that are members of the Global Coalition.

Want to improve crowdwork? Regulate it

Valerio De Stefano

Janine Berg

Crowdwork is the casual work of the 21st century. Like other forms of casual work, crowd work is characterized by lack of job security and few, if any, labour protections. But with day labourers, dockworkers, and agricultural hands – probably the types of casual work that most readily come to mind – work is at least for the day. In the on-demand economy, it is for the task at hand. This can be as short as a few kilometers’ drive or ten minutes spent tagging photos on the internet. Lucas Biewald, the CEO of the micro-task platform Crowdflower, once quipped that ‘before the Internet it would be really difficult to find someone, sit them down for ten minutes and get them to work for you, and then fire them after those ten minutes’. Now instead, ‘you can actually find them, pay them the tiny amount of money, and then get rid of them when you don’t need them anymore’ (quoted in Marvit, 2014).

The ‘Turker’, the Uber driver, or the graphic artist working on an online design platform must continuously search for work, monitoring their computer screens or phones for work opportunities. Indeed, in a recent ILO survey on employment and working conditions in two leading micro-task crowdwork platforms, it was found that workers averaged 18 minutes looking for work for every hour working (Berg, 2016). As an Amazon Mechanical Turk worker from the United States put it, 

The toughest part of turking for a living is actually finding the jobs. For every hour I spend working I most likely spend 2 hours monitoring the various scripts I have running to see what jobs show up (Quoted in Berg, 2016:14)

Uber: do not take us for a ride!

Claire Clarke

Mac Urata

The ‘sharing economy’ is changing the landscape of work by promoting a model that provides easy access to work but further casualises the workforce. Work has evolved from long-term employment to a series of jobs, and has now again been reduced to the delivery of unique tasks.

Transportation network companies (TNCs) such as Uber are driving the growth of less formal work in passenger transport via a business model that challenges the traditional approach to the supply and demand of passenger transport as well as the way in which value is created, distributed and controlled. These companies promote themselves as electronic marketplaces that connect customers with drivers. They claim they are not taxi operators, and therefore operate outside existing industry regulations on licensing requirements, insurance, and driver screening.

Uber claims to offer flexibility for its ‘partners’ (users and drivers), but driving for Uber can be tough. Many media reports suggest that Uber drivers are not earning the legally required minimum wage. In some cases, drivers make no money at all from some shifts.

Crowd Work: Shame, Secrets, and an Imminent Threat to Employment

Kristy Milland

You may have no idea what crowd work is, and that is understandable. Most people do not. Crowd work is not a job that many aspire to, nor is it one that workers are necessarily proud of. It may not carry as much shame as some other jobs, but due to the low pay and unfair treatment workers often experience, it is not a job to boast about.

Crowd work comes in a variety of forms, but I define it as any paid work which is offered to or completed by a large group of people. Crowd work is the dirty secret of major corporations. It is a rising threat to economies and governments around the world, and it could be a future for many people as they try to make a living. In this article I wish to reveal the exploitation of crowd work, the pressing threat it has become when paired with automation, and some possible avenues of resistance that we can use to protect ourselves and our loved ones in a future where this is the only option left for income generation. I want to show the reality of crowd work and how harmful it could become.

An Introduction to the Platforms
A few major forms of crowd work are found today. The first are macro-task platforms such as Upwork, Uber, and Fiverr, where work is offered to a large group of people, but only one completes it. Competition is fierce, so pay declines over time, and worker reputation, which is key to accessing more work, is totally in the hands of the work requester.

Work Struggles at Amazon in Germany and Beyond

Workers in the logistics sector have tremendous leverage because they work at the global intersection between production and circulation of goods. However, they and their unions are seldom prepared for the transnational tactics used by corporations to undermine worker struggles, such as building distribution centres abroad or sourcing deliveries from non-striking centres.

In Germany, however, workers from Amazon, the leading US e-commerce multinational, have been organising for more than two years with some success. With the support of solidarity groups, they have developed international relationships with workers from other Amazon sites, such as Polish workers who are usually considered a threat owing to their lower salaries. Such self-organisation shows that a section of the organised workers at Amazon have the willingness to organise beyond national borders and are ready to take an emancipatory path.

‘Work hard, have fun, make history’[1]

Amazon was founded in 1994 in the US, and opened its first centre in Germany in 1999. It now has nine distribution centres with about 10 000 workers. Worldwide, it has about 230 000 full-time and 100 000 short-time employees.

Work in a distribution centre is industrial and comparable to a factory: individualised mass distribution, reliance on machinery such as goods-picking robots, assembly lines, and advanced division of labour and standardisation of tasks. It is therefore more appropriate to call these centres ‘distribution factories’, and Amazon’s success lies more in increasing the rate of exploitation than in innovative business strategies.

Working in the solidarity economy: between precarity and emancipation

Jacob Carlos Lima

Angela Maria Carneiro Araújo

Marcia de Paula Leite



Since the early 2000s, the discussion on the role and nature of cooperatively organised work in Brazil has been intense, reflecting its multiple facets: as a form of cost-cutting and labour precarisation; as an alternative way of generating jobs and income; or as a democratic form of labour organisation, based on the principles of cooperativism and self-management.

Between 2007 and 2011, we researched the management experiences of cooperatives formed by local authorities, NGOs and trade unions in the Brazilian state of Sao Paulo (De Paula Leite et al, 2015), asking questions like: To what extent are cooperatives and associations a form of employment creation and income generation? We also examined their scope for transforming gender relations: who are the men and women who work in these cooperatives? How does the form of work organisation affect gender relations within the workplace?

To overcome the difficulty of finding reliable, current data, we surveyed associative labour in the State of São Paulo and conducted field work at several solidarity economy units.

Working poverty in many sizes: A survey of Delhi garment workers challenges key assumptions in the labour standards debate

Alessandra Mezzadri

Three years after Rana Plaza, garment workers worldwide still endure poor working conditions. The industry has witnessed several ‘minor’ disasters and sweatshop scandals since then. In Cambodia, a garment factory outside Phnom Pehn collapsed and fell into a pond a month after Rana Plaza. Images of garment workers swimming to safety amidst floating pieces of clothing appeared in major newspapers (O'Keeffe K. and Narin, 2013). In 2014, Cambodian garment workers were subjected to a wave of state-based violence (Sotheary, 2014). The industry made news yet again in February this year, when the sports’ gear giant Rip Curl was named and shamed for producing in North Korea, where many factory workers endure ‘slave-like’ conditions, according to Labour Behind the Label. The label on the clothing read ‘Made in China’. Rip Curl declared they had no idea their goods were being made in North Korea, blaming unauthorised, hidden subcontracting by suppliers.

Challenging the standard story about labour standards

The common narrative is that, while labour standards might work in tier-one factories (those with direct relation to the global buyer), the problem - so the story goes - is that many tier-one factories further outsource production to ‘unauthorised’ sub-contractors. This is a key message in the recent Stern report, whose focus on informal garment units beyond tier-one factories unveiled several noteworthy issues and sparked fierce criticisms (See Anner and Bair, 2016). In particular, it questions the coverage and effectiveness of the Bangladeshi Accord on Fire and Building Safety (the Accord).

Coordination among strikes and prospects for pattern bargaining in Vietnam

Chi Do Quynh

The 1995 Labour Code granted Vietnamese workers the right to strike. However, none of the more than 5 000 strikes since then followed legal procedures, nor was organised by the official union, the Vietnam General Confederation of Labour (VGCL). While the VGCL called these wildcat strikes ‘purely spontaneous’ (Chi and Van den Broek 2013), many studies proved they were organised by rank-and-file workers with the covert support of the Vietnamese mid-managers in foreign-owned enterprises, and sometimes even the official union leaders in the enterprises (Clarke and Pringle 2007, Anner and Xiu 2015). Based on a longitudinal study of strikes from 2005 to 2015 in seven provinces of Vietnam, including Ho Chi Minh City, Dong Nai, Binh Duong, Long An, Hanoi, Bac Ninh and Hai Phong, this paper finds that not only are strikes well organised, but there is also coordination among strikes. Strike waves result from the characteristics of industrial clusters, coordination among foreign employers, and worker communities inside industrial zones, which together create the basis of informal pattern bargaining.[1]

Organisation of strikes

Most strikes happened without advance notice or any attempt by the de facto leaders to negotiate with the employers. A smaller number of strikes, however, happened after several attempts to bargain informally. These strikes were often organised as follows: a group of rank-and-file workers petitions the employers, either directly or via the official union leader. The petition states the workers’ hardships and presents demands. It gives a deadline for the employer’s response, and fixes a date for the strike if the employer fails to respond or refuses the workers’ demands. In these companies, the informal leadership is active not only during strikes but also after. According to Tran (2013), the de facto leaders are often team leaders or experienced workers who have built networks among rank-and-file workers in the workplace and in their community, often around common cultural identities such as gender, province of origin or workplace.

The lowest part of the working class: refugee struggles and the trade unions in Germany

Oskar Fischer

More than one million refugees came to Germany in 2015, the majority fleeing from Syria’s civil war and others coming from the Balkan states, Afghanistan, Iraq and northern Africa. How should the trade unions respond to the ‘refugee crisis’ amidst a swing to the right in the public debate?

The current debate in Germany

The public debate is mainly concerned with the so-called ‘refugee crisis’, an expression which suggests that refugees are to blame for the economic crisis and the rising social inequality in Germany and Europe. The ‘Iron Chancellor’ Angela Merkel has now come under serious attack, from the right wing within her own government coalition, although she is herself responsible for tightening the asylum laws. The Federal Ministry of the Interior reports that fewer than half of asylum seekers have been awarded political asylum (Bundesministerium des Innern, 2016).

Pegida, a right wing political movement whose name translates as Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamification of the West, has organised weekly rallies all over Germany for more than a year. Among other things, they call for Germany’s borders to be closed and for asylum seekers to be deported. Meanwhile, a wave of right-wing terror swept across Germany last year, involving hundreds of arson attacks against refugee facilities and countless assaults on migrants.

Rebuilding our Power: Organising Precarious Warehouse Workers in Canada

Mostafa Henaway

The logistics revolution over the past twenty-five years has become a central feature of globalisation, leading to the rise of global corporate retail giants such as Walmart, Amazon and Sports Direct. This revolution is fuelled by their ability to move goods as quickly and as cheaply as possible from the global South to the global North. ‘Wal-Mart may be widely known as a mammoth retailer, but in the world of business management it is known as a logistics company’ (Cowen 2014: 192).

The increasingly complex supply chains which source cheaper goods are based on just-in-time production and deregulated labour markets, so the modern corporation has also restructured its logistics, creating a flexible, low-wage and exploitable workforce across warehouses and distribution centres. According to the Financial Times,  

The people here are not day labourers looking for an odd job from a passing contractor. They are regular employees of temp agencies working in the supply chain of many of America’s largest companies – Walmart, Macy’s, Nike, Frito-Lay. They unload clothing and toys made overseas and pack them to fill our store shelves. They are as important to the global economy as shipping containers and Asian garment workers. (Gabrell 2013)

Antonio Gramsci and Britain’s Corbyn moment

Camila Bassi

Introduction

From the mid-1990s, the British Labour Party explicitly oriented to free market capitalism and adopted a new version of Clause IV of the Party constitution, which decisively turned away from the original promise to ‘secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry’ (cited in Gani, 2015). New Labour, as it was branded, pushed politically conservative discourse and policy on social justice (in contrast to redressing poverty and inequality), on workfare (as opposed to welfare), and on crime and immigration, and it implemented public-private partnerships and private finance initiatives to dismantle the public sector and welfare state. New Labour’s landslide electoral successes in 1997 and 2001 indicated its firm hegemony of the Party and the labour movement base: a swing in the Party’s basic contradiction, as a bourgeois-workers’ party, to its right-wing pole.

A majority on the British Left regarded such changes as irreversible. No one predicted that in the Labour Party leadership race of 2015 the socialist candidate of Jeremy Corbyn would win, and with a huge mandate. Corbyn’s election manifesto included demands for growth not austerity, public ownership of the railways and the energy sector, a large-scale public and private house-building programme and rent controls, reinvestment in the welfare state, the abolition of zero hours contracts, and the right of trade unions to organise collectively to redress workplace injustice. While arguably not going far enough, notably, in failing to promise that Labour Party MPs will not implement existing Conservative Government funding cuts to the public sector, Corbyn nonetheless stands in stark opposition to unbridled capitalism.

The 2015 elections in Argentina and its impact on labour

Bruno Dobrusin

Luis Campos

The right-wing victory

On November 22nd, Argentina underwent the second round of the 2015 presidential election. The stand-off between the candidate of the Peronist party, then-governor of Argentina’s largest province, Daniel Scioli, and the right-wing mayor of the City of Buenos Aires, Mauricio Macri, was decided in favour of Macri by a margin of just over 2 percent of the vote (51-49%). The victory of Macri represents a significant change both in Argentina and in South America. The wave of victories of left and center-left governments seems to be coming to an end in the region, the continental right-wing (with the support of the usual external forces) are getting the upper-hand.