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.

Protracted Displacement: Syrian Refugees in Turkey

Bilge Pınar Yenigün

Özge Berber-Agtaş

The world faces the greatest movement of people since World War II, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Turkey has become a major refugee-hosting country owing to an unpredicted influx of Syrian refugees forced to flee from the civil war (UNHCR, 2014). Syrian refugees are still considered as ‘guests’ (a word chosen over ‘refugees’) in Turkey, but their displacement will not be resolved in the near future and will continue to be defined as protracted and unresolved. According to the UNHCR, 4 603 363 registered refugees have been forced to leave Syria, with most moving to Turkey (2 503 549), Lebanon (1 069 111) and Jordan (635 324) since 2011 (UNHCR, 2016).

When the civil war began in 2011, the Turkish government declared an open-door policy and welcomed the Syrian refugees. It predicted that the conflict would end swiftly and allow Syrian ‘guests’ to return home, precluding any need to plan for their long-term or permanent stay in Turkey (İçduygu, 2015). Five years later, more than two million refugees have crossed the Turkish border and thousands are risking their lives attempting to travel to Europe.