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| Guillermo Zuccotti |
As the International Labour Organisation (ILO) prepares to celebrate its 100th anniversary, the debate is underway as to the future of work.
When we, the workers, are called on to discuss this issue in light of the current global context, our minds turn to the social value of a return to work as a driver of upward social mobility, something that must be advocated on the world stage.
The crisis of the Welfare State
The crisis in social welfare of the 1970s, which was marked by changes in production patterns, gave rise to explanations of the crisis in work – and in particular waged work (Gorz 1982, Fitoussi and Rosanvallon 1997) – that at the extreme predicted the end of work (Rifkin 1996), arguments that guided the thinking of international organisations such as the IMF and World Bank on this subject.
And so the world continued its relentless march towards a second best in terms of the quality of human work and the associated labour rights standards. Evidence of this can be found in the institutionalisation of informal labour as a form of production and source of labour. This informality was also responsible for the phenomenal increase and concentration of profits in the hands of a few, oligopolising the structure of the markets in our countries.
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| Patrick Belser |
In recent years the share of labour compensation in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) declined in many countries around the world. At the same time wage inequality reached levels considered by many to be both socially and economically unsustainable. Too much inequality not only erodes social cohesion, it also reduces opportunities for social mobility, hurts consumption by lower income groups, weakens the middle class, and creates societies in which elites live in a separate world.
Reducing inequality has thus become more central for policy makers in many parts of the world, as is reflected not only in the International Labour Organisation (ILO) decent work agenda, but also in the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda, which calls for decent work for all as well as fiscal, wage and social protection policies to progressively achieve greater equality.
The latest ILO Global Wage Report focuses on wage inequality, taking as the starting point that overall wage inequality results from a combination of differences in average wages between enterprises and wage inequality within enterprises.
This enterprise perspective differs from the more traditional focus on skills as the major source of inequality. Many studies have documented how technology, globalisation, pressures from financial markets, labour market deregulation and trade unions’ weaker bargaining power have contributed to increased wage inequality between highly skilled workers and workers with lower levels of education. But individual characteristics alone (including age, educational attainment, and years of tenure) do a relatively poor job of explaining the variation in workers’ wages.
The simple human capital model used in the Global Wage Report shows that there are sometimes enormous differences between people's actual wages and the wages predicted for these individual characteristics. The discrepancy is large anywhere in the distribution, but particularly large at the top, where workers are hugely ‘overpaid’ for their characteristics, and at the bottom, where they are grossly ‘underpaid’.
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| Pham Thi Thu Lan |
Since the reform from a command economy to a market economy in the early 1990s, labour relations in Vietnam have also changed, with more widespread disputes and strikes. Since 1995, when the Labour Code of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam first took effect, there were more than 6000 strikes[1], but what is remarkable is none of these were legal (The Labour Newspaper, 2017). A legal strike has to fulfill two criteria,: firstly, it can only take place after a procedure stipulated by the law which rules out rights-based strikes; and secondly, it has to be led by a trade union. However, all strike incidents in Vietnam appear to be sponteneous and unorganised, and thus are illegal and refered to as wildcat strikes.
Legal constraints on the right to strike
The procedure in Article 209 of the Labour Code of Vietnam provides for ‘interest-based’ strikes, that is strikes about labour disputes on matters not regulated by the law or in an existing collective bargaining agreement. Rights-based strikes are considered illegal and any dispute over rights is subject to settlement at court, which is often costly and time consuming. Court rules are unenforcable in a number of cases. Futhermore, the law concerning the right to strike provides for difficult and lengthly formal procedures (Articles 212 and 213 of the Labour Code). A collective labour dispute must first go through compulsory mediation and arbitration, where it is also decided whether the dispute is right-based or interest-based. These mechanisms often give trade unions and workers a hard time before any possiblity of going on strike. On top of that unions must fulfil heavily bureacratic requirements such as getting signatures of at least 50% of workers, specifying in writing the time, venue, scope and demands of the strike, providing names and addresses of contact persons from the trade union committee, and sending a copy of the strike decision to employers, the upper-level trade union and the state labour management agency in advance. It might take three weeks from the declaration of a labour dispute until a legal strike can take place.
