All new columns from 1.1.2018 on have been / will be published on the new website

The power of informal transport workers

Dave Spooner

Urban passenger transport in developing countries is dominated by the informal economy. Informal transport workplaces – bus terminals, taxi ranks, motorcycle taxi stands, and minibus parks – are major transport hubs of national economic and political importance.

Most of the world’s transport workers are informal. They face police harassment, criminal extortion, job insecurity, low incomes, discrimination, and no access to social security. Yet they provide essential services for millions across the world. In Asia and Africa most urban passenger transport is informal, employing many thousands of workers in a wide range of occupations. Women workers are the most precarious and low paid in the sector, facing discrimination, violence, sexual harassment and abuse. Informal work is now also widespread in the developed world with the proliferation of transport jobs in the ‘gig economy’.

Motorcycle taxis, couriers and delivery services are increasingly popular in congested cities. Huge numbers are involved. In Kampala, Uganda, for example, the authorities estimate there are 120 000 boda-boda (motorcycle) operators. In 2013 the boda-boda industry in Uganda was the second largest employer after agriculture, reported Standard Bank researchers (Nasasira, 2015).

But where are the workers? How the youth entrepreneur model fails in Africa

Pierre Girard

The figures are now well known: 375 million young people will reach working age in Sub-Saharan Africa by 2030, and for many their livelihoods will depend mainly on the rural economy (Losch, 2016). Facing the massive generation of activity required by these demographic dynamics, entrepreneurship has become the leitmotiv of many donors’ and NGOs’ programmes and projects, as well as public policies. According to them, the multiplication of entrepreneurs can meet the employment challenge in the African countryside.

Amidst the positive picture presented by the ‘Afro-optimism’ narratives that have emerged since the growth recovery of the 2000s and the proliferation of over-publicised success stories, entrepreneurship is scarcely criticised. In view of the above, it is essential to qualify the unrealistic expectations generated by the fantasy in which millions of rural youth would constitute a myriad of independent entrepreneurs on the continent. Not everyone will become an entrepreneur in this fantasy: the majority of young people will combine different employment statuses where relationships of economic dependence and subordination will be dominant. Therefore, it would be better to focus public policies on social protection than on entrepreneurship.

The slow death of Ecuadorian Banana workers

Magali Marega

Jo Vervecken

‘In reality, the work in the field implies a slow death, because it kills you inside’ says Luis, a 59 year old banana worker. ‘Paradoxically, it’s the only way of surviving but it kills you anyway.’[1]

This testimony comes from one of 30 in-depth interviews in Vitali’s (2015) study of work conditions and workers’ health in the banana-producing sector in Los Rios province of Ecuador.

Luis is one of 200 000 people working on banana plantations in Ecuador, the world’s leading banana exporter. The global banana supply chain is under a lot of pressure from food retailers, forcing down producers’ prices. Workers and the environment suffer the consequences. Rights violations create serious health risks for the banana workers.
One of the main health risks is daily exposure to pesticides. Aerial fumigation is done at any hour of the day. María describes: ‘They fumigate during lunchtime, also where we are eating. They force us to sign a paper stating that we agree with aerial fumigation and that we receive the necessary protection. If we don’t sign, we get into trouble.’

Redesigning the Euro area towards a social project

Hansjörg Herr

As shown in detail in the recent e-publication (Herr et al, 2017) linked below[1] all countries in the European Monetary Union (EMU) were severely hit by the Great Recession in 2008 and 2009. The initial recovery was relatively quick, but the Eurozone slid into a double-dip recession in 2012 and 2013. Since then there has been a slow recovery. Germany became one of the best performing countries in terms of GDP growth. Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain suffered massively from the crisis. Development in France also has been sluggish.

The lost decade for some of the EMU countries was caused by ill-advised policies. More fundamentally, the architecture of the EMU is not adequate to create a stable currency, in spite of some reforms after 2008, such as the steps towards banking union.

After the Great Recession, three polices were particularly damaging.

Marshall Plan with Africa: an opportunity for trade union revival?

Terence Manus

The Marshall Plan was the economic recovery plan employed to stabilise Western Europe after World War Two, which also laid a foundation for constructing public institutions, formulating pro-worker economic policies and constructing a social security system which could reduce extreme poverty in the case of structural labour market changes. Chang (2014) frames it as the plan which laid the foundation for the ‘golden age of capitalism’.

Analysis of the role of trade unions in formulating recovery plans and the impact of these policies on the international trade union movement is often lacking. On the other hand, trade unions in Africa, and their role in the liberation struggle, are often mentioned by researchers analysing political, economic and social developments in post-colonial Africa – but usually only briefly. The development of working class institutions in the early post-colonial era under the Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) and how SAPs influenced trade union development have enjoyed very little attention.

Structural Adjustment Programs
African decolonisation is analysed in two phases, the late 1960s and 70s, and the 80s and 90s when SAPs were implemented without considering countries’ different political, economic and social development stages. Without referring to SAPs, the BMZ (the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development in Germany) recognises this weakness by mentioning that the Marshall Plan for Africa will not take a blanket approach, additionally appealing to institutions to prioritise research and data collection (BMZ 2017).

How President Erdogan is marketing the state of emergency

Gaye Yilmaz

Tolga Tören

Workers and their unions in Turkey have been systematically attacked by their rulers over many years. But these attacks have sharpened recently, especially following the attempted coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in 2016, after which large numbers of public servants were sacked and imprisoned. The president has used the subsequent state of emergency to intervene in workplaces where strikes are threatened; this has become a marketing strategy to woo business. We will discuss the repression of Turkish workers and ask why this president and his policies seem so popular.

From bad to worse
In the last 15 years, the AKP (Justice and Development Party) has passed numerous regulations against workers and their trade unions. Even more savage has been the President’s response to events harming working people. For instance, in May 2014, an explosion at a coal mine caused an underground fire, which burned for two days. It was Turkey's worst ever industrial accident: 301 miners died, some burnt alive, and others suffocated. Families of victims and also thousands of workers from other sectors were shocked when Mr. Erdoğan, on the evening after the disaster, said ‘These types of incidents are ordinary things’ (The Guardian, 2014).

Can the future of work be uncoupled from productive development?

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.

A perspective on wage inequality from the ILO Global Wage Report

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’.

Why always wildcat strikes in Vietnam?

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.

A worker-driven way out of the crisis in Mediterranean agriculture

Giulio Iocco

Karin Astrid Siegmann

SOS Rosarno, an association of farmworkers, farmers and activists in Calabria, Italy, represents an innovative response from below to the extreme exploitation and precarity of migrant farmworkers in the Mediterranean region, as well as to the retailer-driven crisis of small-scale farming. 



The crisis of farmwork
Agriculture is a major employer in Rosarno, an enclave of intensive citrus fruit production in southwestern Calabria. Here, each year, growers employ about 5 000 farmworkers. Since the late 1980s, foreign migrant labourers gradually became essential within this workforce, now totalling approximately 2 500 migrants. While indispensable to value addition in the regional citrus fruit sector, they endure extremely harsh conditions.

Migrant farmworkers receive only about two thirds of the minimum wages established by local labour contracts, while commonly working longer than the stipulated limit. For specific tasks, piece-rate payment further increases the incidence of overtime. Farmworkers also experience extreme precarity in employment relations: discontinuous daily employment, informal contracts without social security entitlements, and indirect hiring through intermediaries. The latter’s fees further reduce already meagre wages. Appalling working conditions are compounded by extremely precarious living conditions. Within a highly stratified workforce, West African workers - the reserve army of seasonal farm labour – experience the worst conditions. The vast majority live either in an over-crowded tent town or in abandoned buildings where they have no or very limited access to electricity, hygienic services like clean water. Their legal precarity prevents them from exercising basic civic and human rights. Owing to the lack of adequate action by unions, this isolation further increases their vulnerability vis-à-vis labour intermediaries and employers (Garrapa 2016, MEDU 2017).

Struggle pays back! A victory against casualisation at London University

Lorenza Monaco

After more than three years of struggle, casual teaching staff from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) of the University of London, organised in the Fractionals for Fair Play (FFFP) campaign, won an impressive victory against precarious working conditions and indecently low pay. The recently signed deal, which represents a significant improvement not only in terms of remuneration but also in the way it promises to overcome an identified mechanism of exploitation, marks a crucial step in the struggle against casualisation in British higher education. The campaign’s latest outcome and the way it was organised may indeed provide inspiration for worldwide campaigns against the marketisation of universities and the deterioration of jobs which comes with it. Overall, this case shows how solidarity, collective action, and a consistent focus on struggle demands, even when challenged during dire times, can eventually win.

Can migrating women escape patriarchy?

Gaye Yilmaz

Sue Ledwith

Women may migrate to escape conflict, war, poverty, family pressures and responsibilities, or fear of sexual oppression. But they also find themselves caught in the twin controlling ideologies of patriarchy and religion.

This was the case for the 120 women migrants interviewed for our book Migration and Domestic Work. All were domestic workers in private households in London, Berlin or Istanbul. Most were either Muslim (52) or Christian (44). A handful were Buddhist, Hindu or Pagan. Twenty atheists had come to disbelief from the two main religions.

Data was collected through interviews, visits and observations in all three cities. These took place in the homes where the women were employed, in ethnic and community organisations, and in employment agencies. The research was designed for women to tell their stories and to establish their agency. An allied purpose was to explore collective solidarities among the migrant women. The interviewees included Kurdish women, who are an under-researched group. A creative research reciprocity was developed: the researcher, Gaye Yilmaz, taught Marxist economics in community organisations in London and Berlin.

Digitisation of manufacturing: The quest for the Union 4.0 paradigm

Ramon Certeza

We are witnessing a great transformation in our times in the way things are being manufactured. Products that were crafted by humans in the past are now being manufactured by automatic machines and robots. We are now in the middle of, in today’s parlance, the ‘industrial revolution 4.0’, entailing the digitisation of the economy. This article will look at how digitisation rapidly transformed the factories of today and how unions are preparing to survive the factories of tomorrow.

Digitisation of the economy was the central theme of the World Economic Forum in Davos in December 2015, where prominent economists and European research institutions produced reports on the future of work, touching on possible consequences of digitisation on workers (IndustriALL, 2017). In May 2017, the Friedrich Ebert Foundation organised an international conference in Vietnam along the same line of inquiry that sought to answer two main questions: what is the impact of digital transformation on Asian economies, and has this transformation been made fair and inclusive? These two events catapulted the discourse to a new level, with differing views and perspectives from actors at different levels.

A year of Brexit: trade union perspectives

Owen Tudor

The United Kingdom (UK) voted to leave the European Union (EU) on 23 June 2016. Since then, the government has been forced by the Supreme Court to obtain Parliament’s permission to initiate the Article 50 process to leave the EU, subsequently issuing the appropriate letter to the European Commission. Negotiations only commenced on 19 June, almost a year after the referendum, and no agreements have yet been reached. The government has introduced the EU (Withdrawal) Bill, designed to copy EU law into UK law before leaving the EU, which is due to happen, under the Article 50 process, by late March 2019. 

The Trade Union Congress (TUC), with most of Britain’s largest unions, campaigned to stay in the EU[1] on the grounds that leaving risked workers’ rights and decent jobs. A legal opinion setting out the risk to workers’ rights (Ford, 2016) from a leading employment lawyer, Michael Ford, was published ahead of the referendum, as well as a TUC analysis of the effect on jobs and wages (TUC, 2016a). 

According to TUC opinion polling immediately after the referendum, 60% of trade unionists voted to remain in the EU, but much larger proportions, including majorities among leave voters, wished to see EU employment laws retained after leaving, and opposed further cuts in government spending to address the economic challenges of leaving. The referendum result was strongly connected to a desire to punish the establishment, together with concerns about the effect of immigration. Generally, older voters, politically conservative voters, and those without qualifications beyond compulsory school were most likely to vote to leave (GQRR, 2016).[2]

Confronting job precarity in Spanish tourism: The rise of the hotel housekeepers

Ivan Murray

Ernest Cañada

Since the 1960s, tourism has played a major role in Spanish capitalism; it has been mostly clustered around the Mediterranean coast and in the Canary Islands. Under General Franco’s dictatorship (1939-1975), tourism was a key currency earner for the balance of payments and helped boost investment. Tourism has subsequently been closely linked to financialisation through the formation of real estate bubbles, especially after Spain joined the European Union (EU) in 1985. While the recent crisis deeply affected the Spanish economy after the burst of the real estate bubble, tourism has been booming again after a short stagnation period between 2008 and 2010. In spite of this, working conditions in the sector have deteriorated significantly, especially for hotel housekeepers. They have, in response, led one of the most significant social mobilisations in Spain.

A long history of attack on working conditions
Since tourism started developing under Franco, profits have been made on the back of widespread labour exploitation. This has however hardly been discussed, except for a few studies on the labour-tourism nexus during the years of Spanish developmentalism (Mandly, 1978) and in neoliberal times (Cañada, 2015).

The movement we need in Britain

David O’Connell

A bit of background
‘We must give them reforms,’ said Quintin Hogg, a Conservative MP, in 1943, ‘or they will give us revolution’ (Sagall, 2005). The Labour government which won the first election after the Second World War is credited with creating the NHS (National Health Service), nationalising core industry, and pushing the most left wing programme in British political history. This is what Labour supporters today point to when you ask them what a Corbyn revolution might look like, and it has certainly begun to gain traction among the British population.

What they forget is that the 1945 Conservative manifesto also included most of these benchmark Labour policies, which were not unique to Labour. Hogg reminds us that this social compromise was born out of the bosses’ general need to compete with the then-powerful socialist movement for the loyalty of the working class.

The resulting pact froze class conflict in most core industries and confined it to the fringes of the working population. The unions became professional mediators rather than instigators of class conflict or social transformation, and were relegated to propping up progressive politics in parliament, a fundamentally disorienting change which dramatically deskilled the labour movement (Berlin, 2006).

The movement against the labour law in France: creativity, state violence and anger

The reform of the French labour code, referred to as Loi Travail (labour law), was announced at the beginning of 2016 by the French socialist government. The reform is complex as it touches many areas, from working time to the ‘right to disconnect’ (meaning the right not to be permanently available through IT devices). The key changes entail shifting collective bargaining from branch to company level, decreasing over-time pay, and making redundancies easier. In short, it is about the flexibilisation of work.

From the outset, the French trade unions, workers, and many young people protested against the law in its totality, all of this while the country was in a state of emergency after several attacks linked to Islamic State. 

The protests were diverse in composition[1] and creative in tactics, earning them the title ‘movement’. They demonstrate the anger of the working class as well as young people’s perception that there is no future for anyone. Determined to pass the reform, the state reacted violently to the protests. The reform came into force on 1 January 2017, while the state of emergency is still in place and the far right on the rise. 

(Re)producing inequality: production and consumption under the imperial mode of living

Markus Wissen and Ulrich Brand

As the French economist Alain Lipietz (2000) pointed out, there is a strong similarity between the social and the ecological issues in capitalism. Both nature and the worker are affected by the expansionary tendencies of capitalist production and valorisation. Consequently, it is in the interests of both workers and environmental protection to contain or overcome those tendencies. 

This is, however, only one side of the coin. The other is a more contradictory relation between labour and the environment, particularly regarding the early industrialising countries: the very reproduction of the working class as part of the capitalist societies of the Global North is based on socio-environmental destruction. (This is not to deny that the environmental impact of the rich is much bigger than that of the subaltern classes).

The basic compromise between labour and capital rests on the willingness of labour to accept its subordination to capital under the condition that labour participates in the increase in material welfare enabled by a growing capitalist economy. Welfare increases, however, imply access to, and extraction of, resources. They produce emissions that have to be absorbed by natural sinks (such as forests or oceans in the case of CO2), and they involve the exploitation of labour power elsewhere.

Solidarity for whom? How Cosatu became part of the establishment

Jan Theron

When considering President Donald Trump’s attempts to keep foreign migrants out of the US, remember who put him in power. It was by all accounts working class people in areas decimated by neo-liberal policies. Remember also that Trump is trying to secure the support of US trade unions for his reconfiguration of these policies. One commentator has described this as ‘eat[ing] the American left’s lunch’ (Harris, 2017).

It should come as no surprise to South Africans that trade unions can support a racist, right wing government. That was how it was in 1976. The South African government of the time was also trying to keep out migrants who were not white, and the established union movement was more or less complicit. Those unions that did not actively support the bars to non-racial organisation imposed by apartheid did nothing to undermine them. In practice, their commitment to solidarity extended only to organised workers.

That year, I became general-secretary of a trade union (‘the union’). The union came from a tradition in which solidarity meant making common cause with unorganised workers everywhere. However, little evidence of this tradition remained by 1976. It had been corrupted organisationally, and there were leaders ‘eating the money’.