Is South Africa at a turning point?

Edward Cottle

A strike is a ‘social phenomenon of enormous complexity which, in its totality, is never susceptible to complete description, let alone complete explanation’ (Gouldner, 1954:65). The complexity of the meaning and implications of strikes often comes to the fore when offensive strikes – strikes where workers demand more than what they have in terms of wages and working conditions – force the attention of the state, capitalists and civil society. They lead to a varied interpretation not only of how events unfolded but also the impact they have made. 

Strikes are a key manifestation of the class struggle over the distribution of national income and reform of the labour relations system. Offensive strikes can generate an extraordinary amount of pressure on the social system which often leads to structural changes such as the reconfiguring of the industrial relations system, the economy or the political system. Such events are referred to here as a turning point ( Legassick, 2012; Alexander, 2013; Webster, 2016).

Strikes in post-apartheid South Africa
In the immediate post-apartheid period, the trend was for strikes to increase in frequency, with the highest number of strikes in South African history – 1 324 strikes – taking place in 1998. From 2000 and 2009, however, strikes averaged 71 per annum, which was even lower than the 1960s, and these strikes were largely defensive in character.

The NHS: safe in our hands?

Claire Sullivan

It is not unusual to hear the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) described in terms such as ‘The envy of the rest of the world’, ‘Britain’s best-loved institution’ or ‘The Labour Party’s greatest monument’. So, is the nearly 70-year old NHS now under threat, and if so, is it worth fighting for, and if so, how?

The NHS was created in July 1948, one of the commitments made by the Labour government before its surprise landslide election victory at the end of WWII in Europe.

The NHS – key in an optimistic vision of a comprehensive welfare state – was founded on three principles: first, it would meet everyone’s needs; second, it would be free at the point of use; and last, it would be based on clinical need and not the ability to pay. The creation of an NHS available to all, regardless of wealth, was both intensely romantic and intensely practical in its ideals and aims.

The NHS is the largest and oldest wholly publicly funded healthcare system in the world, and remains one of the most efficient, egalitarian and comprehensive. While 11% of the UK population uses private healthcare (The King’s Fund, 2014), this is mostly to supplement rather than replace NHS services. The creation of an enduring national health service is indeed an achievement to be celebrated, for which millions of people have worked over its lifetime. The Labour Party and the people of Britain can rightly be proud, but it is important not to look at the NHS’s history only through rose-tinted spectacles. The creation of the NHS was bitterly opposed by some health professions, notably doctors, and the rows over what ‘comprehensive’ access to free services really meant started early, with charges for dental services, eye glasses and prescriptions being reintroduced as early as 1952 amid concern over soaring costs.

The right to strike under attack: Recent patterns and trends of violations

Edlira Xhafa

The right to strike is under attack in many countries across the world. Pressure on the right to strike has also increased at the international level. It culminated at the 2012 International Labour Conference (ILC) where the Employers’ Group challenged the existence of an internationally recognised right to strike protected by the ILO Convention No. 87 and questioned the role of the supervising machinery of the International Labour Organisation (ILO). The controversy may have a serious impact on the exercise of this fundamental right, especially in the current context where economic and security arguments are increasingly used as an excuse for the violation of fundamental human and democratic rights. The Friedrich-Ebert Stiftung (FES) report, “The right to strike struck down?”[1], sheds light on recent patterns and trends of violations of the international principles[2] on the right to strike. 

Main patterns of violations
The report shows that of the 119 countries covered by the report, 117 have adopted legal measures (in law and/or case-law) and/or practices which violate international standards on the right to strike. Many countries have enacted restrictive legal measures prior to the 2012 ILC controversy. Such restrictions pertained mainly to (a) exclusion of groups of workers from the right to strike; (b) compulsory arbitration accorded to strikes; and c) excessive prerequisites to strike.

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.

‘Carwasheros’ unionise in New York City: community-labour partnerships and the challenges of organising a runaway industry

Carwasheros on strike in Park Slope, Brooklyn
(Photo Credit: Center for Popular Democracy)

New York City carwashes harbour some of the most exploitative labour practices in the city. State law sets carwash workers’ hourly minimum wage at nearly three dollars below the state minimum – US$7.25 per hour in 2012, when carwash workers began organising. Employers are expected to pay workers the difference in tips, but minimum wage violations are rampant in this cash-run and largely unregulated industry. A 2008 New York Department of Labour report found 78% of investigated carwash operators violated minimum-wage laws, depriving workers of more than US$6.5 million (Smith, 2008). Compounding already precarious working conditions, many carwasheros, as some workers call themselves, are undocumented immigrants, a vulnerability employers prey upon by threatening to call immigration when workers begin to organise (Center for Popular Democracy, 2013).

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.

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. 

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.

Metal Workers Keep Defending the Rights of the Working Class in Turkey

Muzaffer Ekin Şişli

Bilge Çoban

Resulting from various violations of the fundamental workers’ rights such as oganising, collective bargaining and collective action (including strikes), union rights have always been at the top of the freedom agenda in the Turkish unions. The Turkish government has directly violated legal framework of the country, as well as International Labour Organisation conventions 87 and 98 as in the many cases. Starting on the 29th of January 2015 and ending a day later, the Metal workers' strike, is the third strike ban in the last 12 months and considered to be the largest one in last 20 years of Turkey (Çelik, 2015). Its suspension is to last for 60 days The Cabinet of Ministers delayed the metalworkers' strike which had covered 15 thousand members working in 42 different companies, claiming that it is prejudicial to the national security. These companies are represented by the MESS (Association of Metal Product Industrialists) group collective agreement.

Lessons learned for a European Minimum Wage Campaign

Stan De Spiegelaere

Ferdi De Ville

With the upcoming European elections, political parties on the left like the Party of European Socialists, the European Left and the European Green party are paying lip service to the call for a European minimum wage policy (European Green Party, 2010; European Left, 2014; PES, 2012). Such a policy would serve as a first step in the development of a more social Europe, enhance the legitimacy of the Union and could contribute to a wage-driven growth model for Europe. In this column we do not go into detail about the economic and social aspects of such a policy, but focus on the campaigning for a European minimum wage. A European minimum wage policy would mean a radical shift in the policy orientation of the Union and by consequence, the campaign for such a policy will be long and exhausting. Luckily, the European left can learn from two very recent and largely successful minimum wage campaigns in Europe: Germany and Switzerland. In Switzerland the campaign is still running while in Germany the current coalition is planning to implement a legal minimum wage in 2015. 

The New Union Movement in Myanmar

Ross Wilson

The past year has seen the birth of a new union movement in Myanmar, after 50 years of brutal suppression of labour rights. More than 670 labour organisations have now been registered under the Labour Organisation Law, mostly small unions at enterprise level and concentrated in the agricultural, manufacturing and transport sectors, and with an estimated total membership of close to 200,000 workers. 

Given the history of oppression and the continuing hostility from many employers, this is a remarkable achievement, and reflects the determination of workers to exercise their new rights to associate, organise and negotiate. Many of them are young factory workers struggling to improve their wages and conditions of employment which, for many, are at exploitative levels.

The International Labour Organisation (ILO) quickly developed a programme to promote and support the new freedom of association rights which includes an awareness raising campaign with education and advice for workers, government officials and employers. However, the core of the programme has been bi-partite training workshops for the leaders of the new unions and their employers.

The new union leaders have taken up the opportunity to learn with enthusiasm, from the first major workshop in July last year attended by almost 300 people. To date more than 2,000 people have attended ILO workshops, with the two key leaders from each union being provided with the opportunity to attend the two-day basic training workshop.

Trade Unions in Western Europe: Hard Times, Hard Choices

Rebecca Gumbrell-
McCormick

Richard Hyman

The Challenges Facing European Trade Unions
For several decades, trade unions in Europe – long among the most powerful in the world – have been on the defensive. They have lost membership, sometimes drastically. Their collective bargaining power has declined, as has their influence on government and, in some countries, their public respect. Unions in Western Europe achieved their greatest socio-economic status half a century ago, in the context of large-scale industrial production (‘Fordism’) and the rise of the Keynesian welfare state. Leading employers were ‘national champions’, and national governments self-evidently shaped social and economic policy; it seemed obvious unions were crucial actors in a triangular relationship.

Today the landscape has changed irrevocably. Governments profess their inability to resist the dictates of global economic forces; major companies are almost universally transnational in their ownership and production strategies; trade unions are often disoriented. Many show obvious uncertainty as to their role in the 21st century, giving rise to internal conflicts. Some observers ask whether unions remain relevant socio-economic actors. But hard times can stimulate new thinking and hence provide new opportunities; the challenge is to review unions’ purposes and priorities and to devise new ways of achieving these. This can involve hard choices: not all objectives can receive the same priority, particularly when resources are scarcer.

Challenges facing the Argentinean labour movement in the 21st Century

Luis Campos

Being the “best student”: the legacy of neoliberalism in Argentina
Argentina faced a huge crisis at the end of the ’90s. After years of being the “best student” of international economic institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, its economy went into a recession in 1998 that led the country to a political and social crisis that reached a boiling point in 2001. During this crisis thousands of people protested daily against the government. Some of the protests were organized by unions, some by other civil society organizations and others were spontaneous.

The last chapter of this story is well known. The government repressed the protests, allegedly killing more than 30 people in December of 2001. However, the president was forced to resign and Argentina experienced a period of political and economic instability, which included five different presidents in a few weeks, and the declaration to default on its external debt.

For the workers and the unions the outcome of this process was devastating. Its origins lay in the military government that ruled the country between 1976 and 1983, setting ground for the implementation of neoliberal policies during the following decades. The average real wage in 2001 was 43% less than the 1975 real wage and after the devaluation of the currency in 2002 the unemployment rate reached almost 25% (against an average rate of 5%-6% during the ’80s) and the non-registered workers by that time were 49%[1]. At the same time, the Argentinean economy suffered a huge transformation, with an increase in the importance of finance, and the virtual extinction of “big industry”.

The Crisis, Structural Reform and the Fortification of Neoliberalism in Europe

Christoph Hermann

The European Commission President, Jose Manuel Barroso, recently made the recommendation that fiscal consolidation (read “austerity”!) must continue in Europe, and that the European Union (EU) member states “should now intensify their efforts on structural reforms for competitiveness”. He specifically highlighted the need for comprehensive labour market reforms as “the best way to kick-start job creation”.[1] The call for structural reform to supplement austerity policies is not new. A number of EU member states have introduced far-reaching institutional reforms during the crisis – several of them under pressure from the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund. Structural reforms differ from regular austerity measures since their main goal is to change the country’s institutional framework to allegedly boost economic growth.

In the following paragraphs we summaries major structural reforms that we have found in eleven EU member states that were strongly affected by the crisis.[2]

The Troika and Multi-Employer Bargaining

Thorsten Schulten

How European pressure is destroying national collective bargaining systems
Collective agreements that extend beyond the immediate workplace or company level are rightly seen as one of the unique institutional features of the European social model. No other world region has any comparably well-developed system of multi-employer collective bargaining in which agreements cover not only entire industries but in some cases apply even nationally. The existence of collective agreements with such extensive coverage is one of the reasons why a clear majority of employees continue to be covered by collective bargaining in Europe. By contrast, in countries and regions in which the predominant level of bargaining is at the workplace or company, only a minority of employees have their employment conditions secured by collective agreement.

Although the past two decades have seen a shift to a greater decentralisation of collective bargaining in Europe, the core features of multi-employer collective agreements have remained remarkably stable in most European countries. In Western Europe, only the UK, beginning in the 1980s under Margaret Thatcher, has undergone a fundamental change from a system in which industry level bargaining played a major part to one that is overwhelmingly characterised by workplace bargaining. After 1990, the UK was joined by a number of Eastern European countries in which it has not been possible to construct a system of industry or national level bargaining. However, aside from these cases, multi-employer collective agreements, embracing a number of workplaces or even sectors, have remained the dominant constitutive feature of collective bargaining in Europe.

Right to Work and Michigan Labour

Roland Zullo

The incorporated right to work (hereafter RTW) movement has scored a victory in Michigan. On the heels of the 2012 election, during a lame duck session in which house Republicans held a 64 to 46 advantage over Democrats, the Michigan legislature passed two bills; one to enact RTW for public sector unions and the other for private sector unions. The private sector bill passed 58 to 52, with no votes from Democrats, and was quickly signed into law by Governor Rick Snyder without any formal public discussion or debate. Nefariously, the law was attached to an appropriations bill, which by Michigan law prevents opponents from taking the issue to a popular referendum.[1] This effectively means RTW will be central to the partisan dialogue leading up to the 2014 elections, when organised labour will try to “reward friends and punish enemies” at the ballot box in a repeal effort.

Unpacking the Marikana Massacre

Crispen Chinguno

The heartless killing of 34 striking miners at Marikana on 16 August 2012 by the South African police startled the world both in the manner and period it happened. Almost 20 years after the demise of apartheid, it evoked memories of the past and raised questions about the post-apartheid socioeconomic and political order and the integrity of industrial relations. This paper argues that Marikana is a crisis linked to the intersection of precariousness and fragmentation of workers. In explaining the choices by different stakeholders, it is imperative to unpack the political, historical, social and economic context.

The Marikana tragedy was, in fact, the zenith of a strike wave that had kicked off in January 2012 at Impala platinum mine following action by disgruntled rock drill operators (RDOs) after being excluded from a retention allowance awarded to mine blasters. This later spread beyond the platinum sector and was characterised by similar claims, violence and repertoires. The workers set uncompromising demands such as R12 500 per month for RDOs through independent workers’ committees directly to management disregarding industrial relations structures. Their militancy was unprecedented and from the onset rejected by the majority union, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM).

Collective Bargaining or Collective Begging? A case of the public sector in Zimbabwe

Taurai Mereki

Introduction
The International Labour Organisation (ILO) Conventions 87 and 98 provide for the right to belong to trade unions, employers’ associations as well as the right to collective bargaining in any employment relationship. Collective bargaining is defined in ILO Convention 154 as “a voluntary process for reconciling the conflicting interests and aspirations of management and labour through joint regulation of terms and conditions of employment”. Zimbabwe ratified both conventions in 2003 and 1998 respectively. It also committed itself to the ILO Decent Work agenda and has a country programme which runs until 2015. However, government as the largest employer has not made positive strides when it comes to decent work. This article seeks to answer these central questions: is there collective bargaining in the public sector in Zimbabwe? Are there any factors hindering collective bargaining? Examples from state owned enterprises (SOEs), commonly referred to as parastatals, and to a certain extent the public service will be cited.