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).

(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.

The 2017 French elections and labour: Interview with Bernard Thibault

Bernard Thibault

An interview by Nicolas Pons-Vignon, co-editor of the Global Labour Column (Translated from French by Clara Dallaire-Fortier).

The Socialist Party, in power since 2012, has forced the adoption of a new labour law (Loi Travail) in spite of resistance from some unions (especially from the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), France’s largest union), and implemented austerity budgets that are unprecedented since the Second World War. What are the stakes, in the 2017 legislative and presidential elections, for the union movement and more broadly for the working class?

Bernard Thibault: The President of the Republic and his government, like many before them, only recognise that they have failed workers during election time. They have disappointed not only by failing to keep their promises, but by implementing reforms that contradict the principles historically defended by the left, for instance in the case of the so-called labour law. The challenge of these elections – which does not get much attention in a political context dominated by scandals about elected officials and candidates – is to ensure that there is a focus on social issues.

Macron, the leading candidate according to survey results, presents a programme that is reminiscent of Tony Blair’s New Left: a mix of economic neoliberalism with progressive views on social issues. What does this idea of ‘going beyond the left-right divide’ inspire in you?

Capital, Labour and the Politics of Inequality in Global Public Health

Bridget O'Laughlin

The impasse: what to do about global health inequalities?
Inequalities of health are recognised as one of the most problematic aspects of the sharpening global divide between rich and poor (Deaton, 2013). There are, however, major differences as to what the causes of health inequalities are and hence on what can and should be done to address them. Some argue for the expansion of commercial healthcare and a greater role for private capital in public health provisioning as a direct investor, as a partner of the state and non-governmental organisations or as a philanthropic funder of business-like interventions. Others argue that redressing global health inequalities is a redistributive project incompatible with commercial logic and private profit. They privilege the role of the state as regulator of public health, as provider of health services and as taxer of wealth.

The expanded role for capital in global public health
In the World Development Report of 1993, Investing in Health, the World Bank both legitimised increased development assistance for international health and extended its critique of the intrusive developmental state to the area of health. This move was significant since even in neo-classical terms, health has long been recognised as a domain of imperfect markets. Institutionalist economists have argued that capitalist enterprises typically do not cover the social costs of their production, either the health of their labour force or the non-commodified environmental resources they consumed unless they were forced to do so through aggressive state regulation.

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).

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.

How US Labour can still defeat the Trans-Pacific Partnership

John Cody

In a coup for lobbyists and harmful special interests, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is just months away from full ratification. TPP is a trade agreement among twelve Pacific Rim countries concerning a variety of matters of economic policy that will impact nearly 40 percent of global GDP. It is designed to lower trade tariffs, establish an investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism, and will have a broad impact on intellectual property, healthcare, and Internet freedom. However, this deal can still be stopped if labour, activists and progressives can successfully capitalize on growing discontent surrounding it. Already US labour has done much to fight TPP, but it’s important that it ramps up its efforts over the coming months or it may face the consequences of a deal that will negatively impact people around the world.

Where TPP Stands
Countries involved in the TPP wrapped up negotiations in October and recently released the text of the massive 5,554-page agreement. In the US, the Obama administration is racing to push the deal through within the next 90 days. The fear is that if agreement on TPP is not reached in time, the debate about its massive impact on the US workforce could spill over into the 2016 Presidential and House of Representatives election cycle.

Power and Classification: Casual Workers Struggles in the South African Post Office

David Dickinson

Jennifer Chung’s (2009) important study illustrates how marginalised workers mobilised symbolic power in their struggles for better pay and conditions in the US and South Korea. Chung uses Bourdieu’s understanding of symbolic power as ‘one of the most fundamental mechanisms of change in the social world.’ Central to the disputes she describes were ‘classification struggles’ in which the legitimacy of the triangular employment relationship, created by the introduction of labour brokers, was challenged: workers demanded to be legally classified as employees of the client company, not of the labour broker. Labour broking separates the de jure and de facto employer, usually to the disadvantage of workers. Chung places emphasis on the ability of the precarious workers to shame their de facto employer by making visible the conditions under which they worked.

Labour broker employees or ‘casuals’ in the South African Post Office (SAPO) engaged in their own struggles against exploitation (Dickinson 2015). Organised into workers committees they successfully challenged labour broking. After strenuous attempts to resolve the dispute through legal channels, they focused on, often violent, forms of ‘disruptive power’ (Wilderman 2015). There were symbolic victories in their struggle, but these alone were far from decisive in their struggle.

Farm Worker Uprising on the Western Cape: From “Flexible Work” to “Moment of Madness”

Jesse Wilderman

“We outnumber the farmers eleven to one and they still hoard the economic power and still talk to us with disrespect. We could kill all the farmers in a weekend if we wanted to and this land will be fucked up - it could happen in one day. But until this strike we were never able to get all the farm workers and all of us to come out and fight back”

Local Councilman and supporter of the farm worker protests 

In late 2012 into early 2013, tens of thousands of farm workers and their allies across more than twenty-five towns around the Western Cape of South Africa, engaged in a historic series of explosive and unexpected work stoppages and protests. There had not in living memory been a protest that reached this scale and intensity, even though grievances around low wages, inadequate housing, and unfair treatment have plagued farm workers for years; the perceived power of the farm owners coupled with a lack of large, formal organisation or trade unions among farm workers seemed to have stacked the deck against collective resistance.

Not only was the scale of this uprising historic, it displayed a form of resistance outside the “paternalistic” discourse that characterised relationships between farm workers and farm owners; as Ewert and Du Toit explain about traditional farm worker resistance, “. . . they rely on the ‘weapons of the weak’, operating within the framework of the paternalistic moral universe itself, relying on individual appeals, consensual negotiations, and the avoidance of the appearance of open conflict” (2005). Yet this uprising was defined by open conflict, including burning of vineyards, protest marches, and pitched battles with the police; farm workers and their allies adopted an overt, confrontational, and adversarial approach in an apparent break from the traditional discourse.

Chinese investments, Marange diamonds and ‘militarised capitalism’ in Zimbabwe

Nunurayi Mutyanda

Crispen Chinguno

Taurai Mereki

For the past two decades, China has undergone a massive global economic expansion and a continued search for resources to keep up its high growth targets. This converged with Zimbabwe’s adoption of a look East economic policy in 2003, following a fall out with the West. As a result there have been massive Chinese investments in various Zimbabwean sectors including mining, telecommunications, infrastructure development, agriculture and retail. This paper examines the experience of workers in Chinese investments, drawing from Marange diamond fields in Zimbabwe. 

The mining potential of the Marange fields was discovered in 2006 following the unorthodox withdrawal of mining rights from the British-owned African Consolidated Resources (ACR) due to a strained relationship between Zimbabwe and the United Kingdom (Sokwanele, 2011). 

‘Militarised’ capitalism

Zimbabwe discovered its biggest diamond deposit when it was under sanctions from the European Union and the United States. Underlying politics and the mineral rights legal wrangle presented an impediment for the attraction of investors. The regime was thus forced to adopt a militarised model of capitalism, a mining exploitation regime controlled by the military and its associates. Its industrial relations model is not receptive to independent trade unions. To start up the diamond mining operations at Marange, the government established a subsidiary closely linked to the Zimbabwe Defence Forces (ZDF) through a parastatal, the Mineral Marketing Corporation of Zimbabwe (MMCZ) (ibid). This was the onset of the militarisation of the Marange diamond mining operations and has a bearing on the labour relations that evolved.

Fiscal redistribution: yes, but inequality starts in the labour market: Findings from the ILO Global Wage Report 2014/2015

Patrick Belser

The International Labour Organisation (ILO) Global Wage Report[1], a publication released every two years, has been issued on the 5th of December 2014. The report is titled “Wages and income inequality” and, as usual, it has three parts. The first part analyses the evolution of real wages around the world. The second part, examines the link between wages and household income inequality, and also looks at wage gaps between certain groups: women and men; migrants and nationals; workers in the formal and the informal economy. The last part challenges the reader on what could be appropriate policy responses. The purpose of this column is to therefore highlight and discuss some of the crucial findings of the report.

Wage trends: Flat wages in developed economies, growing wages in emerging economies
The most recent global wage growth was driven almost entirely by emerging and developing economies, where real wages have been rising – sometimes rapidly – since 2007. Before the financial crisis, real average wages in developed economies grew by an average of about 1 per cent per year, and global wage growth was about 3 per cent. Such figures have since changed in recent years; wage growth in developed economies almost stands at zero, and global wages are growing by 2 per cent. If you take China out of the equation, the global wage growth is quite simply cut in half (see Figure 1).

Chinese Construction Companies in Africa: A Challenge for Trade Unions

Eddie Cottle

The recently Chinese-built African Union (AU) headquarters, in Addis Ababa, is a bold symbol of China's rapidly changing role in Africa. China-African relations run as far deep as China being the biggest supporter of Africa’s anti-colonial struggle and the first to assist reconstruction efforts for the newly formed African States. The most famous example is the 1,800 kilometre Tanzania-Zambia Railway (Tazara) that was built in the 1970’s by some 50,000 Chinese engineers and workers, during which 64 of these workers died. China had provided a US $400m interest free loan to build the railway; even at a time when it was poorer than most African countries.

Chinese investment boosts African economic growth and infrastructure
China’s rapidly growing economy has resulted in the need to secure energy resources for stable development in the future. In this regard, Africa's importance to China's overseas investment agenda would still remain significant. In July 2012, President Hu Jintao pledged $20bn in credit for Africa for lucrative investment and infrastructure - critical and to the annoyance of the West is China’s no-strings attached loans. Two years previous to that, in 2010, China and Ghana signed an agreement for a 20 year loan of $13,1bn with an interest payment of only 2%. There is increasing fear over this arrangement that it might lead African countries to opt-out of International Monetary Fund -World Bank loans and other forms of dependence on Europe and the US.

Egyptian Labour in the Shadow of Revolution

Ahmed Badawi

There have been claims that Egyptian workers have been revolting against capitalism[1] but at a closer inspection of the pattern of workers’ protest, the various demands made by them and their mode of organisation do not substantiate such a claim. Activism by workers, in the decade preceding the January 25th, 2011 revolt, has been pivotal in paving the way for the overthrow of Egypt’s long-serving president Hosni Mubarak. In July 2013, the workers, together with millions of Egyptians, took to the streets again to demand the removal of Mohamed Morsi, the Islamist president, who was elected into office in June 2012. Otherwise, workers chose to go on localised, dispersed wildcat strikes and other forms of protest, demanding improvements in their conditions rather than the wholesale transformation of the system.

Egyptian labour: From compliance to revolt
The Egyptian labour force is approximately 26 million, in a country of more than 80 million inhabitants. However of those 26 million, only 6 million are members of trade unions, where half are members of the Egyptian Federation of Trade Unions (EFTU). The EFTU was decreed into existence by the Nasser regime in 1957, it is younger when compared to its Tunisian counterpart, the Union Générale Tunisienne du Travail (UGTT) established in 1946 upon the initiative of the Tunisian labour movement, and which has maintained its independence even during the authoritarian rule of Habib Bourguiba (1957-1987) and Zine El Abidine Ben Ali (1987-2011). Since then, Egyptian workers have been kept on a very tight leash. In the absence of independent trade unions, the EFTU became the only legal umbrella organisation for labour in Egypt.

What could be done about the continued Human Rights Violations of Workers in the Electronics Sector?

Martina Hooper

This article looks into the issue of labour rights violations in the electronics industry, using the example of a recent report on Dell production in Shenzhen factories in China. After some background information on the sector itself, it briefly introduces the report, the research methodology, and key findings, before going on to highlight how these make a mockery of local and international laws, ILO standards, Dell’s own Code of Conduct and that of the Electronic Industry Citizen Coalition (EICC). These initiatives are failing. If however there is collaboration between large public buyers, sufficient leverage could be created to encourage industry to act. The proposed solution, Electronics Watch, plans to establish a sound local monitoring system, with supply chain reform elements built into public contractual procedures, in order for this to happen.

Brazilian Protests and their Effect on Labour

Kjeld Jakobsen

Introduction
At the beginning of June, some Brazilian municipalities and local state governments decided upon a change in prices of public transport, with an approximate increase ranging between 5% and 10%, depending on the city or state. Minimal issues were expected as a result of this change because on average, the inflation rate sat on approximately 6% a year and, there was at least a two year gap since the previous increase in price. However, the motion put forward has triggered protests in many Brazilian cities, with a youth movement reiterating demands for free transport for students.

Brazilians experience new forms of political participation
The initial protests comprised of small opportunist groups who went to the extent of smashing windows and the entrances of some metro stations; provoking harsh reactions from local state police. Far worse, some rioters in São Paulo surrounded a policeman and assaulted him. Two days later a new march was organized, with approximately two thousand participants. It is alleged that police came out to avenge the attack on their colleague and subsequently reacted with extreme violence. Unfortunately, this confrontation also came to affect some people who were not actively involved in the protest, with an extreme incident of a journalist who lost her eye due to a rubber bullet being shot and another incident where people inside cafés were allegedly beaten with riot police sticks.