Global crisis, Neoliberalism, and left alternatives

Alfredo Saad-Filho

The certainties that turned neoliberalism into the “common sense” of our age are melting into the air. Tried and tested policies such as privatisation, marketisation, financialisation and trade liberalisation have lost traction, and established political systems haemorrhage legitimacy. Mass protests spring in unexpected places and take new forms. Even the steadiest political hands have lost their grip on the levers of power, which, themselves, increasingly lack effectiveness. The economic turmoil in global neoliberalism is morphing into a wholesale political crisis.

A dysfunctional economy…
Neoliberalism created conditions favourable for capital accumulation that were unprecedented since the early 1980s. The ensuing economic growth supported a steep concentration of power, income and wealth, in which unparalleled prosperity for the wealthy coexists with old and emerging patterns of poverty and exclusion. Yet accumulation in the “core” countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) face declining rates of investment and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth, mounting instability, and increasingly frequent finance-driven crises, culminating in the deepest and longest economic contraction since the Great Depression. Recoveries have also become increasingly sluggish: a Great Stagnation now engulfs the world economy, with no end in sight.

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.

Portugal’s new social and political context

Elísio Estanque

Hermes Augusto Costa

The elections on 4 October 2015 ushered in a changed parliamentary scenario which seems to herald a major political shift. After four years of austerity, which have affected every aspect of Portuguese life but particularly labour, the election outcome proved contradictory right from the start. The victory of the right-wing alliance between the Social Democratic Party, the PSD, and the Social Democratic Centre, the CDS, opened up the possibility for an alliance of the left.

The election results
There was a high rate of abstention – 44.14 % - from the parliamentary elections. The PSD-CDS coalition, which had been in government since 2011, received the most votes (36.86 % of the votes), followed by the Socialist Party (32.31 %), the Left Bloc (10.19 %) and the Portuguese Communist Party (8.25 %). In our view, this electoral outcome was not because the Portuguese people like austerity. Rather, the following factors must be considered:

We are Steaming Ahead: NUMSA’s Road to the Left

Karl Cloete

The expulsion of the National Union of Metal Workers of South Africa (NUMSA) from the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) in November 2014 was a watershed moment. It deepened further the crisis in the Alliance between the ANC, COSATU and the South African Communist Party (SACP). In addition to fighting for a radical shift amongst trade unions, NUMSA also played a major role in the establishment of a new United Front which will be launched in 2015.

In December 2014 Sam Ashman (SA) and Nicolas Pons-Vignon (NPV) interviewed Karl Cloete (KC) about a tumultuous year and the road ahead.

SA / NPV: Those who are not in South Africa may think that NUMSA is responsible for undermining COSATU and working class unity. How would you respond to this?

KC: When COSATU was established in 1985, NUMSA was in the centre of the unity talks. COSATU was a product of collective struggle and the federation shook the South African landscape under apartheid and played an important part in the 1994 democratic breakthrough. But COSATU, particularly over the last eight years, has almost totally shed its independence. It has become embroiled in factional politics within the ANC and the SACP. The COSATU that used to be a campaigning formation has become an organisation unable to take forward critical struggles – around precarious work, unemployment, the privatisation and commodification of services. We are challenging legally our expulsion and we have appealed for the convening of a COSATU Special National Congress (SNC). COSATU’s history is not something you walk away from easily.

Sustainability, Just Transition and Trade Unions

Brian Kohler

Getting to Sustainability 
Working people and their unions want a future in which the environment is protected and where sustainable industries create decent, safe and healthy work. That, essentially, implies changes in present patterns of production and consumption. However, if society wants workers and their unions to make changes to what they are doing today; logic dictates that it must be able to tell them what they will be doing tomorrow. Furthermore, it had better sound good; otherwise the resistance to change will be overwhelming. The challenge is to build a bridge from where we are now; to the future we must reach. A Just Transition for workers, their families, and their communities is the essential prerequisite for a movement towards a sustainable future. Such a transition would incorporate the elements of sustainable industrial policy; robust social protections; and creative labour-market adjustment programs.

Fear Uncertainty and Doubt 
In popular understanding of climate issues, unscientific scepticism often triumphs over science because it is a form of asymmetric warfare. Scientists are not engaged in a scholarly debate with other scientists but are debating a climate-denial noise machine. A scientist may spend years researching climatic forces and refining the algorithms in a climate model, and finally publishing a scholarly paper in a peer-reviewed journal; only to have the noise machine ridicule it and be given equal weight to real science in the popular media. In the face of rejection, the scientist responds with further years of research and another peer-reviewed paper. There is a possibility that it will again be rebutted when it is released, and the cycle continues.

Yes, we did it! Domestic Workers Launch an International Federation

Chris Bonner

Barbro Budin

Karin Pape

“Yes we did it!”[1], a statement that best captures the jubilant mood on the last day of the Founding Congress of the International Domestic Workers Federation (IDWF) in 2013. It is also the title of a new book launched at that Congress, which tells the story of how domestic workers organised to win the Domestic Workers Convention, C189, at the International Labour Conference (ILC) of the ILO on 16 June 2011. 

Just over two years later, domestic workers have done it again. Another milestone has been achieved through the formation of a fully constituted, democratic federation of 48 membership-based domestic workers’ organisations representing around 300 000 domestic workers globally. This will ensure that the Convention is not forgotten, and that the struggle for “decent work for domestic workers’ continues in a coordinated and sustained manner.

The launching of the IDWF has wider implications because it marks an important moment in the history of the Labour Movement. For the first time a global union organisation has been formed by women from the poorest sections of society, with an all-women elected leadership. The transformation from a network to a global federation was decided upon by representatives of 48 domestic workers’ organisations, from 42 countries.

“We need to back that Dialogue with some Action” – Programme and Practice of Decent Work in Ghana

Joyce Abebrese

The rise of globalisation and economic growth, evolving throughout the last decades, brought about several forms of inequality and injustice among and within the different countries of the world. Not all economic growth can be assigned to decent and productive employment for the people, since it has not led to a reduction of poverty and informal labour (International Labour Organisation (ILO) 1999). Developing countries, in particular, struggle because they often lack efficient social security and social protection systems to care for the unemployed, diseased and vulnerable parts of society. Jütting and de Laiglesia (2009, 9) find that “informal employment is the norm, rather than the exception, in most developing countries”. Poverty reduction and creation of decent employment need to be followed by national strategies to achieve better economic and social development.

Informal workers show a high risk for poverty
The ILO finds that in many African countries, farmers and informal workers are the groups which are affected most by poverty (ILO 2004). In sub-Saharan Africa, countries show infor-mal non-agricultural work proportions of more than 80% (Jütting/ de Laiglesia 2009, 18). As opposed to the formal economy, informal workers have little or no social security, battle with lower incomes, and deal with precarious work. Most of the newly created employment in the informal economy inserts people into a “vicious circle of low pay, high risks and limited mobility” (ibid. 18).

Democratic Global Keynesianism: a long-overdue Vision of Progressive Politics

Heikki Patomäki

In a global world, the question of solidarity is acquiring new dimensions. Transnational solidarity seems an adequate response to the power of multinational corporations and global finance. A number of analysts have depicted how activists are now working across state boundaries and forming transnational networks, campaigns and organisations. The problem is that more often than not, the new forms of solidarity have been limited to resisting privatisation, deregulation flexibility, and welfare cutbacks. At the same time the emerging field of transnational labour regulation has been mostly confined to the private, voluntary sphere. A wider and deeper conception of solidarity seems to be missing.

Meanings of solidarity
Solidarity is a modern concept. It is tightly bound with the juridical concept of equality and the political concept of democracy. Although legal in its origins and commonly used for many purposes, in the workers’ movement the concept of solidarity has essentially been also a way to overcome the dilemmas of organising collective actions. The concept of political equality in the bourgeois democracy of 1792 turned into a guiding concept of the social emancipation of workers just half a century later. Since 1848 activists have often envisaged a common debt or solidarity obligation and, by acting upon it, sometimes have made it at least partially true. In the contemporary global world, it is this moral and future-oriented application that should characterise attempts to create and sustain various transformative social and political movements and to globalise labour unions.

Why asbestos should be banned

Jan Cremers

There has been an outburst of public anger after the ‘discovery’ of asbestos polluted social housing, despite there being several other topical asbestos related incidents. This coupled with the spectacular Turin trial against some captains of industry who were sentenced for knowingly exposing their workforce for decades to the killing fibre and the alarming reports of annual death rates among teachers who were working in asbestos containing public schools. In turn, the driving thoughts behind recent research by a group of outstanding international experts were of a more pragmatic nature. The aim was to document that asbestos is still carried around the globe and that there is no reason to retreat from the fight against the trend and its effects. Unfortunately, the European Union (EU)-wide ban is not the end of the hazardous story; it is only one of the necessary steps to protecting workers and citizens against the fatal consequences of the use of a mineral fibre that started as the eternal, global insulation champion. The fairy tale of 'safe handling' that still leads to import and use in large parts of the world has to stop. In the following sections we summaries major developments that led to a slow phasing-out in Europe and a turn to other continents by the industry.

State Funding of Research and the Narrowing of Economics in the United Kingdom

Frederic S. Lee

In 1986, the United Kingdom instituted an exercise through which the allocation of state research funds to universities and their departments was based on the quality of the research they produced. While the official justification for the exercise was the need to be selective in the allocation of limited research funds, the non-talked about agenda behind the exercise was to reduce the number of research universities to a manageable number and to ensure that these elite universities conducted research and carried out teaching that was consistent with the interests of the economic and political elite which control the state. Consequently the ensuing research selectivity exercise known as the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) was and is popular with the Tories, New Labour, and anybody else who believes that the State should have quasi-direct and complete control over the thinking and research activities of its citizens.

Most academics initially thought the exercise would be a fair way of allocating state research funding when the state decided to reduce its commitment to higher education. However, in some disciplines, such as economics, it became evident by the mid-1990s that the exercise was also being used to cleanse economic departments of heterodox economic ideas that did not conform to mainstream (neoclassical) economic theory and with the neoliberal, pro-market policies based on the theory and which the state approved of. But the precise manner through which the cleansing process operated was not clearly understood. The rest of the article deals with the cleansing process, its consequences for UK economics, and what can be done about it.

Gender and TU database – a Basis for Change?

Carol Jess

The Gender and Trade Unions Research Group (RG) was established in 2009 as a grassroots-driven alliance between trade unionists, practitioners in the broader labour movement, and academics. The focus of this RG is to broaden academic contributions relating to the positioning of women in trade unions. Its unique strength lies in the depth of experiences member researchers bring to its academic endeavours. As argued elsewhere “...the researchers are both ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’... [and] ...are actively engaged in labour movements... This unique combination of seemingly contradictory positions provides...a uniquely valuable vantage point as participant observers.” (Britwum, Douglas and Ledwith, 2012: 42)

The group is interested in the positioning of women in trade unions for a number of reasons. Of particular importance to the RG is the fact that, although increasing numbers of women are joining trade unions around the globe, this membership increase is not reflected in trade union leadership positions. The group has conceived, developed, and is implementing a database that is specifically designed to track the positioning of women in trade union leadership and other positions of authority within the labour movement. A driving force is to develop trade union consciousness about gender democracy deficits and to consider further action to close the gender gap.

Modelling a Global Union Strategy. The Arena of Global Production Networks, Global Framework Agreements and Trade Union Networks

Michael Fichter

For the past decades of economic globalisation, unions around the world have been on the defensive; their role as voices of the political and economic interests of working people has been marginalised. In a climate of outsourcing, offshoring, flexibilisation and casualisation of work, the loss of union power and the deregulation of labour markets has flourished and opened the way for increasing precariousness and agency work - the "triangular trap"[1].

While continuing to fight to protect their hard-won regulatory instruments within their national domains, trade unions have also begun to look for transnational approaches to combat unfettered international competition that is fed by a race to the bottom over labour costs. The challenge is in developing a strategy that will serve as a political and organisational answer to the dilemma they face – namely, how to bring the power of unions, as locally or nationally organised entities, to bear on the transnational regulation gap in labour relations.

The National Pact to Eradicate Slave Labour in Brazil: A useful tool for unions?

Siobhán McGrath

Lisa Carstensen

In 2012 two major clothing retailers, the Spanish group Zara and the Brazilian retailer Marisa, were suspended from membership of the “National Pact to Eradicate Slave Labour.” In both cases, the suspension occurred less than a year after the firms became members in the first place. As members of the Pact, they had pledged to eliminate slave labour from their supply chains. These cases generated a major debate – about forced labour in São Paulo’s clothing industry but also about the Pact itself and, linked to this, about the “Dirty List” of those found to be using slave labour[i].

So how does the Pact work? Is it a model for other countries committed to the fight against forced labour? Is it useful for the trade union movement? What are its limitations? We argue below that the Pact is a powerful tool which has been used to make progress in the ongoing fight against forced labour. Before explaining how we come to this conclusion, however, it is necessary to provide a short overview of the institutional and legal context of the Brazilian struggle against slave labour.

What Europe can learn from the South

Nicolas Pons-Vignon

After having caused a massive increase in inequality throughout the world, which led to the build-up of politely called “imbalances” and which fireballed into a financial, then economic, crisis, neoliberal policies are threatening to push many economies into a precipice with unknown political and social consequences. Yet, the European countries at the heart of this turmoil are showing little sign of resistance; the growing social movements opposing bailout and austerity have thus far failed to influence dominant parties and national policies. Instead, it appears that the very same policy mix of austerity and privatization which shattered African, Latin American and ex-communist countries in the 1980s and ’90s is being inflicted on Europe. The irony lies in the fact that most economists now agree that these policies have indeed had disastrous consequences. The belief that what led to a growth collapse and social disaster elsewhere will have positive consequences in Europe is an illusion which is sustained by the mainstream media and by powerful interest groups. Lambert (2012) thus highlights the French media’s predilection for consulting a coterie of economists who are closely linked to (or rather remunerated by) financial interests, and who invariably play down the responsibility of banks in the crisis and the usefulness of taxing finance rather than, say, ordinary citizens through increased value added taxes. In Italy, the “structural reforms” supposedly aimed at boosting growth focus on accelerating flexibilization of the labour market, in a context already marked by very high levels of precariousness.

Trade Unions, Globalisation and Internationalism

Ronaldo Munck

This piece reports on recent research around the relationship between trade unions and internationalisation in the context of globalisation. It argues for a more open, less pessimistic view than the dominant one. This view builds on the experiences of the 1970s and is cognisant of the depth of the current crisis.

Transnationalism

Unions and the workers they represent have always been part of a transnational system of labour relations. Capital has always been mobile and the capital/wage-labour relation has never been hermetically contained within national boundaries. However, until quite recently, the dominant system of industrial relations had been confined, almost exclusively, within a national frame. In the 1970s, a ‘new’ international division of labour emerged as the ex-colonial countries began to industrialise and the multinational corporations became central players in the neo-colonial global system. This period saw a major flourishing of transnational labour activity and the hope, soon dashed, that union internationalism could act as a ‘countervailing power’ to that of the multinationals.

Working for a Social Protection Floor

Ellen Ehmke

Andreas Bodemer

Worldwide, 75% of the population have no or insufficient access to social security provision. Despite the long record of social security as a human right, which is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Art. 22, 25) and the International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights (Art. 9), its implementation has been widely disregarded.

Many pretexts have been given to excuse this severe injustice. Prominently, the competitiveness of a globalised economy has allegedly caused a scarcity of financial resources available for social policies. On the one hand, the assumed negative effects of social security on economic growth have served as reason to cut back globally. On the other hand, during and after the economic crisis of 2009/2010 many observers confirmed the benefits of wide-ranging use of existing social security structures.
 

Building Progressive Alliances

Asbjørn Wahl

The social conflict in Europe has intensified strongly over the past couple of years, in the wake of the financial crisis. The labour and trade union movement has been on the defensive ever since the neoliberal offensive started around 1980. The balance of power in our societies has thus shifted enormously over the past 30 years - from labour to capital, from democracy to market forces. Time is ripe, therefore, to fight back, to build broad social alliances and to reassess our strategies and tactics.

In this article I will take a closer look at the current situation, address the question of alliance building and particularly summarise some of the experiences we have had in building alliances in Norway. My point of departure is that social development is a question of power, social power, and strength. If we are not able to mobilise sufficient social power behind our many excellent demands, they will only end up as wishful thinking.