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 2012 student movement in Quebec: fair shares, commodification and saucepans

Clara Lea Dallaire-Fortier

In 2012, a policy to increase university tuition fees, and a large student mobilisation against it, led to a broad debate on education, accessibility and public institutions in Quebec.

The education system in Canada falls under provincial governments’ jurisdiction. Tuition fees in Quebec are below the Canadian average and its institutions are relatively underfunded. In other provinces, the debate on the public education system had no repercussions and the basis of the student struggle was perceived as foreign to their societal priorities. In Quebec’s debate on public education, citizens influenced by the rise of neoliberalism were at odds with the values of others who thought the increases undermined notions of collectivity.

The right-wing Liberal Party in Quebec had planned two consecutive hikes in university tuition fees, the first by 30% from 2007 to 2012. This increase was not publicly discussed: some media even claimed there was no increase (Nadeau-Dubois, 2013). The second increase of 127% was planned for the period of 2012 to 2017. This would have raised the cost to CA$3 793 (about US$ 2 880). Between 2007 and 2011, students began to plan actions for 2012. Student associations undertook extensive research on accessibility and university finances, and mobilised in universities and CEGEPs, the general and vocational colleges which teach a post-school degree unique to Quebec. 

What is at stake with the coup in Brazil?

Antonio de Lisboa Amancio Vale

Brazil's current political crisis was stirred up from the day after President Dilma Rousseff was re-elected with more than 54 million votes in October 2014. It was the fourth consecutive victory of progressive forces in the country's presidential elections.

First the national right wing, again defeated, asked for a recount. Then they tried to question the budgetary accounts of the re-elected president’s campaign and sponsored several other maneuvers aimed at impeachment. Since 2015, fabricated scandals were widely publicised by the media, giving truth to hundreds of lies. The architecture of the coup was drawn, therefore, from the daily action of the media oligopoly (in Brazil, six families control 80% of the media – TV, newspapers, magazines, radio, news agencies, and web sites) with financial support from industry, the finance sector, and agribusiness.

The right wing that conspired openly against an elected president’s mandate is the result of centuries of slavery and resistance against slavery which mark Brazil’s history. It is the legitimate heir of the social and economic forces historically responsible for that regime. When they reached the country, these elites stormed our land and wealth. Captured Africans were brought by force to Portuguese America, and initially became the fundamental labour force in sugarcane, tobacco and cotton plantations. Later this was repeated in villages and towns, mines, and cattle ranches. The socially dominant class, consisting of a white minority, justified this condition by pseudo-religious and racist ideas that legitimised their alleged superiority and their privileges. 

Want to improve crowdwork? Regulate it

Valerio De Stefano

Janine Berg

Crowdwork is the casual work of the 21st century. Like other forms of casual work, crowd work is characterized by lack of job security and few, if any, labour protections. But with day labourers, dockworkers, and agricultural hands – probably the types of casual work that most readily come to mind – work is at least for the day. In the on-demand economy, it is for the task at hand. This can be as short as a few kilometers’ drive or ten minutes spent tagging photos on the internet. Lucas Biewald, the CEO of the micro-task platform Crowdflower, once quipped that ‘before the Internet it would be really difficult to find someone, sit them down for ten minutes and get them to work for you, and then fire them after those ten minutes’. Now instead, ‘you can actually find them, pay them the tiny amount of money, and then get rid of them when you don’t need them anymore’ (quoted in Marvit, 2014).

The ‘Turker’, the Uber driver, or the graphic artist working on an online design platform must continuously search for work, monitoring their computer screens or phones for work opportunities. Indeed, in a recent ILO survey on employment and working conditions in two leading micro-task crowdwork platforms, it was found that workers averaged 18 minutes looking for work for every hour working (Berg, 2016). As an Amazon Mechanical Turk worker from the United States put it, 

The toughest part of turking for a living is actually finding the jobs. For every hour I spend working I most likely spend 2 hours monitoring the various scripts I have running to see what jobs show up (Quoted in Berg, 2016:14)

Uber: do not take us for a ride!

Claire Clarke

Mac Urata

The ‘sharing economy’ is changing the landscape of work by promoting a model that provides easy access to work but further casualises the workforce. Work has evolved from long-term employment to a series of jobs, and has now again been reduced to the delivery of unique tasks.

Transportation network companies (TNCs) such as Uber are driving the growth of less formal work in passenger transport via a business model that challenges the traditional approach to the supply and demand of passenger transport as well as the way in which value is created, distributed and controlled. These companies promote themselves as electronic marketplaces that connect customers with drivers. They claim they are not taxi operators, and therefore operate outside existing industry regulations on licensing requirements, insurance, and driver screening.

Uber claims to offer flexibility for its ‘partners’ (users and drivers), but driving for Uber can be tough. Many media reports suggest that Uber drivers are not earning the legally required minimum wage. In some cases, drivers make no money at all from some shifts.

Crowd Work: Shame, Secrets, and an Imminent Threat to Employment

Kristy Milland

You may have no idea what crowd work is, and that is understandable. Most people do not. Crowd work is not a job that many aspire to, nor is it one that workers are necessarily proud of. It may not carry as much shame as some other jobs, but due to the low pay and unfair treatment workers often experience, it is not a job to boast about.

Crowd work comes in a variety of forms, but I define it as any paid work which is offered to or completed by a large group of people. Crowd work is the dirty secret of major corporations. It is a rising threat to economies and governments around the world, and it could be a future for many people as they try to make a living. In this article I wish to reveal the exploitation of crowd work, the pressing threat it has become when paired with automation, and some possible avenues of resistance that we can use to protect ourselves and our loved ones in a future where this is the only option left for income generation. I want to show the reality of crowd work and how harmful it could become.

An Introduction to the Platforms
A few major forms of crowd work are found today. The first are macro-task platforms such as Upwork, Uber, and Fiverr, where work is offered to a large group of people, but only one completes it. Competition is fierce, so pay declines over time, and worker reputation, which is key to accessing more work, is totally in the hands of the work requester.

Work Struggles at Amazon in Germany and Beyond

Workers in the logistics sector have tremendous leverage because they work at the global intersection between production and circulation of goods. However, they and their unions are seldom prepared for the transnational tactics used by corporations to undermine worker struggles, such as building distribution centres abroad or sourcing deliveries from non-striking centres.

In Germany, however, workers from Amazon, the leading US e-commerce multinational, have been organising for more than two years with some success. With the support of solidarity groups, they have developed international relationships with workers from other Amazon sites, such as Polish workers who are usually considered a threat owing to their lower salaries. Such self-organisation shows that a section of the organised workers at Amazon have the willingness to organise beyond national borders and are ready to take an emancipatory path.

‘Work hard, have fun, make history’[1]

Amazon was founded in 1994 in the US, and opened its first centre in Germany in 1999. It now has nine distribution centres with about 10 000 workers. Worldwide, it has about 230 000 full-time and 100 000 short-time employees.

Work in a distribution centre is industrial and comparable to a factory: individualised mass distribution, reliance on machinery such as goods-picking robots, assembly lines, and advanced division of labour and standardisation of tasks. It is therefore more appropriate to call these centres ‘distribution factories’, and Amazon’s success lies more in increasing the rate of exploitation than in innovative business strategies.

Austerity policies and trade unionism: A glance at Portugal

Hermes Augusto Costa

Elísio Estanque

Wage labour played and continues to play a central role in Western industrial societies, not just on the economic plane but above all as a vital support for social cohesion and the rule of law. The main advances of the last 200 years including the building of the welfare state and its important gains in the field of human rights (e.g. dignified work and social rights) are examples of the importance of struggles waged by organised wage labour. The major problem, however, is the imminent civilisational regression in which we find ourselves, teetering on the brink of a new cycle of mercantilist barbarism similar to the times of Marx (Estanque and Costa, 2013). In fact, the Portuguese labour context has in recent years been battered by austerity policies, formally with the entry of the Troika (International Monetary Fund (IMF)/ European Central Bank (ECB)/ European Commission(EC0) in May 2011 and even beyond its exit n May 2014.

In this text, we initially identify some internal challenges put before unions and the external threats underlying austerity policies. We also set out some tasks for trade unions.

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.

Workers Unrest in Automobile Plants in India: Strikes and Occupations at Maruti Suzuki and Bajaj Auto in 2011/12 and 2013

Jörg Nowak

The new plant of India´s biggest passenger car producer, Maruti Suzuki, saw two illegal strikes and wide-scale rioting in 2012. The causes of the conflict included the extension of contract labour, a higher work speed accompanied by real wage losses of 25 %, since the early 2000’s, and a harsh work regime. Despite the events getting widespread attention they did not lead to a considerable change of labour relations in India.

The industrial city of Gurgaon, south of New Delhi, has seen an upswing of factory struggles since 2005. In that same year, workers at a Honda factory occupied their plant. In 2007, both the contract workers at Honda and India´s biggest motorcycle producer, Hero, saw major strike movements.

Maruti Suzuki: New workforce, new conflicts
Initially, Maruti Suzuki was established as a state-run company but went on to be controlled by the Japanese company, Suzuki, since mid-2000. Maruti’s main plant is also located in Gurgaon and 20 kilometres further south, in Manesar. In 2011, 75 % of labour in this factory consisted of contract workers from 60 different contractors, and at the time totalled to 2700 contract workers but only 1000 permanent workers. The contract workers earned about half of the wage (9000 Euros – 100 Euro) of permanent workers in 2011 (18000 Rupees).

Constructing an Anti-Neoliberal Analysis to Arrive at Truly Alternative Alternatives

Salimah Valiani

The instance of nursing labour market restructuring

For the past few decades, the world economy has been shifting through radical restructuring and reorganisation. Within this context, the "anti-globalisation”, “anti-WTO”, “anti-neoliberal,” and other such movements are an important field within which to identify the thinking behind the action. For Antonio Gramsci (1971), questions of theory and practice are raised particularly when the “movement of historical transformation is at its most rapid”. The point of such questioning, as Gramsci says, is to make the “practical forces unleashed” more efficient and expansive and the “theoretical programmes” more realistically justified. Taking inspiration from this, the aim of this column is to provide methodological direction in analysing and responding to changes of the neoliberal era using the instance of the global restructuring of nursing labour markets.

The Meaning of Marikana

Ben Fine

Sam Ashman[1]

The mining core of South Africa’s economy saw, in 2012, the most explosive and significant strike wave since the defeat of apartheid. At Marikana, it involved the killing of 34 Lonmin strikers allegedly by police on 16th August. These events, and the response to them by the Tripartite Alliance of the African National Congress (ANC), Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) and the South African Communist Party (SACP), starkly reveal the economic and social issues in South Africa today, highlighting how many features of the apartheid system have been reproduced and even intensified.

These events have drawn attention to the scale of South Africa’s mineral wealth and the industry’s dependence on cheap, black, and often migrant labour. In April 2010, a Citigroup report identified South Africa as the world’s richest country in terms of its mineral reserves, valued at $2.5 trillion. Platinum group metals (PGMs) constituted $2.3 trillion, the bulk of this value, all located in the Bushveld Ignateous Complex (BIC) geological formation spreading across Gauteng, the North West and Limpopo provinces. This area also contains the world’s largest chromium and vanadium reserves and produces ferrochrome, nickel and other minerals.

Platinum is one of a family of six chemically-similar elements that make up the PGMs. South Africa is estimated to hold 87% of the world’s PGM reserves and accounted for 76% of world platinum production in 2009. Since the early 1990s, platinum has been the fastest growing sub-sector within the mining industry and the BIC area has been the fastest growing South African region with growth exceeding 15% in some years. The sector is dominated by three big producers: Anglo American Platinum (80% owned by Anglo American), Impala Platinum and Lonmin.

Against this backdrop, there are four systemic factors underpinning events at Marikana.

Trade Union Activists are in Jail in Turkey, but why?

Zeynep Ekin Aklar

Gaye Yilmaz

(written by  Zeynep Ekin Aklar with contribution from Gaye Yilmaz)

The repression of opposition movements, particularly trade unions, has been increasing in Turkey since 2008. Today more than 6000 people are in jail as a result of having different opinions from the Turkish government. More specifically, since the end of March 2012, more than 100 journalists and artists, 40 trade union activists, 1000 children, 600 students and academics and thousands of activitists from the Kurdish movement have been held in prison for months without trial. As recently as 25 June 2012, 71 Kurdish trade union members of the Confederation of Public Employees’ Trade Unions (KESK) were detained. For the first time since the 1980 military intervention, Mr. Lami Özgen, a leader of a trade union confederation was detained.

Challenges for Minimum Wage Campaign in South Korea

Lee Changgeun

For the past decade, labour conditions in South Korea can be characterised by rapid increases in precarious work and low pay, both of which have contributed to widening inequality. As of March 2011, precarious workers accounted for 48.5 % of the total labour force (17 million) and low pay rate as the share of wage earners earning below two-thirds of median wages (ILO) was 28% (4.79 million), a jump from 23% in 2001. Not surprisingly, most low paid workers are precarious workers. Almost half of precarious workers are expected to fall into the low-pay trap. In 2011, on average, precarious workers were paid 52.8% less than regular workers. Wage decile ratios have also deteriorated. The D9/D1[1] ratio has grown from 4.81 in 2001 to 5.49 in 2011. It is, therefore, no surprise minimum wages have attracted so much attention in recent years in Korea.

The King and Us - Why Thailand’s lèse majesté law matters to unions and the world

Ian Graham (author)

Somyot Prueksakasemsuk

“Union rights are human rights.” That has been said loud and often. But it bears repeating. Labour rights are specialised extensions of the principles set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. “Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests,” the declaration insists. Nobody reading this column is likely to disagree (except, perhaps, with the “his”). Philosophically, core human rights such as freedom of association have always underpinned core labour rights.

We seldom hear the equation put the other way round: “Human rights are union rights”. And yet it is just as true. A place that disregards any of the basic human rights is a place that trade unions will find irksome.

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.

Bringing Politics Back In

Nicolas Pons-Vignon

Many progressive economists and trade unionists have sought to engage in dialogue and negotiations with capital and governments during the global financial crisis, hoping they could achieve the adoption of reasonable and balanced policies. They may have done so because such an approach used to work in the past, especially in social-democratic contexts, or because, in the early days of the crisis, they were listened to as respectfully as during the high time of the “Keynesian compromise” in economics. They may be convinced that governments should “see” what is happening and want to adopt more inclusive policies. But as the General Secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) Sharan Burrow puts it in a Global Labour Column, “If during the crisis workers’ organizations could have anticipated that a new era of dialogue had begun, the moment has clearly passed”. Governments are indeed not seeing anything; in fact, the way in which they have responded to the crisis indicates that relying on strong arguments is insufficient. Are neoliberal policies, and the huge increases in inequality they have caused, responsible for the crisis? Well, the policies adopted in the wake of the crisis amount to more of the same – from the absence of any meaningful regulation (or rather, curtailment) of financial “innovation”, to the public bailing out of banks by states who then in turn reduce their spending, thus passing the costs of the crisis on to ordinary workers and unemployed people. Trade unions have been using their organizational and institutional power to resist relentless attacks on social and labour rights. Nevertheless, after decades of retreat, the financial crisis is rapidly weakening further their traditional pillars of power and influence. What is to be done?

A modern Italian Story

Alessandra Mecozzi

The 28th of January 2011 was a beautiful day for Italian metalworkers: 70% participated in the national strike and in 17 demonstrations called by FIOM (the metalworkers union affiliated to CGIL, Italy’s largest union confederation). This was a response to the aggressive strategy adopted by Fiat in several of its factories.
Only a few years ago, Sergio Marchionne, Fiat’s CEO, declared that as labour cost accounted only for 7% of the company’s total costs, there should be no reason to squeeze workers and put pressure on working conditions (interview in La Repubblica, 21/9/2006). He used the context of the global crisis to launch a direct attack on workers’ rights and conditions, with the aim of dismantling the Italian labour relations system.