A year of Brexit: trade union perspectives

Owen Tudor

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

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

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

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

Ivan Murray

Ernest Cañada

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

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

The movement we need in Britain

David O’Connell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Markus Wissen and Ulrich Brand

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

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

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