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| Gillian Hart |
South African student protests are hardly surprising. Since 2000 the ANC government has devoted a low and declining share of GDP to tertiary education, despite large increases in student numbers.
More surprising are patterns that emerge from comparing this erosion of public higher education with tendencies in other regions of the world. First, over the same period, the share of GDP going to higher education has actually been increasing in a number of other middle-income countries.
Second, although defying the positive trends set by its middle-income peers, ironically and tragically South Africa is emulating the state of California, where a comprehensive system of public education has been systematically dismantled over the past several decades. What makes the California story all the more salient for South Africa is how they have converged on a similar path of eroding public higher education and intensifying race-class disparities, despite coming from dramatically different directions.
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| Bernd Mueller |
The international development community has invested tremendous effort and finance in the goal of ending global poverty. Especially in low-income countries across Africa, this has produced countless projects and policies to boost productivity, livelihoods, incomes, and liberties for those who have to eke a daily living out of US$1.90 or less. While these development initiatives[1] vary greatly in scope, ambition, and method, it is possible to identify a common trait: most target beneficiaries in a capacity as existing or prospective self-employed producers, such as farmers or owners of micro, small and medium enterprises.
This focus stems from the notion that most poor people’s livelihoods come from informal self-employment, as purported by national statistics in low-income countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. However, a growing part of the development literature highlights the need to appreciate socio-economic differentiation in poor communities (for example, Oya 2010). This differentiation manifests itself in highly uneven distribution of productive assets (mainly capital and land). A logical consequence is greatly varying livelihood strategies of households.
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| 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.
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| Peter Evans |
Trump’s minions have already made it clear that organised labour will be among their immediate targets. Public sector workers, who are the main pillar of organised labour’s strength, will be attacked early. Turning the National Labor Relations Board into a thoroughly anti-labour organisation will make union certification, via officially sanctioned elections, close to impossible. Another obvious agenda item is a national ‘right to work’ law which will remove the requirement that workers represented by a union pay membership dues. I will not try to exhaust the list of likely attacks here, although projecting the disastrous details of Trump’s regime will be a crucial part of figuring out how to mount some kind of defense.
Trying to think about how it might be possible to change the political landscape is a different sort of task. It requires a careful debate on the structural circumstances that produced so many Trump voters. Theories of ‘The Trump Voter’ abound, and sorting them out will require a careful analysis of exit polls that has yet to be done. But two preliminary themes have already emerged.
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| Thomas Greven |
Donald Trump clearly lost the popular vote and will only inhabit the White House because of the anachronistic and undemocratic institution of the Electoral College, once specifically designed to foil populists like him. Contrary to claims that he somehow ‘hijacked’ the Republican Party, I argue that he simply used the traditional Republican playbook to the extreme - dividing the population along racial, ethnic, and religious lines as well as exploiting anti-elite sentiment – to sell economic and social policies that will hurt the majority of Americans. This got him support from right-wing extremists in the Alt-Right movement as well as the white working class – Americans without a college education – and surprisingly also from white working class women, given that he tried very hard to offend all women. This latter group of voters, previously either non-voting or marginally part of the Democratic coalition, was the key group for Trump’s success in the old industrial heartlands now called the rust-belt states. It is necessary to ask why this group supported him.
