‘WHAT do flight attendants, autoworkers, college professors, clerical workers, and public employees have in common?’ asks Peter Rachleff, teaching US history at Macalester College in St Paul, Minnesota. ‘We … all over the world … are under the gun, the gun of “neo-liberalism”,’ he provides the answer. ‘Neo-liberalism’, a form of class war unleashed against labour by capital, has robbed labour blind with intensity much more than ever before: wages cut, real wages decreased, and other forms of wage theft, labour regulations ‘liberalised’, unions corrupted, deactivated and muzzled down, state support withdrawn, and many others resulting in increased appropriation of surplus value.
The assertions of the British iron lady Margaret Thatcher on the role of government and economy were part of this class war. The rise of the neo-liberals was from the same class source. Reganomics carried the same standard. SAP, the structural adjustment programme, imposed on countries languishing in poverty, came from the same concept of class war, a global phenomenon. Automation and information technology have increased the speed and widened the sphere of appropriation. Labour around the world is bearing the wrath of capital: increased productivity but decreased real wages, and increased blame on the ordinary people. ‘The economy is doing fine, but the people are not,’ was the ‘famous’ observation made in 1971 by General Emilio Medici, the military-dictator of Brazil.
‘Billions of dollars in wages’, Kim Bobo, executive director, Interfaith Worker Justice, writes, ‘are being illegally stolen from millions of workers each and every year. The employers range from small neighbourhood business to some of the nation’s [US] largest employers – Wal-Mart, Tyson, McDonald’s, Target, Pulte Homes, federal, state, and local governments and many more.’ She defines wage theft as all the wages not paid, overtime denied, violation of law by employer, depriving workers from legally mandated wages. A number of surveys in the US found wage theft in 60 per cent of nursing homes, 89 per cent of non-monitored garment factories in Los Angeles and 67 per cent in New York, 78 per cent of restaurants in New Orleans, 100 per cent in poultry plants, by 25 per cent of tomato producers, 35 per cent of lettuce producers, 51 per cent of cucumber producers, 58 per cent of onion producers, 62 per cent of garlic producers, of almost half of day labourers in construction work. Companies around the US, according to the Economic Policy Foundation, the business funded think-tank, ‘annually steal $19 billion in unpaid overtime.’ Wal-Mart, the world famous retailer, paid, before 2006, 12.4 per cent below the average wage for retail workers. A survey by Arindrajit Dube and Steve Wertheim, economists at the Institute of Industrial Relations of the University of California found this fact. The famous retailer’s ‘wages are nearly 15% below the average wage of workers at large retailers and about 30% below the average wage of unionized grocery workers,’ wrote John Miller, economics teacher at Wheaton College. Then, is it now known from where the wealth comes in?
The burden of bread buying has fallen on the ‘heavy’ shoulders of females ‘liberated’ by capital, ‘a task made more challenging since women typically earn only 78 cents compared to the male dollar,’ wrote Heather Boushey, a senior economist at the Centre for American Progress. Citing data from the Bureau of Labour Statistics’ Current Establishment Survey for March 2009, Boushey wrote that since the Great Recession began in December 2007 in the US men have lost 75 per cent of non-farm jobs and 72.7 per cent of all private-sector jobs. Capital has liberally been allowed to perform these ‘liberal’ acts: a full grown liberalism!
Unpaid work is not only an American reality, and not only a Great Recession reality now ravaging the land of opportunity. A Canada government survey documenting the time men and women spent on unpaid work in 1992, referred to by Lena Graber and John Miller, found: the Canadian women performed 65 per cent of all unpaid work. They shouldered ‘an especially large share of household labour…’ They also referred to Great Britain, where ‘unpaid labour hours are high for an industrialized country. The British Office for National Statistics found, using the opportunity-cost method, unpaid work was 112% of Britain’s GDP in 1995! With the specialist-replacement method, British unpaid labor was still 56% of GDP – greater than the output of the United Kingdom’s entire manufacturing sector for the year. In Japan … paid workers put in longer hours, and women perform over 80% of unpaid work…. [T]he value of unpaid labor …equaled at least half of Japanese women’s market wages.’ A reader may tell: at least one of the sources of wealth is identified.
This reality is not confined only to the centre of the centre of the present world system, the US, or in the centre. In China, now a country far from periphery and nearer to the centre, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, the biggest trade union in the world, plays a significant role in the lives of the Chinese workers. According to Ellen David Freidman, a visiting lecturer at the School of Government at Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China, ‘many trade union cadres at the district level are investors or beneficiaries of the enterprise’s profitability.’ This ‘achievement’ could be made possible ‘[o]wing to its neoliberal legacy.’ These phenomena, she wrote, ‘undermine the union’s ability to independently defend workers’ interests when in conflict with management… Now linked by a profound market failure, workers in the United States can no longer buy, while workers in China can no longer produce. In the context of the current global crisis, it has become clear that union leaders in both countries have failed to anticipate and challenge the dangers of the unregulated market, and failed to organise workers to protect themselves against its ravages.’ Plundering economies not dependent on export to US may find an easy solace.
The periphery reality is not different. In the shadows of Buenos Aires, a city with tango clubs, in ‘the city’s nearly 400 clandestine shops…around 100,000 undocumented [Bolivian] immigrants work … with an average wage – if they are paid at all – of $100 per month,’ wrote Marie Trigona, an independent journalist based in the Argentine capital. In these sweatshops, they work in slave-labour condition. ‘[T]op clothing companies have turned small warehouses or gutted buildings into clandestine sweatshops. Locked in, workers are forced to live and work in cramped quarters with little ventilation and, often, limited access to water and gas.’ A labour union reported more than 8,000 cases of labour abuse in 2006. Quoting two workers she reported, ‘[Y]ou work from 7 a.m. until midnight or 1 a.m. Many times they don’t pay the women and they owe them two or three years’ pay. … You don’t have rights to rent a room or to work legally.’ ‘For two years I worked and slept in a three-square-meter room along with my two children and three sewing machines my boss provided. They would bring us two meals a day. For breakfast a cup of tea with a piece of bread and lunch consisting of a portion of rice, a potato, and an egg. We had to share our two meals with our children because according to my boss, my children didn’t have the right to food rations because they are not workers and don’t yield production.’ The woman worker was fired as she divulged the truth. The workers manufacture garments for brands including Lacar, Kosiuko, Adidas and Montage. There are times, infamous acts adorn famous names!
This is the present-day labour reality, almost universal, a part of which has been recorded and analysed with hard facts and data in the Real World Labor (eds Immnuel Ness, Amy Offner, Chris Sturr, and the Dollars & Sense collective). The real life of labour partly referred above from the pages of the Real World Labor, depressing and irrational to human brain, are overwhelming in the present context, but not or least discussed by the mainstream, and the truth behind these is presented partially, in a tilted way, distorted, methodically and with regularity, and even killed. Fabrication and falsification goes on as capital-controlled media and academia try to colour the reality. These acts are done with ‘misinformation, false arguments, faulty analysis,’ as Michael Yates, associate editor, Monthly Review, puts while discussing the Real World Labor, ‘so common in the mainstream media and among orthodox economists.’
An antidote to this is the Real World Labor (2009, Economic Affairs Bureau, Boston) that also provides information and analysis on resistance by labour: in 2008-09, sit-down strikes in Europe and North America ranged from 24 hours to 51 days. In 1971-2007, Australian and European sit-down strikes ranged from 5 days to 2 years. Labour’s resistance is not only in the interest of workers themselves though often sections of media controlled by lumpen interests equate raising workers’ grievances to harming national interests. Workers’ unions, as David Bacon, journalist and photographer covering labour, immigration, and the impact of global economy on labour wrote, ‘are the main opposition to the occupation’s economic agenda, and the biggest obstacle to the agenda’s centerpiece – the privatization of Iraq’s oil.…[U]nions have become the only force in Iraq trying to maintain at least a survival living standard for the millions of Iraqis who still have to earn a living somehow in the middle of the … war’ (‘Iraq’s Workers Strike to Keep Their Oil’, Real World Labor).
People in many countries including Canada, Argentina, Brazil and US are organising ‘solidarity economy’ in response to capitalist globalisation’s inability to provide employment. The forms and activities of these emerging initiatives vary. In 2005, ‘there were over 6,000 social solidarity economy enterprises in Quebec employing over 65,000 people. …In Argentina…over 180 factories have reopened under worker control, providing jobs for over 10,000 workers…. As of 2005, [Brazil’s] solidarity sector comprised almost 15,000 enterprises employing over 1.2 million workers, along with 1,120 support organizations…’ (Julie Matthaei and Jenna Allard, Real World Labor) Drawing from the pages of Dollars & Sense and WorkingUSA the collection of 70 authoritative essays by leading authors, economists, teachers, scholars, and journalists, the Real World Labor discusses issues confronting labour on a global level including neo-liberalism, free trade, offshore outsourcing and shows the level of discourse in the sphere of labour and capital a few societies are having while a few societies are not engaging in. Bankruptcies of the streams, main and the other, in lumpen elite dominated societies stand out starkly while one goes through the Real World Labor, and this reflects the influence lumpen elites inflict with its money power. Significant information even does not reach the concerned audience. Underlings and hatchlings corrupt and capture union leadership. Debates are shaped by interests related to capital. Promising initiatives are decapitated with lofty sounding soft tactics. While one section dreams of organising labour with donor money the other hatches plan to muzzle down the voice of labour. A la lumpen reality!
The assertions of the British iron lady Margaret Thatcher on the role of government and economy were part of this class war. The rise of the neo-liberals was from the same class source. Reganomics carried the same standard. SAP, the structural adjustment programme, imposed on countries languishing in poverty, came from the same concept of class war, a global phenomenon. Automation and information technology have increased the speed and widened the sphere of appropriation. Labour around the world is bearing the wrath of capital: increased productivity but decreased real wages, and increased blame on the ordinary people. ‘The economy is doing fine, but the people are not,’ was the ‘famous’ observation made in 1971 by General Emilio Medici, the military-dictator of Brazil.
‘Billions of dollars in wages’, Kim Bobo, executive director, Interfaith Worker Justice, writes, ‘are being illegally stolen from millions of workers each and every year. The employers range from small neighbourhood business to some of the nation’s [US] largest employers – Wal-Mart, Tyson, McDonald’s, Target, Pulte Homes, federal, state, and local governments and many more.’ She defines wage theft as all the wages not paid, overtime denied, violation of law by employer, depriving workers from legally mandated wages. A number of surveys in the US found wage theft in 60 per cent of nursing homes, 89 per cent of non-monitored garment factories in Los Angeles and 67 per cent in New York, 78 per cent of restaurants in New Orleans, 100 per cent in poultry plants, by 25 per cent of tomato producers, 35 per cent of lettuce producers, 51 per cent of cucumber producers, 58 per cent of onion producers, 62 per cent of garlic producers, of almost half of day labourers in construction work. Companies around the US, according to the Economic Policy Foundation, the business funded think-tank, ‘annually steal $19 billion in unpaid overtime.’ Wal-Mart, the world famous retailer, paid, before 2006, 12.4 per cent below the average wage for retail workers. A survey by Arindrajit Dube and Steve Wertheim, economists at the Institute of Industrial Relations of the University of California found this fact. The famous retailer’s ‘wages are nearly 15% below the average wage of workers at large retailers and about 30% below the average wage of unionized grocery workers,’ wrote John Miller, economics teacher at Wheaton College. Then, is it now known from where the wealth comes in?
The burden of bread buying has fallen on the ‘heavy’ shoulders of females ‘liberated’ by capital, ‘a task made more challenging since women typically earn only 78 cents compared to the male dollar,’ wrote Heather Boushey, a senior economist at the Centre for American Progress. Citing data from the Bureau of Labour Statistics’ Current Establishment Survey for March 2009, Boushey wrote that since the Great Recession began in December 2007 in the US men have lost 75 per cent of non-farm jobs and 72.7 per cent of all private-sector jobs. Capital has liberally been allowed to perform these ‘liberal’ acts: a full grown liberalism!
Unpaid work is not only an American reality, and not only a Great Recession reality now ravaging the land of opportunity. A Canada government survey documenting the time men and women spent on unpaid work in 1992, referred to by Lena Graber and John Miller, found: the Canadian women performed 65 per cent of all unpaid work. They shouldered ‘an especially large share of household labour…’ They also referred to Great Britain, where ‘unpaid labour hours are high for an industrialized country. The British Office for National Statistics found, using the opportunity-cost method, unpaid work was 112% of Britain’s GDP in 1995! With the specialist-replacement method, British unpaid labor was still 56% of GDP – greater than the output of the United Kingdom’s entire manufacturing sector for the year. In Japan … paid workers put in longer hours, and women perform over 80% of unpaid work…. [T]he value of unpaid labor …equaled at least half of Japanese women’s market wages.’ A reader may tell: at least one of the sources of wealth is identified.
This reality is not confined only to the centre of the centre of the present world system, the US, or in the centre. In China, now a country far from periphery and nearer to the centre, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, the biggest trade union in the world, plays a significant role in the lives of the Chinese workers. According to Ellen David Freidman, a visiting lecturer at the School of Government at Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China, ‘many trade union cadres at the district level are investors or beneficiaries of the enterprise’s profitability.’ This ‘achievement’ could be made possible ‘[o]wing to its neoliberal legacy.’ These phenomena, she wrote, ‘undermine the union’s ability to independently defend workers’ interests when in conflict with management… Now linked by a profound market failure, workers in the United States can no longer buy, while workers in China can no longer produce. In the context of the current global crisis, it has become clear that union leaders in both countries have failed to anticipate and challenge the dangers of the unregulated market, and failed to organise workers to protect themselves against its ravages.’ Plundering economies not dependent on export to US may find an easy solace.
The periphery reality is not different. In the shadows of Buenos Aires, a city with tango clubs, in ‘the city’s nearly 400 clandestine shops…around 100,000 undocumented [Bolivian] immigrants work … with an average wage – if they are paid at all – of $100 per month,’ wrote Marie Trigona, an independent journalist based in the Argentine capital. In these sweatshops, they work in slave-labour condition. ‘[T]op clothing companies have turned small warehouses or gutted buildings into clandestine sweatshops. Locked in, workers are forced to live and work in cramped quarters with little ventilation and, often, limited access to water and gas.’ A labour union reported more than 8,000 cases of labour abuse in 2006. Quoting two workers she reported, ‘[Y]ou work from 7 a.m. until midnight or 1 a.m. Many times they don’t pay the women and they owe them two or three years’ pay. … You don’t have rights to rent a room or to work legally.’ ‘For two years I worked and slept in a three-square-meter room along with my two children and three sewing machines my boss provided. They would bring us two meals a day. For breakfast a cup of tea with a piece of bread and lunch consisting of a portion of rice, a potato, and an egg. We had to share our two meals with our children because according to my boss, my children didn’t have the right to food rations because they are not workers and don’t yield production.’ The woman worker was fired as she divulged the truth. The workers manufacture garments for brands including Lacar, Kosiuko, Adidas and Montage. There are times, infamous acts adorn famous names!
This is the present-day labour reality, almost universal, a part of which has been recorded and analysed with hard facts and data in the Real World Labor (eds Immnuel Ness, Amy Offner, Chris Sturr, and the Dollars & Sense collective). The real life of labour partly referred above from the pages of the Real World Labor, depressing and irrational to human brain, are overwhelming in the present context, but not or least discussed by the mainstream, and the truth behind these is presented partially, in a tilted way, distorted, methodically and with regularity, and even killed. Fabrication and falsification goes on as capital-controlled media and academia try to colour the reality. These acts are done with ‘misinformation, false arguments, faulty analysis,’ as Michael Yates, associate editor, Monthly Review, puts while discussing the Real World Labor, ‘so common in the mainstream media and among orthodox economists.’
An antidote to this is the Real World Labor (2009, Economic Affairs Bureau, Boston) that also provides information and analysis on resistance by labour: in 2008-09, sit-down strikes in Europe and North America ranged from 24 hours to 51 days. In 1971-2007, Australian and European sit-down strikes ranged from 5 days to 2 years. Labour’s resistance is not only in the interest of workers themselves though often sections of media controlled by lumpen interests equate raising workers’ grievances to harming national interests. Workers’ unions, as David Bacon, journalist and photographer covering labour, immigration, and the impact of global economy on labour wrote, ‘are the main opposition to the occupation’s economic agenda, and the biggest obstacle to the agenda’s centerpiece – the privatization of Iraq’s oil.…[U]nions have become the only force in Iraq trying to maintain at least a survival living standard for the millions of Iraqis who still have to earn a living somehow in the middle of the … war’ (‘Iraq’s Workers Strike to Keep Their Oil’, Real World Labor).
People in many countries including Canada, Argentina, Brazil and US are organising ‘solidarity economy’ in response to capitalist globalisation’s inability to provide employment. The forms and activities of these emerging initiatives vary. In 2005, ‘there were over 6,000 social solidarity economy enterprises in Quebec employing over 65,000 people. …In Argentina…over 180 factories have reopened under worker control, providing jobs for over 10,000 workers…. As of 2005, [Brazil’s] solidarity sector comprised almost 15,000 enterprises employing over 1.2 million workers, along with 1,120 support organizations…’ (Julie Matthaei and Jenna Allard, Real World Labor) Drawing from the pages of Dollars & Sense and WorkingUSA the collection of 70 authoritative essays by leading authors, economists, teachers, scholars, and journalists, the Real World Labor discusses issues confronting labour on a global level including neo-liberalism, free trade, offshore outsourcing and shows the level of discourse in the sphere of labour and capital a few societies are having while a few societies are not engaging in. Bankruptcies of the streams, main and the other, in lumpen elite dominated societies stand out starkly while one goes through the Real World Labor, and this reflects the influence lumpen elites inflict with its money power. Significant information even does not reach the concerned audience. Underlings and hatchlings corrupt and capture union leadership. Debates are shaped by interests related to capital. Promising initiatives are decapitated with lofty sounding soft tactics. While one section dreams of organising labour with donor money the other hatches plan to muzzle down the voice of labour. A la lumpen reality!
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