Struggle in a Time of Crisis , livre ebook

Struggle in a Time of Crisis
Struggle in a Time of Crisis
Edited by
Nicolas Pons-Vignon and Mbuso Nkosi
First published 2015 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright © Nicolas Pons-Vignon and Mbuso Nkosi 2015
The right of the individual contributors to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN    978 0 7453 3616 9    Hardback
ISBN    978 0 7453 3621 3    Paperback
ISBN    978 1 7837 1731 6    PDF eBook
ISBN    978 1 7837 1733 0    Kindle eBook
ISBN    978 1 7837 1732 3    EPUB eBook
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.
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Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England Text design by Melanie Patrick Simultaneously printed by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, UK and Edwards Bros in the United States of America
Dedicated to the memory of Frederic Sterling Lee
Contents List of Figures Acknowledgements Introduction by Nicolas Pons-Vignon and Mbuso Nkosi   SECTION 1: UNDERSTANDING THE CRISIS      1 Planet Earth is Wage-led! A Simultaneous Increase in the Profit Share by 1 Per Cent-point in the Major Developed and Developing Countries Leads to a 0.36 Per Cent Decline in Global GDP   Özlem Onaran    2 From Financial Crisis to Stagnation: The Destruction of Shared Prosperity and the Role of Economics   Thomas I. Palley    3 State Funding of Research and the Narrowing of Economics in the UK   Frederic Sterling Lee    4 Globalisation and Taxation: Trends and Consequences   Ilan Strauss    5 T-shirt economics: Labour in the Imperialist World Economy   Tony Norfield   SECTION 2: EUROPE IN TURMOIL      6 Greece in the Deadlock of the Troika’s Austerity Trap    Giorgios Argitis    7 The ECB’s Misleading Understanding of the Euro Crisis   Carlo D’Ippoliti    8 Europe’s Lost Decade: Paths out of Stagnation   Hansjörg Herr    9 The Crisis, Structural Reform and the Fortification of Neoliberalism in Europe   Christoph Hermann 10 The Economic Crisis and Job Quality in Europe: Some Worrying Trends and Worse May be to Come   Janine Leschke and Andrew Watt   SECTION 3: EXPLORING ALTERNATIVES   11 Tackling Unemployment and Growing Public Debt   Jomo Kwame Sundaram and Anis Chowdhury 12 Tax for Equity (T4E): Getting Wages Back on Track   Frank Hoffer 13 The State as the Employer of Last Resort   Cédric Durand and Dany Lang 14 ‘We are Steaming Ahead’: NUMSA’s Road to the Left   An Interview with Karl Cloete 15 Alternatives to Neoliberalism: Towards a New Progressive Consensus   João Antônio Felício   SECTION 4: RESISTING EXPLOITATION AND NEOLIBERALISM   16 The Hobbit: An Unexpected Outcome?   Carol Jess 17 Right to Work and Michigan Labour   Roland Zullo 18 A Site of Struggle: Organised Labour and Domestic Worker Organising in Mozambique   Ruth Castel-Branco 19 Constructing an anti-Neoliberal Analysis to Arrive at Truly Alternative Alternatives   Salimah Valiani 20 The 2012 Strike Wave, Marikana and the History of Rock Drillers in South African Mines   Paul Stewart   SECTION 5: GOOD SAMARITANS? INSTITUTIONAL RESPONSES TO LABOUR RIGHT ABUSES   21 Where is Decent Work in DfID Policy? Marketisation and Securitisation of UK International Aid   Phoebe V. Moore 22 The National Pact to Eradicate Slave Labour in Brazil: A Useful Tool for Unions?   Lisa Carstensen and Siobhán McGrath 23 Better Work or ‘Ethical Fix’? Lessons from Cambodia’s Apparel Industry   Dennis Arnold 24 Putting Workers’ Agency at the Centre in the Indonesian Sportswear Industry   Karin A. Siegmann, Jeroen Merk, and Peter Knorringa 25 Rana Plaza: Private Governance and Corporate Power in Global Supply Chains   Tandiwe Gross   SECTION 6: ‘WORKERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE’: CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES OF TRANSNATIONAL SOLIDARITY   26 Rank and File Participation and International Union Democracy   Vasco Pedrina 27 Trade Unions, Free Trade and the Problem of Transnational Solidarity   Andreas Bieler 28 Modelling a Global Union Strategy: The Arena of Global Production Networks, Global Framework Agreements and Trade Union Networks   Michael Fichter 29 Trade Unions, Globalisation and Internationalism   Ronaldo Munck 30 Chinese Construction Companies in Africa: A Challenge for Trade Unions   Eddie Cottle   Notes on Contributors Index
List of Figures 2.1 The 1945–75 virtuous circle Keynesian growth model 2.2 The neoliberal policy box 2.3 The structural Keynesian box 7.1 Slide 10 of Mario Draghi’s Presentation at the March 2013 Euro Summit 10.1 EU27 Job Quality Index results 10.2 Overall JQI scores per country. NB: EU…=EU27 and EU15 respectively 10.3 Change in unemployment rate versus change in overall JQI
Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of the articles in this book were first published in the Global Labour Column (GLC) – http://column.global-labour-university.org/ – which is edited at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. The GLC is a project of the Global Labour University, a network of trade unions, universities and the ILO (International Labour Organisation). It offers Masters Courses in five different countries on trade unions, sustainable development, social justice, international labour standards, multinational companies, economic policies and global institutions and promotes research cooperation on global labour issues. The GLU is a new approach to increase the intellectual and strategic capacity of workers’ organisations and to establish stronger working relationships between trade unions, the ILO and the scientific community.
We thank the Bureau for Workers’ Activities of the ILO for its financial support.
Introduction 1
Nicolas Pons-Vignon and Mbuso Nkosi
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto
The crisis which started in the United States in 2007 has turned into a global depression whose consequences are wreaking havoc across the world, although affecting in a disproportionate manner the 99 per cent, people who depend on their labour or state transfers to live. While banks and large companies have been bailed out (a remarkable sign that state intervention is alive and well in the neoliberal era) it is the majority who are now paying the bill in the form of spending cuts. Such cuts have direct social and economic effects: on the one hand, they make life more difficult for the poor who depend on grants or free access to essential services; on the other hand, they undermine investment and economic recovery, delaying desperately needed job creation. As shown by David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu (2013) in their work on austerity policies’ impact on health, austerity kills, not just growth, but people.
The crisis has shown the limits of the neoliberal model of accumulation and of its theoretical or ideological foundation, the neoclassical belief in the self-regulating ability of ‘free’ markets. This is nothing new though, as many economists outside of the hegemonic neoclassical tradition had been arguing since the 1980s that neoliberal capitalism does not only increase inequality, but generates disequilibria which threaten the possibility of sustained growth. Such debates, which would have appeared far too radical a few years ago, have now entered the mainstream of the economics profession, as shown by the conference organised in March 2015 by the New York Review of Books on ‘What’s Wrong with the Economy – and with Economics?’. 2
There is, in Europe and North America, a rampant sense of powerlessness in the face of the crisis. This is because, in spite of the rise of numerous movements of contestation of neoliberal policies, from Occupy to the Indignados , the only cure which politicians are implementing to respond to the ills of neoliberalism entails more of the same. The Syriza-led government in Greece is of course the lone exception, but its very ability to prove the ‘There is no alternative’ dogma wrong means that it is under intense pressure to jettison its hopes of charting an alternative path. The other alternative, of course, which is steadily rising across Europe, is a far-right populism which is worryingly reminiscent of the 1930s.
There is an important difference between the last period of sustained world crisis in the 1930s and now, in that there are no leaders such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt who are prepared to rein in the market. When this was undertaken during the Great Depression, it laid the foundation for an era of ‘shared prosperity’ between capital and labour after the Second World War. During this so-called Golden Age, wage increases and extensions allowed, in advanced capitalist countries, for an unprecedented reduction in inequality. This explains why the memory of, or perhaps nostalgia for, this age makes it an enduring reference point for much of the left and most trade unions.
Three qualifications to the idealised vision of the Golden Age are important. First, this phase of capitalist accumulation, which has been called Fordism, did not emerge only out of the vision of politicians or businessmen, but was the result of the enormous political power (and threat) of the Communist left, who had played a central and painful part in the resistance to fascism. Secondly, whilst inequality declined, it remained stubbornly present; many in the West, and many more outside of it, did not benefit from institutionalised redistribution. It was perhaps a Golden Age for capitalism, but not one for all workers, let alone inhabitants of the world. Thirdly, as shown by Thomas Piketty (2014), this period was an exception; in the long term, capitalist development is associated with the rise of ine