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Labor Repressed Labor Struggling

By Farooque Chowdhury

30 April, 2012
Countercurrents.org

Brutally repressed, dispossessed labor is in countries, in continents. Capital is waging its class war against labor in covert and overt, in economic and political, in legal and illegal forms. It’s capital’s desperate effort for its own survival. Randomly picked information/news shows the grim realness of the state of labor.

Miners in Africa work in substandard working conditions for long hours with low wages or no-wages in the informal mining industry. Many of them are children, who are compelled to work in small, narrow pits. Mudslides, cave-ins, drowning and other accidents accompany miners collecting diamonds and gold. Citing BBC, Amnesty International, Diamond Development Initiative and IRINnews.org, MSNBC made the report.

In Mali’s artisanal mines, at least 20,000 children, many of them six years old, work. Approximately 100,000 to 200,000 miners, women and men, work in Mali, Africa’s third largest gold producer. Some children never get paid while others are paid a few dollars a week, or a bag of dirt that they wash, and if fortunate enough, get some gold that might be in the dirt. Headaches, back pain, joint aches, spinal injury, heart, coordination and memory problems, kidney failure overshadow their life. Toxic mercury vapors kill them. Some of them die of suffocation. Many of them are actually shackled to mines – work till death. Citing A Poisonous Mix: Child Labor, Mercury and Artisanal Gold Mining in Mali, a Human Rights Watch report, Jessica Hopper said in Rock Center on Dec. 5, 2011.

South Africa’s wine and fruit farm workers are not allowed to form unions; they are one of the worst paid in the country; their working conditions are unsafe; their housing is inadequate; they are exposed to chemical pesticides. Human Right Watch report Ripe with Abuse exposed the brutish condition in 2011.

In Ivory Coast, cocoa fields turn productive with the labor of child slaves. Their number is not small. And, the profit they produce for capital is not little.

Workers, mainly from Africa, toil in the southern Italy’s tomato fields that produce for the canned-tomato industry. Mostly from Ghana, Burkina Faso, and Ivory Coast, they live in slave-like conditions. In the Italian orange groves that produce fruit for the processed food industry including Coca-Cola and its Fanta soft drink, workers’ earning is meager. Gangmasters, who recruit them, charge workers for transport, and make other deductions from wages. Many of them live in horrifying conditions, in run down buildings or in makeshift slums, in many cases, without functioning roof, without electricity or running water. Citing Ecologist, Tom Philpott reported in Mother Jones on March 2, 2012.
In Afghanistan, more than half of the workers in the brick kiln industry are under the age of 18. Of them, 47% are under the age of 14 or younger. Of these younger workers, 33% are boys and 14% are girls. Most children began working between 7 and 8 years of age, and by the age of 9 almost 80% of them were working. Both adult and child laborers work more than 70 hours a week while the average daily wages are between 297 (about US$6) and 407 Afghanis for an adult and 170-278 Afghanis for a child. The brick kilns rely almost entirely on debt bondage. The workers are tied to a kiln to pay off debt they borrowed for basic necessities, medical expenses, weddings and funerals. Buried in Bricks, an ILO report prepared on the basis of a survey conducted in August-October 2011, found the facts.

In Global Employment Trends 2012 report, ILO mentions German policies to keep down wages. “Deflationary” wage policy was implemented in Germany after reunification as “German unit labor costs were falling relative to those of competitors over the past decade”. In Germany, the increase in private consumption was more than 1% lower than other euro zone countries between 1995 and 2001. Domestic demand in Germany was not strong enough because of low wages. As a result, countries in crisis had not been able to export enough of their goods to Germany. The rising competitiveness had benefited German exporters at the expense of other countries. Other European countries increasingly saw only harsher wage deflation as a solution to their lack of competitiveness.

The ILO report doesn’t mention that the German exporters’ benefit have actually come at the expense of labor in Germany and in other countries. In Germany, surplus labor has been appropriated brutally, and in competing countries, labor has been kept under pressure; that’s also for a brutal appropriation.

An ILO report issued in March 2012 cited around 20 violations of the ILO’s international labor standards in Canada. The report reviewed Canada’s compliance to the ILO’s most fundamental Convention – No. 87, Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organize. The governments in Canada have refused to change labor laws that the ILO has ruled to be in contravention of the Convention although Canada ratified the Convention in 1972. The Convention establishes the universal right of all workers to form and join unions of their own choosing, the rights to engage in free collective bargaining and strike action. The report cited 16 incidents, where workers were denied the basic human right to join a union and five incidents, where unionized workers were prevented by legislation from bargaining collectively.

The ILO “has been expressing concern [over Canada] for many years on the exclusion of wide categories of workers from statutory protection of freedom of association and on the restrictions on the right to strike in several provinces”. Drew Plaxton, the Canadian Foundation for Labour Rights Board member and president of the Canadian Association of Labour Lawyers noted that the federal and provincial governments continue to demonstrate disregard for the ILO rulings on restrictive labor legislation in Canada. “In many cases, governments in Canada have not even provided the ILO with the courtesy of a reply to its many requests for information,” said Plaxton.
And, this advanced capitalist economy teaches democracy in poor countries.

Inventory of Policy Responses to the Financial and Economic Crisis, an ILO/World Bank joint synthesis report, examines 22 high-income and 55 low- and middle-income countries’ labor market interventions in the face of the Great Financial Crisis. The sampled 77 countries represented 89% of global GDP and 86% of the global labor force. The report said: “Most countries adopted policies to support the creation of new jobs as well as the protection of the existing jobs.” (p. 13)

But the reality overwhelmed by bosses, and actually capital, disobeyed “the policies” for job creation. Countries have submerged in unemployment. In a number of countries, the unemployment situation has turned alarming. Reports from the ILO and other international organizations showed the facts. Miseries of the unemployed laugh at the status quoed data presentation and interpretation. In Europe, 45 million people were out of a job while 1.1 billion people were unemployed or living in extreme poverty worldwide. Anti-austerity movement in countries in Europe unwrap capital and co.’s character of job “protection” measures.

During the crisis, according to the ILO/WB report, social security contributions were decreased. This step was taken in 24 countries out of the 77. Of the 24, ten countries made it on a permanent basis, 13 countries made it “across the board, e.g. for all employees or all newly hired employees.” Social security contribution was cut while “high-income countries allocated most of their budgets to the financial sector [….] Of the US$1.9 trillion PPP sectoral budget for high-income countries, US$1.2 trillion, almost two-thirds went to the financial sector. This financial bailout dwarfed other sectoral support in high-income countries, the next highest level support” was 8% for health, 7% for manufacturing, 5% each for education and real estate, 4% for transport, and 3% each for agriculture and infrastructure. (The ILO/WB report, pp. 8-11)

Percentage of allocation identifies the entity served, the interest protected. It’s finance-lords, not workers. Size of labor’s “fate” determined by the crisis or labor’s share of bounty from the crisis is evident from the facts cited in the report.

Questions related to the economy’s capacity and level of efficiency can be forgotten temporarily as mainstream scholarship likes to hide those questions under tricky terms and presentation, and with rhetoric against labor and labor’s politics. Question related to intervention by Brussels-bureaucrats and bankers, intervention for changing of government or replacing elected government by unelected one is also set aside for an intermediate period.

Instead of entering into the castle of detail a look into labor related steps taken by capital and co. in the face of the financial crisis helps perceive the reality hostile to labor. Wage subsidies, work sharing arrangements, unemployment benefits, preserving skills through training, social assistance programs, health care, etc. that were initiated in the face of the crisis as the ILO/WB report mentions were, in actual sense, for regeneration of capital, and at the cost of labor and broader society. If labor is not there at the door step of capital, and if labor goes to graveyard, who shall be there to generate capital? So, in the interest of capital, steps should be there so that labor fails to hide in crematorium. Capital and co. is well aware of this fact of “generosity”.

And, “social dialogue during the crisis”, as the report cites? Is not this to make labor, and broader society, agree to terms favorable to capital? Even, that dialogue, as the “Table 4: Examples of Negotiation Related to Social Pacts and Main Sector-level Agreements – 2008-10” in the report shows, has not happened in the US and the UK, two capitalist economies shaken by the crisis. Reflection of a reality, indeed!

In total, as the report mentions, 63 countries were without social pacts/major sector level agreements. This means, in these countries capital and co. had no urgency to enter into negotiation with labor, and with broader society. This means, in these countries capital and co. had upper hand, and labor was functionally, organizationally and politically kept within control, was neutralized.

Countries in Europe now know the price of austerity as unemployment mocks all inventories of policy responses. Twenty-five percent of the Spaniards are out of work. Greece, Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Finland, Slovenia, Slovakia, Romania, The Netherlands and many are in the same queue with astonishing figures and percentages, with hunger looming and living standard falling down.

Everywhere it is the working people, who suffer, whose difficult days are now turning difficult for the mainstream to deny. And, it is turning impossible to deny that capital has not suffered in the crisis. Capital has been and is being boosted up by the lender of last resort – state.

On the condition of labor, only a partial view, a miniscule, emerges from the facts. Harsh practices and shrewd tact by capital get uncovered, broader trends of capital emerges, also. Capital is in endless war with labor irrespective of color, country and continent. In times of crisis, actually crises, capital turns cruder, more brute, more merciless, and much more tactful. Its financial and economic karma, in casino and in “real economy” as the mainstream learnedness likes to use the term to hide its failure in analysis, is not free from politics.

And, capital’s anti-labor politicking include provoke labor, engage provocateurs to resort to nihilism degenerating into philosophy and tool of reaction, and resort to anarchism to provide capital opportunity to make onslaught, incite labor to deviate from protracted political work and to get embroiled into phrase-mongering, destruction of property and acts of arson, to engage into acts that isolate labor from broader society, give calls for higher level of political struggle without political preparation.

But, like time immemorial, labor in mines, in farms, in streets and squares, in docks and ports, in closed down factory premises, in homes filled with only unemployment and hunger, in laid off condition knows that call for higher level of struggle without political organization reflects nothing but impatience and immaturity reaching to confusion and ultimately to inaction. It’s labor’s experience gathered over long period of struggle that anarchist energy ignores. This experience, the experience of shunning adventurism and anarchism is again required in this May.

Farooque Chowdhury from Dhaka contributes on contemporary issues.




 


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