Seminar hosted during the World Social Forum, 2004, Mumbai, India
19 th January, 5 pm- 8 pm

The IDEAs session on Resisting Imperialism: The World of Labour was held on 19 January 2004 from 5-8 pm. The speakers in this session comprised of Subhashini Ali of AIDWA; Prof. Thomas Isaac, MLA from Kerala; Dr. Praveen Jha from JNU; Ravi Naidoo from Naledi, South Africa; Prof. V.K. Ramachandran from Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata; and Prof. William K. Tabb from Queen’s College, USA. Prof. Utsa Patnaik from JNU chaired the session.

Ravi Naidoo said that workers are bound to face increasingly oppressive work conditions under globalization. Then he spoke briefly on the kind of work an organization called the Self Employed Women's Association (SEWA) was doing in organizing women workers in the unorganized sector. He spoke about how SEWA is finding that the unorganized sector workers, and the women workers in particular, are being further weakened under the globalized world order. Unskilled workers have lagged behind in productivity and wages as a result of global and national technical progress which have benefited mostly the organized sector exclusively; unorganized sector workers are facing an increased vulnerability and insecurity in the new market and trade oriented world; and the bargaining power of unskilled workers has decreased as a result of the greater mobility of capital and skilled labour.

Subhashini Ali started by speaking on how globalization is affecting women labourers in particular and forcing them to work under abominable work conditions. As a result of globalization hunger has also increased tremendously. The PDS has broken down, issue prices have increased rapidly, people are eating less than what they were eating ten years ago. This desperation is forcing people to agree to work for lower and lower wages. Research by people in AIDWA shows that while the proportion of women workers in agriculture is on the rise, they are paid much lower than what the male workers are used to getting.

Patriarchy is being reinvented and reimposed. Patriarchy encloses and confines women. Out of all jobs that the government provided last year only 8 per cent went to women. While in rural areas women are often doing most of the work even under government schemes, wages are paid a long gap after the work is completed. Often the men go to collect the money and the women lose control over their earnings. Most nurses, even in hospitals and nursing homes and health centres in northern India, are from Kerala. They are ill-paid but cannot protest and are totally vulnerable. They say they are doing it to earn their own dowries. Young women now have to earn by working for a pittance with the sole objective of arranging for their own dowries increasing demands for which cannot be met by the brides’ parents.

All strategies of patriarchy use fear, terror and physical violence to keep patriarchal institutions and power structure in place. To keep women submissive they are often threatened with abduction and rape. There are jails in Afghanistan where women are kept for their own safety. Most of these women had made self-choice marriages. In Haryana ‘honour killings’ are women are regularly carried out to save ‘family honours’, and it is not just a coincidence that most of these women had received some education.

The retreat of the state as a result of globalization has seen the retreat of the state from meeting the social sector obligations like child care, care for the old and infirm, and so on. Women are expected to now fill all the gaps left by the state to make globalization bearable with the men having to work under increasingly regressive working conditions for longer hours and obviously this work has to be unpaid.

Without addressing the concerns of women, and without opposing their oppression, the fight against globalization, and against imperialism, cannot be taken to any great distance.

Prof. Tabb spoke on the situation of labour in the United States. He started with three broad conditioning factors that changed in the recent decades. The transformation of the US from an industrial economy to a service economy has changed the nature of the labour force in the country in many important ways. The Cold War era repressed communist tendencies. The Trade Union Movement in the US during the Cold War almost acted as an agent of the US government and pursued anti-communist policies, destroying trade union independence around the world. The AFL-CIO was given a very large amount of money by the US government to basically act as an agency of the CIA worldwide. Domestically the aim was to drive out the basic trade unionists by dubbing them communists. Militants were isolated and expelled from unions after being branded as communists. The next important factor was the regional shift in the US economy from the northeast and the industrial mid-west to the southern part of the country where racism and anti-union activities are more violent and religious fundamentalism as a strategy of dividing workers is stronger.

The speaker next told about a particular strike. Less than ten per cent of the American workers in the private sector today are unionized. In the 1950s a third of the American labour force in the private sector were members of trade unions. So the decline of trade unionism is a very important factor. Thirty years ago General Motors was the largest employer in the US, today it is the Wall Mart. In California there is a strike going on right now in 800 Californian stores (not Wall Mart, but the supermarket stores which are Wall Mart’s rivals). The supermarket workers are paid good wages, about US $18 per hour. However Wall Mart pays its employees very poorly (often as low as US $8-9 per hour). Its competitors used to offer about twice this rate as hourly wage. Now even the competitors of Wall Mart are asking their employees to agree to cutbacks in health benefits, retirement privileges, etc. Wall Mart does not give these benefits to its employees, and the company’s rivals claim that if they are forced to continue forking out these benefits they will not stand a chance of competing with Wall Mart. This is called the Wall Marting of the United States. It is the forcing down the wages by one very large employer.

Naked exploitation lies at the heart of the American notion of efficiency. Threatened by the fear of being fired next workers are forced to put in extra work mostly without any additional benefits. In the last decade the minimum wage in the US has fallen by a third in real terms. In terms of health care, in terms of retirement American workers are far worse off than they were earlier. There is a 25 per cent wage gap between the white and the black workers in the United States today.

Half of white children have a single parent or grand parents bringing them up and not both the parents. A generation ago the average American family could save 11 per cent of its income. The average American family today saves nothing. On the contrary they are borrowing to consume. Casualisation in work is also on the rise in the country. There has been casualisation in the Netherlands and in Germany as well. However, in these countries casual and permanent workers are paid wages at the same rates. But in the United States wages vary depending on race, colour, sex, etc. This can happen as trade unions in the US are extremely weak. American workers have always been patriotic and they have supported the government in foreign policies doing bad things around the world. That may be partly because the Americans often do not know what their government is doing, partly may be because the government says that it is bringing freedom to people around the world. But now there is disillusionment among them. As they feel the pinch of jobs moving out of the country workers in the US also have become like workers elsewhere. Probably for the first time US workers are feeling the pangs of globalization. Meanwhile President Bush is cutting taxes not even for the top one per cent of the US population, but for the top tenth of a per cent. Expenditure by the state is going down on education, on health care, while the same money is going to fund military expansion and cut taxes of the super rich.

Today the AFL-CIO is standing for the first time with undocumented workers, demanding equal wages for women, and a kind of social unionism is developing. The increasingly harsh treatment of American workers and the increasing difficulties families of American workers are facing, one can hope, will see them identifying themselves with those around the world who have been marginalized and impoverished by the kind of imperialist globalization the world is currently undergoing.

Dr. Praveen Jha was the next speaker and he spoke how over the last couple of decades we have witnessed the strengthening of a whole range of predatory tendencies of capitalism vis-à-vis the world of labour. The earlier checks on these tendencies that were in place in some parts of the world because of historical reasons seem to be disappearing. The massive thrust towards flexibilisation of labour market policies, practices such as doing away with regular employment, increasing part-time works, all these were considered by most labour economists and development economists of the 1960s and 1970s as transitory. But now the thrust is on making these erstwhile transitory practices permanent. In quantitative terms recent figures published by the International Labour Organisation on global employment scenario state that the number of people globally who are openly unemployed has gone up from 141 million to 180 million in the last seven years. As with other ILO reports, these estimates are huge underestimates. In any case this report looked at open unemployment and large sections of the population who are underemployed or disguisedly unemployed are not captured in this report.

It is very clear that in every region of the globe there has been as increase in unemployment. There has also been a tremendous increase in vulnerability of workers, in terms of social and political terror, and also in terms of a weakened bargaining power in a scenario of increasing unemployment. Wages in every region has fallen, stagnated, or, in the most positive cases, seen a threat to growth of wages. The capitalist manifesto, if any, would be that of course the capitalists need the workers, but hell with the workers.

Next the speaker spoke about some trends emerging in India. The Union Budget of 2001-02 proposes major amendments to the legal framework that has regulated industrial labour since independence. The suggestions included amendment to the Industrial Disputes Act and the Contract Labour Act. The suggestions that emerged from the Group of Ministers that looked into this issue have suggested the acceptance of many clauses that are extremely detrimental to labour. If one looks at the Second National Commission on Labour, some of the issues that are discussed are distinction between core and non-core activities. More and more activities are now being pushed into non-core activities. Activities in non-core section need not be regulated by the Contract Labour Act, and so even if the Contract Labour Act does not get amended, more and more workers will now be outside the purview of this act in any case. Besides closures are being made easier while legal strikes are being made increasingly difficult.

While these policies are being pursued thinking that weakening of labour laws will bring in investment, investment is more a function of public investment, infrastructural facilities, rather than of anti-labour policies. We have to fight together to see that the anti-labour policies are reversed.

The next speaker in the session was Prof. V.K. Ramachandran. He spoke on issues plaguing rural employment in India, what the state of rural employment in India is today, what it holds for the future, and how things have progressed on this front in the last decade, i.e. over the period of deflation-induced impoverishment. The last decade had seen the collapse of rural employment and the collapse of purchasing power in the countryside. Wherever one goes in India, the demand that rural people have is the demand for employment. Even if we accept the grossly exaggerated government-given figure, creation of 520 million person days of work is a failure and not a success of the government. If we take 150 days of work as the minimum requirement for each of the 120 million agricultural labourers (in itself a conservative estimate), we would require 18,000 million person days of work. So what the government claimed to have created was less than three per cent of the work that is required.

Conversion from traditional to high yielding varieties of rice and wheat leads to an immediate increase in labour absorption per unit of land. However use of new labour-saving technology has prevented the rise in demand for agricultural labour. Whatever work is now available is mostly on piece rate basis. Investment on irrigation facilities has a major positive impact on the creation of employment in rural areas. But almost nothing has been spent by the government on agriculture in recent years. The attack on employment schemes like the Integrated Rural Development Programme (IRDP) has a visible bearing on the creation of rural employment.

The next factor behind the rise in rural unemployment is the change in the rural credit policy. Financial liberalization has been an important component of the entire reforms package. And under financial liberalization no sector has been as much affected as the rural banking sector. Salient features of the 1990s were actual closing down of rural branches of several banks, cut backs in the rate of growth of rural branches, decline in the share of total advancement of credit by the rural branches, fall in the number of functioning rural branches, fall in the credit-deposit ratios of rural branches, and so on.

Leaving land fallow has been another blow to the creation of rural employment. In situations characterized by rising costs, falling harvest time prices, the absence of information to extension services and alternative crop cultivation activities cultivators may, and indeed do, decide to leave land fallow. Recently the World Bank has suggested the privatization of extension services, a step which is bound to multiply the problem of poor agriculturists. Deciding to leave land fallow has an effect on demand for wage and family labour.

Agriculture is increasingly being controlled directly by multinational corporations and is being guided by corporate interests. More land is being diverted from the cultivation of foodgrains to growing potatoes for chips, cherry tomatoes and kerkins. Such diversion should of course be evaluated in terms of its effects on incomes and employment, but also in a broader canvass, in terms of how it will affect land use, food security and bio-diversity.

To conclude Prof. Ramachandran harped on the fact that employment expansion in the countryside is crucially dependent on public investment including direct investment on infrastructure, investment in different schemes of mass employment generating and public works projects, most of which needs to be done through India's rural banking network. With this network and investment in rural India facing a total collapse the prospects of a recovery in rural employment generation are very bleak indeed.

Prof. Thomas Isaac was the last speaker in this session. He spoke about the new forces and changes that are making their way into the labour market. The basic parameters of bargaining have changed so much that over the last ten years or so all the gains that the working class made through years of militant struggle has come to nought. Globalization implies a change in the international division of labour and a second relocation of the industries, significant technological changes and the consequent transformation of the labour process, new forms of production organization which makes informalisation the basis, and so on.

All these changes have very important implications on labour. The structure of the working class is getting more stratified. The forms of organization that were effective in collective bargaining also are getting redundant. The spread of credit cards and other labour saving devices have affected employment generation negatively in a big way. Informalisation has now become the norm. Forms of struggle that have so far been the recourse of workers are being declared illegal. Also the powers of co-operatives have been gradually weakened. Co-operatives have always been the pillars of bargaining strength vis-à-vis the private sector. Dwindling away of co-operatives will allow the return of merchant capital.

Work conditions are also becoming more and more labour unfriendly. The Supreme Court of India says that probationers will work at the sweet will of employers. Wall Mart stores in the US now get the stores cleaned overnight by immigrant workers at pitifully low wages. But technically the Wall Mart says that the labour is hired by labour contractors and so the latter are to be blamed for bad working conditions. Permanent workers are told to punch out at scheduled hours and then keep working. The headquarters say that for such violation of work rules managers are to be blamed. Levels of corruption in the US have reached new grounds and have become very obvious. As a government servant one gives a favourable report about a company even if the company is in trouble or violates norms. The very next day the government servant finds himself on the board of directors of that company. So the notion that privatization will bring down the level of corruption is nothing but a myth.

Every participant in the session was of the opinion that labour faces a grave threat under the imperialist globalization that is being forced upon most countries, and we need to unitedly resist such efforts by international capital to undermine the interests of the working class in their search for increasing profits.

March 8, 2004.