“That would never work!” A typical response, I imagine, to the description of a socialist society, where people work because they want to, on a voluntary basis. Such a society would not work, we are told, because no one in it would do any work. However, that view of work as, well, work – rather than something enjoyable — tells us more about today’s society, where our motivation to work is primarily the need to pay rent and put food on the table. Immersed as we are in this reality, it is not surprising that it shapes our...
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While the holidays are supposed to be a time to gather together with family members and reflect not only on the accomplishments of the past year but on the possibilities of the future, to many it is a crushing reminder of just how much this brutal system we live under can make our lives miserable. As capitalism, which depends on constant growth to survive, depends increasingly more on the winter holiday season meet its yearly profit goals, so too does the pressure increase on the working class to spend their hard earned discretionary income or go deeper into debt...
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The Magna Corporation is the largest supplier of parts to the auto industry in Canada. It employs more workers than GM Canada, all non-union and all working below union rates putting downward pressure on wages in the industry. (It will come as no surprise that CEO Stronach takes home higher than union wages – $100 million over the last three years!). The company represents a significant challenge to the Canadian Auto Workers’ Union (CAW) and a potentially large source of dues revenue. But the deal that was struck between CAW president Hargrove and Stronach has provoked strong reaction. Here’s...
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“Irish workers are second most productive in the world” headlined the business section of the Irish Times (4 September) reporting on an International Labour Organisation (ILO) study on productivity in various different countries. Productivity as measured by the ILO is a pretty nebulous concept. They take a country’s total GNP and divide it by some measure of the amount of work done, either the total number of hours worked by workers in that country or this divided by the total number of workers (work per hour). It was on this second measure that Irish workers came second (to US...
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A court has dismissed charges against three top officers of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU), ruling on March 29 that the government failed to present evidence proving the union federation had violated “exchange control” regulations to affect the market. ZCTU secretary-general Wellington Chibebe, Elijah Mutemeri and Vimbai Mushongera were involved in an attempt to organize workers in the informal sector by founding a new organization, the Zimbabwe Chamber of Informal Economy Associations (ZCIEA). The Zimbabwean police raided its office in 2005. Informal workers are one of the most widespread but precarious sectors of the Zimbabwean economy. Through...
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Why unions must set their own agenda in online campaigns Knee-jerk assumptions undermine working class solidarity I have been helping organize online campaigns in support of workers’ rights for several years now. The latest campaign I’m helping with concerns Zimbabwe. It supports a call by the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions demanding that President Robert Mugabe respect workers rights. Very few of the campaigns that I have been involved in may be considered controversial – at least they are not usually controversial within the labour movement. When you attack a company like Wal-Mart, everyone on the left has only...
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The BBC is reporting that child labour , in fact , near enough actual slavery , remains an unresolved problem in the Ivory Coast , the world’s biggest cocoa producer. A 2002 report by the industry body, the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture, put the number of children working in dangerous conditions in cocoa in West Africa at 284,000 in 2002, 200,000 of them in Ivory Coast. Many children on cocoa farms don’t get to school, some exchange their childhood for work, a roof over their head and a meal a day. Others have been sent by their parents...
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Each year half a million people in India and other tropical countries catch visceral leishmaniasis, also known as black fever. Infected by the bite of a sand fly, they rapidly weaken and lose weight before dying with painfully swollen livers and spleens. A safe and effective treatment for black fever was found long ago: the antibiotic paromomycin (cure rate 95 percent). But the firm that developed it — Pharmacia, a precursor of Pfizer – shelved it in the 1960s for lack of a “viable market.” What that means is that the people who need it cannot afford to pay...
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R. What is the condition of the working class today? How do you see the status of people who work for a living? W. Speaking very generally, in the early 21st Century, it’s true that certain luxuries are more easily available: it seems that everybody has television, running water, electricity. Certain consumer goods are very available. Food is also widely accessible in the United States as well, unlike in other parts of the world. In some ways, particularly the American working class is in some respects, I think, sheltered from some of the more horrible aspects of global capitalism....
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In the village of Orlovka, in the Chui region of Kyrgyzstan in post-Soviet Central Asia, there used to be a uranium mine. Its closure in the early 1990s led to massive unemployment in the area. But now the desperately poor local residents have found a new way to survive. They sift through the waste dumped near the disused mine °©- “a moonscape of grey slag” – in search of material that they can sell to scrap merchants. There is iron and other metals, and graphite, but most valuable is silicon, which fetches $10 per kilo and ends up at...
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