Comment on "Workers Who Benefit From the Exploitation of Other Workers" by Marcel van der Linden

 

Working-class internationalism is needed more than ever today, and this attempt to try and understand why it has been so hard to achieve is very welcome.

Capitalism is inherently global; the imperative to ‘accumulate, accumulate!’ pushes it to expand into every corner of the world in search of new sources of raw materials, land, markets and labour power. What has been characterised as ‘the first international division of labour’ emerged out of the imperialist phase of capitalist expansion, when capital depended heavily on state intervention to support its expansion around the world. Inevitably, this led to inter-imperialist competition and conflict, as each imperial power tried to assert control over more territory, either directly, by establishing its own rule in the countries it colonised, or by less direct methods, such as installing local leaders whose interests were so entwined with those of the imperial elite that they could be partners in exploiting the working people of their country.      

In this period it is possible to identify both direct and indirect benefits accruing to workers in the imperialist countries from the exploitation of colonised working people, as listed in the paper. In general, then, it is true that imperialism in this period eventually provides benefits for workers in the imperialist countries which are enabled by the exploitation of working people in the colonies, but with three caveats:

Fine-Tuning the Linkage Proposal: Commentary

A cross-country comparison which finds ‘Strong evidence that countries with open trade policies have superior labor rights and health conditions and less child labor’ (Flanagan 2004: 26) suggests that openness to the world economy does not undermine workers’ rights and may even enhance them. However, the finding that in any particular country openness to the world economy can go with high labour standards is not incompatible with the proposition that globalisation as a process undermines labour rights globally.

One process by which this could and does take place is by the transfer of production from countries with higher labour standards to countries with lower standards, leaving workers in the former unemployed. Thus in developed countries, jobs in the labour-intensive textile and garment industries have been decimated as production shifted to developing country export sectors (Williams 2004; Narendranath 2004). This has also caused job losses in developing countries, when production moved from higher-wage countries like Korea to lower-wage ones like Cambodia. Outsourcing in the service sector led to further transfer of employment from developed to developing countries, leading to calls for a curb on outsourcing in the US (Alden 2004).

A less obvious, more insidious way in which labour standards are undermined is by the spread of low labour standards to countries which did not formerly suffer from them, or at least not to the same extent. The global expansion of informal labour – workers who do not have any formal employment contract with an employer and therefore are extremely vulnerable to abuse – is a case of this. Informal labour was always preponderant in India, but the expansion of homeworking, sweatshops, and the hiring of workers through intermediaries (‘labour contractors’, ‘agencies’, ‘gangmasters’ and so on) in countries which were formerly free of these problems (Mather 2005) has caused serious concern within the ILO in the 21^st century (ILO 2002).

In this context, the publication of International Trade and Labor Standards, with its carefully crafted proposal for a linkage between trade and labour standards that is both feasible and capable of stopping the downward pressure on labour standards, is of great importance. The authors have taken up objections to linkage in a step-by-step manner in order to formulate a proposal that meets almost all the arguments against it that are commonly put forward. This paper is an attempt to strengthen it by tackling some of the few remaining weaknesses.

Review of Globalization, Employment and Income Distribution in Developing Countries

Globalization, Employment and Income Distribution in Developing Countries edited by Eddy Lee and Marco Vivarelli. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2006, xvii + 253 pp., ISBN 0 230 00783 X, £65.00

This book presents the findings of the second stage of a research project funded by the UK Department for International Development and carried out by the International Policy Group of the International Labour Office. The focus of the project was on the impact of trade and investment liberalization on employment, within-country inequality and poverty reduction in developing countries. While the first stage of the project carried out a general worldwide review, this book is based on country studies of Morocco, Ghana, Vietnam, Kazakhstan and Nepal.