GLOBAL POLITICAL ECONOMY, YOUTH AND DECENT WORK: Problems and prospects for the trade union movement*
INTRODUCTION
The world
has been in severe turmoil now for six years. Staring as a “financial crisis”,
the global economy entered into a “Great Recession”, the likes of which has never
been witnessed since the “Great Depression” of the 1930s, in 2008-2009. While
the world economy has come out of that recession, we now witness what has been
described as the “Great Stagnation”[1]
with an economic crisis that has thrown hundreds of millions of persons into
the abyss of unemployment and rendered millions homeless.
The global
economic crisis has impacted on different countries in different ways and to
different extents, depending on the way and manner they are integrated into the
world economy. But hardly any country can claim to be aloof from its adverse
consequences, as “globalisation” intertwines the fates of peoples from the
farthest reach of into one broad mosaic of a community of fate. This does not
mean that everyone in the multiplicity
of countries and regions of the world are affected by the crisis in the same way. There are social and
generational divides which define those who bear the brunt of the crisis costs.
Workers who
create the social wealth are the main sufferers. Indeed, the bosses who created
the mess we all happen to be in now, are the ones being bailed out, while
working people are made to pay. The youth, particularly
those from working class backgrounds can also clearly be seen as those for
whom this crisis is not only a big blow to their present lives, but as well the
tearing asunder of their future, right before their eyes today.
In the
storm of crisis, 750million youths are now jobless, while hundreds of millions
more eke some form of living on the sidelines of the informal economy or in the
shadows of increasingly precarious employment within the formal sector. In
advanced countries that have been known to project the liberal market economy
such as the United States and the United Kingdom, millions of young graduates
have tuition debts hanging over their heads that they will most likely never
finish paying before they die. In economically backward countries like Nigeria,
millions of youths have been sucked into lives of crime, prostitution and
sectarian violence out of disillusionment and a bid to survive.
This is a
situation that is very much like a ticking time bomb for humankind. This era of
crises has thus, not surprisingly been one of revolts. Mass mobilisation on the
streets, spates of strikes, uprisings and revolutions (such as the cases in the
Middle East and North African region) have now become near commonplace. But,
despite all these, there seems to be no letting steam of the situation of social
crisis that the global economic cataclysm our generation faces has thrown up.
We cannot
but be concerned about asking questions. How did we get to where we now are?
What exactly is the current situation? What are the problems and prospects of a
resolution of the situation? What possible alternatives of resolution can we
grasp at?
As we
confront these questions, for us as workers, a primary one equally would be:
what can the working class and its trade union movement do, in defence of the
working people? This is a question for us as working class activists. But it
also goes beyond one for us as workers. It is a question for all that seeks a
better world. This is due to the central role of the working class in the
social relations of modern industrial (i.e. capitalist) society, which makes it
most strategically placed to bring about social transformation within and
across all lands of the world.
In this
essay, we would thus attempt to present tentative answers to the questions that
history has foisted on our class, and today’s generation of youth, in the shape
of a general and organic crisis of the capitalist system. In doing this, we consider three variables:
the global political economy; the character and dynamics of (working class)
youth and; the paradigm of decent work, vis-a-vis the challenges of working
class’ self-emancipation, and relate these to, what in our humble opinion, the
trade union movement can do.
THE
GLOBAL POLITICAL ECONOMY AND THE CURRENT CRISIS
It is
important to point out quite clearly that the global economic crisis did not just happen. It emerged from the logic
of capitalist development in general, and some of its particular
characteristics stem from the neoliberal model of “development” that has been
dominant since the mid-1970s across the world.
Capitalism
is based essentially on the profit
motive. Any and everything in the “market”, including labour and labour
power are nothing but commodities acquired
and produced for the continued expansion of capital. While profits are being
raked we tend to have booms in production. The flush of these booms primarily
benefit the bosses. But they can afford to make some crumbs available for the
workers. But when the crunch comes with the rates of profit falling, the motive
for continued production takes a downturn and contraction of production
commences.
This
general schema of the logic of capitalist development is what leads to cycles
of prosperity followed by downturns of outright recession i.e. negative growth
or economic depressions i.e. sluggish growth. Before the current situation, the
world witnessed the worst ever economic crisis of this logic of development
between 1929 and the late 1930s. This was the period known as the Great
Depression.
Like the
current crisis (and even earlier crisis in the nineteenth century) it started
as a “financial crisis”. The financial sector of modern economy is the most
volatile sector precisely because it is one of “fictitious capital”. While
international finance had come to hold sway over manufacturing somewhat since
the turn of the 20th century, global neoliberalism had further
helped to institutionalise it in a form of “casino capitalism” which had hedge
funds and the likes lurking behind futures CDOs etc.
“Financialisation”
also had no choice but to suck in the working class in liberal market economies
within the developed countries, through the extension of credit. This was
partly due to the fact that the real wages of workers in a large number of
these countries had not increased, for decades. In the case of the United
States for example, real wages had stagnated since 1973. The sub-prime mortgage
loans which served as trigger for the “credit crunch” of 2008 could thus be
best considered as a strategy of the bosses to keep up a real fiction of life
getting better for the workers or “new middle class”, while the real benefits
rolled into their own bank accounts.
Neither
“financialisation” nor the global economic crisis arose from some disembodied free market. Contrary to the myth that
global neoliberalism involves the rolling back of the state, and
“deregulation”, we have rather had re-regulation
in the interest of the bosses, with the strong arm of a privatizing state, and
sets of international rules and institutions that also largely privilege
multinational corporations and the high and mighty in general.
The choices
that these same states and international institutions have taken in the wake of
the crisis have been such that have tried to kick start jobless growth, because they remain largely governed by the profit
motive, especially where these involve labour. Bailouts for the bosses still
remain as supposed incentives for “private sector-driven” economies. In
economically backward countries (that are resource-rich) like Nigeria, and
Africa in general where the working masses have only known crisis in perpetuity since the 1980s, the bosses actually brag that
we are immune from the global crisis and the neoliberal policies such as NEEDS
and NEPAD which they pursue have even brought about oases of growth in the
current global desert of crisis.
This is
quite clearly a mirage in so many ways. While countries in the eye of the storm
might be those more closely intertwined with the world economic system (like
Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain in the eurozone), we have equally been
adversely affected. In 2009, one third of the worth of the Nigerian stock
exchange was wiped out in barely three months. This was despite an earlier
claim by Prof Charles Soludo, then the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria
that the country was too insulated from the global recession.
To save the
profits of capitalists, the Federal Government temporaily established a ceiling
and floor for the value o shares; so much for “free enterprise”. But while the
interests of the bosses are to be safeguarded, it is not so for workers and the
poor. According to the National Bureau of Statistics the percentage of people
living beyond the poverty line increased from 54% in 2004 to 69% in 2011, and
the impact of further neoliberal policies like the fuel price hike of 2012, the
NBS asserted, would have thrown more people still into the morass of poverty.
The present
spate of “jobless growth” which Nigeria is witnessing, making it one of the five
“fastest growing” economies in the world is driven by extractive resource (i.e.
crude oil) exploitation. It is also unlikely to last, as the global economy
continues a sluggish staggering towards further crisis on the horizon.
DECENT
WORK AND THE “DEVIL” OF PRECARITY
The Decent
Work Agenda of the International Labour Organisation might be a recent one,
starting in 2007, but the struggle of trade unions over the last two hundred
years has been largely about decent work on one hand and self-emancipation on
the other. Both sides of this coin are of course, not necessarily mutually
exclusive.
The
perspective on decent work by the ILO, further reiterates the centrality, in a
sense of decent work to the struggles of the working class, when it states thus:
Decent work sums up the
aspirations of people in their working lives. It involves opportunities for
work that is productive and delivers a fair income, security in the workplace
and social protection for families, better prospects for personal development
and social integration, freedom for people to express their concerns, organize
and participate in the decisions that affect their lives and equality of
opportunity and treatment for all women and men[2]
It is
however noteworthy that DWA became an element of the narrative of social
dialogue, and one which the trade unions throw their weights solidly behind, at
the particular point in history that it did. It reflects defensive action of the unions in the face of a series of defeats
of the working class, and the increasingly precarious nature irregular nature
of work relations for many a worker a la global
neoliberalism.
The concept
of an “informal sector”, and later put as the “informal economy” was a
theoretical attempt to understand the practical reality of work outside formal
relations of employment, based on field research work in Kenya and Ghana,
between 1971 and 1973. By the 1980s, starting with the structural adjustment
programmes, and increasingly so, subsequently, non-standard work became the
pillar for labour flexibility, and the twin of rising unemployment.
Trade
unions were fought and defeated by the state in several countries to establish
the “Washington consensus” as a supposed common sense. This was because the
earlier social democratic compromise of the Keynesian Welfare National State
had to be dismantled, with subtlety where this was possible, but more often
than not, in the most brutal of ways. The bosses and their state co-joined to
try save the continued falling of the rate of profit by leveraging on rising
unemployment to foist precarious working conditions, insecure jobs and grossly
inadequate remuneration on those who found jobs.
The Decent
Work Agenda as an effort at reform is however possible in the first place
because workers have not surrendered the struggle for democracy. It might seem
to some that democracy under capitalism is merely and strictly formalistic.
This is a very inadequate perspective. Tripartism, social dialogue and such
other instruments which are being utilised to pursue the Decent Work Agenda
have in them contradictory currents. They express some level of expansion of
the democratic space and which we should consolidate on. Butthey also have
laden in them, the very palpable possibility of co-optation by the bosses,
including through soft (and not so soft) bribes.
There is
every need for us to pursue decent work and any agenda for it. But we equally
have to be circumspect in doing this, not to get sucked into the labyrinth of
minefields that the bosses, and their states do place in the pathways of such
pursuits.
THE
YOUTH: THE FUTURE THAT IS TODAY
An old
axiom posits that “tomorrow starts today”. Youth is the most apt
personification of this truism. Youths are not just the leaders of tomorrow as
yet another adage goes, they are part and parcel of the hopes and aspirations,
anxieties and anguish, struggle and creation of today. In terms of work, the
youth constitute a significant proportion of any country’s workforce. But they
also tend to be those who are more likely to face the scourge of both primary
and secondary unemployment.
In most
countries of the world with rising unemployment rates, the youth unemployment
rates tend to be much higher than the general rate of unemployment. This has
resulted in a lot of youth restiveness. Greece and Spain with youth unemployment rates of 65% and 56%
respectively have witnessed some of the stiffest anti-austerity battles in the
present era of crises and revolts that we live in. The youths have not only
been part of mass strikes, they have as well been at the heart of
new-and-not-yet-entirely-new forms of struggles such as the Squares movement
and the los indignados movement.
In the MENA
region, youths have been very much the driving force of resistance on the
streets and at points of convergences of mass anger like Tahrir and Pearl
Squares in Egypt and Bahrain respectively. But youths have also been some of
the most active organisers of strikes and sit-ins in factories and offices.
The case in
Nigeria is also of great relevance. While the general unemployment rate is 23%,
youth unemployment rate could be as high as 60% according to the Federal
Government. The disillusionment of youths burst out to the fore during the
January 2012 General Strike and Revolt, which saw not less than 28 young men
killed in the heat of demonstrations across some 57 cities and towns. But this
epochal struggle showed both the strength and the limitation of simply put
“youth power”. The power to decisively change the way things are, lies with
youth-as-part-of-the-working class.
There was a
time that younger trade unionists tended to be more radical. There were
objective reasons for this. Less weight of responsibility, greater sense of
idealism and expectations from life, the freshness of coming from school, and a
greater openness to new ideas were (and are still) some of the reasons for
this. Today, the ideological warfare against “community” and the projection of
consumerist-end-of-history ideology have helped to stunt critical thinking on
the part of many a youth in normal times.
But we are no longer living through “normal” times. We are in a period
where once again the youth and working people as whole, pushed to the world are
not only fighting, but can dream dreams and see visions.
To win reforms for decent work and such like,
as well as to change the world itself, we have to dream really, but this is not
enough. We have to organise. A major
plank of this is mainstreaming youth. This is a challenge that the trade union
movement in Nigeria is now rising up to. But a lot more still has to be done.
TRADE
UNIONS AND THE CHALLENGES OF THE MOMENT
The trade
union movement at local, national, regional and global levels are trying in
different ways to fight the good fight, singly and as part of broader social
movements. As a movement and as individuals activists that are part of
combinations, we enter with the weight of our views and practices of just
yesterday on us, but even these are being challenged by what we face, where and
when we choose to see this.
At the
global level, the trade unions have been demanding an end to the bailout of the
bosses and workers’ bearing the brunt of the crisis. A radicalisation of
several global union federations and as well the combinations of such into new
federations such as the case of IndustriALL are some of the signs of the times.
A major programmatic plank of the GUfs has been the Global Jobs Pact. This has the blessings of the ILO, and initially
in 2009 when it was formulated; it seemed it would have the blessings of the
G20. But as the bosses grew stronger based on our weaknesses, they have chosen
to, in essence, disregard this.
At the
national level, anti-austerity coalitions are being sired by the trade unions
or by other social movements, but with the trade unions being very much
involved. A recent example of this trend can be seen in the Peoples Assemblies
in the UK. Trade unions are also getting more involved in partisan politics
even in countries where “economic unionism” was the norm. Politics is also not
being restricted to the ballot box. Trade unions have taken up alternative
politics as with the Occupy Wall Street movement.
In the case
of Nigeria, the role of the trade union movement in building fighting
coalitions, particularly but not limited to anti-fuel price hike struggles
cannot be overemphasized. This has taken organisation form in the Labour Civil
Society Coalition. But the struggles of the trade union movement for decent
work and a better life go beyond these. The anti-casualisation campaign of NLC-TUC
is being revived and more and more GUF-actions are also taking place.
The youth
have been some of the most active foot soldiers in these little and big
actions, and are increasingly taking up leadership in these as well. But there
is much more that can be done and that has to be done.
These
include but are not limited to the following:
·
establishing
strong research-to-policy and policy-to-action linkages;
·
consolidating
sectoral networking at shop floor, national and regional levels;
·
strategic
campaigning as strategy and forging of closer relations with other social
movements;
·
an
activist sense of mobilisation, breaking the bounds of routine work and
institutionalising Social Movement
Unionism;
·
mainstreaming youth consciously and systematically
IN
LIEU OF CONCLUSION
I have
described the period we live in as “an era of crises and revolts”[3].
Such a period comes with both challenges and opportunities. The capitalist
logic of development has led to a multifaceted crisis which includes political,
environmental, ideological and cultural dimensions. But at its heart is the economic crisis, for as Walter Rodney
pointed out, economic development establishes
an index for other dimensions of development, and the social relations of
production are primary to the material reproduction of our species as humans.
The essence
of our specie though, is freedom.
Decent work has meaning to the extent that it implies reforms for a better life
for human beings. We must thus struggle for decent work and living.
The struggle
for reforms, particularly in economically backward countries like ours cannot
however be separated from that for social transformation. The trade unions as
the primary organisations of the working class are bound to be part of this
struggle.
From this point
of view, I have tried to put in perspective, the global economic crisis, noting
that economics cannot be separated from politics. Indeed, politics is basically
concentrated economics. I have then looked critically, albeit summarily at the
paradigm of “decent work” which is very valid, but requiring a critical
approach to avoid falling into the pitfall of incorporation that the bosses
bring to the table of “social dialogue” for decent work.
The
problems and prospects for the trade union movement’s roles in the current
period have then been considered, taking note of what is being done, and what
could be done better.
Throughout
this discourse, the place of the youth-as-worker has been primary for me. To
change the world and make it better, the youths must envision a new society and
fight to win this.
A luta continua!
Victoria ascerta!!
*Being a paper presented at the 1-day
Capacity-building training for young trade union activists organised by the Friedrich
Ebert Stiftung, on Thursday, October 24, 2013, at the Top Ranks Galaxy Hotel,
Utako, Abuja
Comments